Can Desegregation Close the Racial Gap in High School Coursework?

This paper examines the interplay between desegregation, institutional bias, and individual behavior in education. Using a game-theoretic model that considers race-heterogeneous social incentives, the study investigates the effects of between-school desegregation on within-school disparities in coursework. The analysis incorporates a segregation measure based on entropy and proposes an optimization-based approach to evaluate the impact of student reassignment policies. The results highlight that Black and Hispanic students in predominantly White schools, despite receiving less encouragement to apply to college, exhibit higher enrollment in college-prep coursework due to stronger social incentives from their classmates’ coursework decisions.