School-Based Residential Segregation in Ankara: A Divided Urban Pattern in Educational Lines

Socio-spatial inequalities are on the rise in Turkey, resulting in increasing segregation between population groups with different socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Therefore, the link between school-based and residential segregation has become crucial for understanding urban and social divisions, specifically in the large metropolitan areas. However, our knowledge about this relationship in the case of Turkey and many non-Western countries is limited. What we know from the related literature based on Western experiences is that school and residential segregation are highly interrelated, and analyzing this relation is the key to understanding socio-spatial inequalities in cities. This article, therefore, aims to investigate the socio-spatial relation between the academic performance of high-schools and the residential segregation in educational line in Ankara, Turkey. In this article, academic performance is represented by national university entrance examination results at school level and residential segregation is analyzed through population census at the neighborhood level. The methodology involves the classification of public and private high schools in terms of academic performance and cross-referencing with schools’ educational environment. We find that in terms of the relationship between school’s academic performance and residential patterns Ankara is, in fact, a divided city in educational lines.