- While residential segregation in the South decreased substantially in the 1990s, public school segregation between Black and White students increased during this period.
- School segregation in the South is not due to residential segregation changes.
- Private school enrollment is a segregative mechanism in the South.
- White private school enrollment at the county level is strongly and tightly positively linked to the proportion of Black school age population in the county.
- Whites enroll at private schools at very high rates in predominantly Black counties.
- White flight to private schools has not lessened since the 1970s.
- In states with growing white/Hispanic residential segregation, there was a corresponding increase in white/Hispanic school segregation, largely because aggregate Hispanic segregation patterns are due primarily to intercounty residential patterns, except in Texas and Florida.
- The White private school enrollment rate increased sharply from seven percent to nearly ten percent in the South during the 1970s, even as it declined in the rest of the country. Black private school enrollment rates increased slightly in both the South and the rest of the United States during the same period.
- Thus, trends for the South as a whole and for individual states suggest that there was substantial White flight to private schools in the 1970s, followed by a decade of relative stability in private school enrollments in the 1980s.
- Results suggest that the presence of Black students in the public schools remains a powerful factor in shaping White families’ public/private schooling decisions.