The most racially segregated public schools in America

The headline

More than seven decades after Brown v. Board of Education, single-group concentration remains the modal experience for US public school students. The 2024-25 NCES data shows 2,351 schools that are 95%+ White, 731 that are 95%+ Black, and 2,724 that are 95%+ Hispanic.

Together, these 5,806 schools (roughly 6% of all US public schools) educate millions of students in environments where they will encounter almost no peers of other racial or ethnic backgrounds.

Geographic patterns differ by group

The geography of single-group concentration is not symmetric:

• 95%+ White schools concentrate in rural Appalachia, the rural Upper Midwest, and the rural Plains states, where the surrounding population is itself 95%+ White.
• 95%+ Hispanic schools concentrate in South Texas, Southern California's Imperial Valley, and dense urban neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Miami.
• 95%+ Black schools concentrate in urban cores (Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, Memphis) and in pockets of the rural Mississippi Delta, the Black Belt, and parts of the South.

How to read the numbers

Measuring single-group concentration is not a normative judgment about any specific school. Many of these schools are well-resourced, well-loved by their families, and produce strong outcomes. The point is to track the underlying pattern. The racial composition of the building a child attends is, on average across the US, largely determined by the racial composition of the neighborhood they live in. Policy choices about school assignment, charter expansion, magnet siting, and inter-district transfer have either entrenched or weakened that pattern over the past 40 years.

Methodology

Source: NCES Common Core of Data 2024-25. Schools with fewer than 100 students excluded so percentages are stable. A school is counted in a "95%+" category if the listed racial group exceeds 95% of total reported enrollment.