# Merging public elementary schools to reduce racial/ethnic segregation

## TL;DR

This paper explores how merging elementary schools can reduce racial and ethnic segregation in US schools, offering a new policy tool for promoting diversity.

## Contribution

The study introduces a novel algorithm to simulate school mergers and evaluates their potential to reduce segregation across 200 school districts.

## Key findings

- School mergers could reduce racial/ethnic segregation by up to nearly 60% in some districts.
- Merging schools increases driving times by only a few minutes on average.
- Districts with many interfaces between diverse neighborhoods are best suited for mergers.

## Abstract

Diverse schools can help address implicit biases and increase empathy, mutual respect, and reflective thought by fostering connections between students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and other backgrounds. Unfortunately, demographic segregation remains rampant in US public schools, despite over 70 years since the passing of federal legislation formally outlawing segregation by race. However, changing how students are assigned to schools can help foster more integrated learning environments. In this article, we explore “school mergers” as one such under-explored, yet promising, student assignment policy change. School mergers involve merging the school attendance boundaries, or catchment areas, of schools and subsequently changing the grades each school offers. We develop an algorithm to simulate elementary school mergers across 200 large school districts serving 4.5 million elementary school students and find that pairing or tripling schools in this way could reduce racial/ethnic segregation by a median relative 20%—and as much as nearly 60% in some districts—while increasing driving times to schools by an average of a few minutes each way. Districts with many interfaces between racially/ethnically disparate neighborhoods tend to be prime candidates for mergers. We also compare the expected results of school mergers to other typical integration policies, like redistricting, and find that different policies may be more or less suitable in different places. Finally, we make our results available through a public dashboard for policymakers and community members to explore further (https://mergers.schooldiversity.org). Together, our study offers new findings and tools to support integration policy-making across US public school districts.