The Most Diverse Public High Schools in America

On a weekday morning at Bettye Davis East Anchorage High, the hallway sounds like several countries at once. The school sits in a part of Anchorage where Samoan, Hmong, Filipino, Alaska Native, and Black families settled within a few miles of one another, and the enrollment reflects that. About 1,636 students, and no racial or ethnic group above one in five. Researchers who study integration, including Gary Orfield's team at UCLA, have pointed to East Anchorage for years as one of the closest things the country has to a school with no majority at all.

That school anchors our ranking of the most diverse public high schools in America. We measured diversity with a single index and let the data say where real integration happens. The answer is not the places most people would name first.

How We Measured Diversity

We ranked schools by a Simpson diversity index: one minus the sum of each racial and ethnic group's squared share of enrollment. The logic is simple. If one group makes up nearly the whole student body, its squared share is large and the index drops toward 0. If several groups each hold a modest share, no single squared term is large, and the index climbs. A score near 0.8 or higher means no group dominates and several are well represented. Read another way, the index is the probability that two students chosen at random belong to different racial or ethnic groups. At 0.85, that probability is 85 percent.

The data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data, school year 2024-25. We counted five enrollment categories: white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and two-or-more-races, the groups NCES reports consistently across every state. We limited the field to brick-and-mortar, non-charter high schools with 500 or more students, which keeps the list to real neighborhood schools rather than small magnets or virtual academies that can post extreme numbers on tiny enrollments. A 600-student school can read as perfectly balanced on paper when a few dozen students shift between groups, so the size floor matters. Restricting to traditional public schools also keeps the comparison fair, since charters and magnets often draw from across a district rather than from one attendance zone, and their enrollment reflects a selection process rather than a neighborhood.

The 15 Most Diverse Public High Schools

Here are the leaders, with enrollment, diversity index, and the approximate racial and ethnic mix where available.

1. Bettye Davis East Anchorage High, Anchorage, AK · 1,636 students · index 0.85 · roughly 16 white / 8 Black / 14 Hispanic / 19 Asian / 17 two-or-more. The single most diverse school on the list.
2. Leilehua High, Wahiawa, HI · 1,521 · index 0.81
3. Mount Tahoma High, Tacoma, WA · 1,410 · index 0.81
4. Spanaway Lake High, Spanaway, WA · 1,787 · index 0.80
5. West High, Anchorage, AK · 1,702 · index 0.80
6. Todd Beamer High, Federal Way, WA · 1,412 · index 0.80
7. Vanden High, Fairfield, CA · 1,631 · index 0.80
8. Liberty High, Henderson, NV · 3,203 · index 0.80
9. Sierra Vista High, Las Vegas, NV · 3,255 · index 0.80
10. Admiral Arthur W. Radford High, Honolulu, HI · 1,227 · index 0.80
11. Lincoln High, Tacoma, WA · 1,556 · index 0.79
12. Desert Oasis High, Las Vegas, NV · 3,300 · index 0.79
13. Chief Sealth International High, Seattle, WA · 1,184 · index 0.79
14. Angelo Rodriguez High, Fairfield, CA · 2,111 · index 0.79
15. Inderkum High, Sacramento, CA · 2,194 · index 0.79

One detail to point out: every school here clears 0.79, and the gap between first and fifteenth is narrow. Once a school reaches this level of balance, the index moves slowly, because it already has no group near a majority. The work of being diverse is mostly done by the time a school enters this range. The full ranked dataset, with every school and its component shares, lives in our most diverse public schools report.

Where Integration Actually Happens

The leaders concentrate in five places, and only five.

The first is Puget Sound. Tacoma, Federal Way, Spanaway, and Seattle place five schools on the list, with nearby Lakewood in the same orbit. This stretch of Washington south of Seattle has decades of Pacific Islander, Southeast Asian, and Black settlement, much of it tied to Joint Base Lewis-McChord. The second is Anchorage, with two schools, where refugee resettlement and Alaska Native enrollment combine in a way no other northern city matches. The third is Hawaii, where Wahiawa and Honolulu sit near military installations and the islands' long history of Asian and Pacific migration produces schools with no white or Asian majority. The fourth is the Las Vegas valley, where Las Vegas and Henderson built enormous master-planned high schools, several above 3,000 students, that fill from new and mixed suburban subdivisions. The fifth is Northern California, specifically Solano County and Sacramento, where Fairfield places two schools, again with a military and aerospace footprint at Travis Air Force Base.

The common threads are concrete. Military bases move families from everywhere into the same housing market and the same attendance zone, which is why Tacoma, Fairfield, and Honolulu all show up near installations. Immigrant-gateway neighborhoods layer several origin groups in one place rather than concentrating one, so Anchorage and the islands draw Filipino, Samoan, Hmong, and Korean families into shared schools. And master-planned suburbs, built recently and priced for a broad middle, draw a wider mix than older neighborhoods sorted by generations of housing policy, which is how Henderson and Spanaway field high schools of 1,800 to 3,300 students with no group near a majority. Diversity here is a product of who lives within walking or busing distance of the building, not of any policy aimed at integration.

Why the Big Coastal Cities Are Missing

The cities people associate with diversity, the ones with the most varied populations overall, are largely absent from this list. That is not a data error. It is the central finding.

School-level diversity depends on housing patterns and attendance zones, not on the diversity of the metro area as a whole. A city can be extraordinarily mixed in aggregate while every neighborhood within it draws a far less mixed school. When families are sorted by race and income across neighborhoods, and schools enroll by neighborhood, the result is many schools that each lean heavily toward one group, sitting inside a city that looks balanced only when you sum them. Researchers have documented this gap for decades. The UCLA Civil Rights Project's work on segregation shows that some of the most diverse metropolitan areas in the country also run some of the most segregated school systems, school by school.

So the schools that top our index are not the ones in the most diverse cities. They are the ones where a single attendance zone happens to contain several well-represented groups at once. That is a narrower and rarer thing, and it explains why a high school in Anchorage outranks anything in New York or Los Angeles. The honest version of this story is that integrated schools are built by integrated neighborhoods, and most large districts have not built many of those.

A note on the limits of the measure. The Simpson index treats every group boundary as equal and says nothing about achievement, resources, or whether students mix once inside the building. A balanced enrollment is a starting condition, not a finished outcome. What it does tell you, cleanly, is where the raw ingredient for integration already exists. On that question, the data points away from the coasts and toward Anchorage, Puget Sound, Honolulu, and the suburbs of Las Vegas and Sacramento.

Sources
NCES: Common Core of Data (CCD)
NCES Condition of Education: Racial/Ethnic Enrollment in Public Schools
UCLA Civil Rights Project: Research on School Segregation and Diversity