How we measure diversity in local schools
How do we measure the extent to which the student body in an individual school is racially and ethnically diverse?
The Democrat and Chronicle’s analysis of public schools in Monroe County relied on two well-established methods for measuring diversity within a population.
The USA Today Diversity Index measures the probability that any two people chosen at random from a given census area are of different races or ethnicities.
The index was developed in 1991 by Phil Meyer of the University of North Carolina and Shawn McIntosh of USA Today to analyze data from the 1990 U.S. census. The goal was to convert an array of figures (population totals for white, African-American, Asian, Hispanic, etc.) into a single number that measued diversity.
Meyer and USA Today’s Paul Overberg updated the methodology in 2000 to account for changes in the way the U.S. Census Bureau asked respondents to identify their race.
A class with 10 students — two white, two black, two Asian, two Hispanic, and two Native American — would yield an index of 80. If you picked two students at random, there would be an 80 percent chance that they were members of different races. If the same class had five white students and five black students, the index would be 50 — a fifty percent chance that two randomly selected students would be of different races. A class with nine white students and one black student would have an index of 18.
For our analysis, we also looked at a simpler measure: the percentage of students in a district or specific school that were members of a racial or ethnic minority.
We looked more closely at two similarly sized schools on either end of that spectrum: The Honeoye Falls-Lima Middle School, where 572 of the school’s 601 students are white, and School 9, where 11 of the school’s 722 students are white.
The HFL middle school had a Diversity Index of 9.3, the lowest of the 191 public schools in Monroe County.
School 9 fared better, with an index of 48.5, since it’s student body included was largely split between black and Hispanic students.
Each of the two methods offers a different way of looking at the same demographic breakdowns. The raw data is also available online for readers to do their own analysis and draw their own conclusions.