More than sixty years after the Brown vs. Board of Education sentence the topic of school segregation not only remains an important area of educational research but has gained momentum in the last decades. Globalization has undoubtedly impacted on this renaissance of school segregation studies. Social inequalities have increased in many urban spaces of the globalized world. Economic growth and social development have been unequally distributed and have generated growing processes of urban fragmentation across neighbourhoods. As Musterd et al. (2017) argue, globalization and polarization have taken place simultaneously even in cities of countries with strong welfare regimes. Moreover, the increasing social inequalities since the mid-1970s and the incapability of governments to use public and social policies to reduce it (Atkinson, 2015) have contributed to raise socioeconomic segregation in major cities. Global inequalities, economic globalization and political conflicts are also affecting migration movements all over the world, with a number of world migrants close to 250 million people in 2013 (3,4% of world’s population), compared to the 120 million of 1990.

Education has not been immune to these tendencies. Residential segregation, migration movements, economic inequalities and education policies themselves have mostly produced an increasing process of school segregation between the most disadvantaged social groups and the upper classes of society. Increasing processes of marketization of education through the expansion of voucher systems, charter schools, the extension of low fee private schools or policies favouring greater school choice have played a key role to understand processes of polarization and inequalities in schooling.

Obviously, these processes have taken different shapes and intensities in different parts of the world. In the US, and especially after the publication of the Coleman Report the amount of literature on this topic has grown extensively and is notably larger than that found in other parts of the world. A number of well-known authors (Orfield and Lee, 2005; Ogbu, 2003; Saporito, 2003) have focused on different aspects of the study of school segregation (scale, spatial dynamics, consequences for performance, social cohesion, effects of desegregation policies).

Nothing similar has occurred in other parts of the world, either because of a lack of a history of explicit apartheid or due to lack of means and data with which to carry out the same type of research. In recent years, this has begun to change. In Europe, better access to data, especially after the appearance of PISA, the crucial importance of migration movements and trends in the direction of more market-oriented reforms in education have all generated a growing interest in the study of school segregation in different countries and enhanced international comparisons (Benito et al., 2014; Gorard and Smith, 2004). The study of ethnic segregation has been less central than it has been in the US. Despite its importance, the discrimination and school segregation faced by Roma children in European societies have received much less attention than research on racial inequalities in the US. The migrant conditions of children, socio-economic variables or special needs proxies have actually concentrated the focus of most empirical research on school segregation in European countries.

This panel aims to offer international evidence on the particular dynamics, causes and consequences of school segregation processes in several education systems today, and will pay special attention to comparative trends between European countries and the US system. Authors of case studies have recently collaborated in producing a book that provides evidence on how social and economic inequalities interact with education policies to generate processes of school segregation, and how these trends have an impact on aspects such as academic performance inequalities or weaker social cohesion.

Atkinson, A. (2015), Inequality. What Can Be Done? Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press. Benito, R., Alegre, M.A., and Gonzàlez, I. (2014), ‘School segregation and its effects on educational equality and efficiency in 16 OECD comprehensive school Systems’, Comparative Education Review, 58 (1): 104-134. Gorard, S. and Smith, E. (2004), ‘An international comparison of equity in education systems’, Comparative Education, 40 (1): 15-28. Musterd, S. Marcińczak, S., van Ham, M. and Tammaru, T. (2017), Socioeconomic segregation in European capital cities. Increasing separation between poor and rich, Urban Geography, 38 (7): 1062-1083. Ogbu, J. (2003), Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb. A Study of Academic Disengagement. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. Orfield, G. and Lee, Ch. (2005), Why segregation matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality. Civil Rights Project, Harvard University. Cambridge, MA. Saporito, S. (2003), Private Choices, Public Consequences: Magnet School Choice and Segregation by Race and Poverty, Social Problems, 50(2): 181–203.