Measuring school segregation: evidence from Lisbon

Abstract

The paper estimates and analyses public primary school segregation in Lisbon between 2006 and 2016, along three dimensions: subsidized lunch, immigrant status, and parents ed- ucation. Also, using 2011 census data, measures of residential segregation by education, un- employed status, and immigrant inhabitant status were obtained for the capital. Throughout this paper, I use the index of dissimilarity, the most popular unevenness index in the literature to compute measures of school segregation that I compare with residential segregation. The area analysed is the entire council of Lisbon, composed of 24 parishes containing a total of 24 public primary schools. The main findings include that segregation across schools has been decreasing over time for the dimensions of subsidized lunch and parents education and that it has increased for immigrant status. Furthermore, for the year of 2011, school segregation is higher than residential segregation.