Student segregation across and within schools. The case of the Portuguese public school system

Joao Firmino, Luis Nunes, Silvia de Almeida and Susana Batista

Nova SBE Working Paper Series from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Nova School of Business and Economics

Abstract: We provide the most comprehensive description of student segregation in the Portuguese public school system to date, a system that exhibits interesting institutional features potentially linked with the student segregation issue (e.g. school catchment areas, course tracking, and almost no central regulations regarding class composition). The analysis uses the entire regular student population enrolled in all public schools of continental Portugal (grades 1 to 12, from 2006/07 to 2016/17). Looking at three segregation dimensions economic, academic, and immigrant at both between and within-school levels, and using a novel dissimilarity index recently proposed in the literature aimed at better capturing systematic segregation, we find that segregation, on median, is mild, across time, grades, and regions. The most important exception is the case of within-school academic segregation. During upper-secondary schooling, in particular, when students are divided across classes according to own course-tracking decisions, it doubles. Moreover, within-school academic segregation estimates have the largest interquartile ranges, within a given year, grade, or region, pointing to heterogeneity in the way different schools set up classes internally in terms of students academic characteristics. Academic and economic segregation are positively associated, at both between and within school levels. The Portuguese segregation insights are also compared to those from other geographies.

Keywords: Segregation; dissimilarity index; municipalities; schools; classes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I38 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://run.unl.pt/bitstream/10362/94327/1/WP633.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unl:unlfep:wp633

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Nova SBE Working Paper Series from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Nova School of Business and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Susana Lopes ().