Educational Achievement of Adolescents: Does School Segregation Matter?

Igor Ryabov, Bowling Green State University

Little attention has been paid to the role of ethnic social capital in school context as a factor of academic achievement of adolescents. Multilevel modeling on nationally representative data (the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health) revealed that racial and ethnic composition of schools had no significant bearing on the academic outcomes of adolescents, while the income composition did. Moreover, the effect of friendship segregation not only exceeds those of school racial and ethnic composition and income composition but also figures as one of the strongest predictors of the academic achievement when all individual-level factors are controlled for. The results indicate that in schools where friendships are highly segregated by race and ethnicity students have better academic achievement than in schools where friendships are not segregated. Similarly, in schools where low-income students are concentrated the academic achievement is lower than in schools where the percentage of these students is low.