Abstract

This note provides an historical example that appears to illustrate how racial fractionalization reduces school district academic performance. Hall and Leeson (AJES, forthcoming) find a negative relationship between racial fractionalization and school district performance in a sample of Ohio school districts. Holding school district spending constant, communities that are more racially heterogeneous have lower passage rates on state proficiency exams. This finding is surprising because the theoretical work of Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly (QJE, 1999) suggests that racial fractionalization will lead to poor public sector performance because of a decline in spending. While they show that racial fractionalization does lead to reduced spending on education, they do not look at whether that leads to reduced school performance. The empirical results of Hall and Leeson suggest that the negative effect of racial fractionalization does not operate through spending but through some other mechanism. The following example from the Cleveland suburb of Cleveland Heights, taken from the work of historian Marian Morton (Cleveland Heights: The Making of an Urban Suburb, 2002), shows one way that racial fractionalization could result in lower school performance independent of spending. Cleveland Heights is a good example of a racially-fractionalized school district, as it is known nationally for its Int Adv Econ Res (2010) 16:130–131 DOI 10.1007/s11294-009-9238-3

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