Measuring Socioeconomic Segregation

After explaining the suitability of International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) studies for examining school socioeconomic segregation, we describe and apply a set of measures for estimating within- and between-school segregation at the country level. We develop separate estimates for segregation based on definitions of socioeconomic status (SES) that are absolute (i.e., constant across countries) and relative (i.e., vary by country). These measures suggest that SES segregation is quite common across countries, grade levels, and definitions of SES status. We also find that SES segregation is fairly stable across time within each country, and that between-school estimates of SES segregation may be biased downwards.