Measuring school income segregation in Spain

Abstract

In this work, our goal is to answer if Spanish students are differently located among schools depending on their standard of living. In other words, we analyse the segregation by income in schools in Spain. To do so, we use data from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) databases. We consider all autonomous communities and types of school of Spain for year 2018. Although PISA does not collect data about the income level of students, it creates an index which measures the socioeconomic status of pupils. We use that index as a proxy of the income level for the analysis. This index is standardized by PISA, therefore we use the Variance Separation Index (VSI) to measure the segregation, that is an invariant and absolute index. The results show that there is low income segregation level among the schools of Spain for 2018. We find the largest segregation level by income in schools in Madrid and the lowest in Cantabria. We also analyse the contribution of the type of school -public school, private-government school and private-government school- and we find that the school type may significate a big part of the school income segregation for some regions. Finally, we examine the segregation due to the language type of school in the Basque Country and we find that it represents around 28% of the total segregation.