The Relationship Between SES Segregation and Student Outcomes

In this chapter we use multiple waves of International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) data to examine two hypotheses: (1) that there is an inverse relationship between a country’s average achievement and average between-school socioeconomic status (SES) segregation (the “equity-efficiency tradeoff”), and (2) that SES segregation is associated with greater inequality of outcomes. We employ a multi-model approach, including correlation, individual and country-level fixed-effects regression and synthetic cohort analysis, as well as applying multiple measures of SES segregation. We find very little evidence for the equity-efficiency tradeoff, but some support for the inegalitarian effects of sorting students by socioeconomic background.