Search

Segregation on the basis of race or ethnicity is one of the most enduring and pervasive inequities in US public education. School segregation is determined not only by residential sorting and families' preferences but by local policy choices such as the drawing of school attendance boundaries. This report examines the role of individual school attendance boundaries in perpetuating racial and ethnic segregation in urban school systems. Our findings show that in many cases, small changes to the attendance boundaries of neighboring schools could make a big difference for school integration. We analyze census and school attendance boundary map data, evaluating the boundary lines dividing attendance rights between every pair of neighboring public schools in US metropolitan areas. We find more than 2,000 pairs of neighboring public schools that are racially unequal, both in residential demographics and school enrollment. We also find that inequality between these schools--many of which are within the jurisdiction of the same school district--exists not only in terms of racial and ethnic demographics but with regard to school staffing, educational program offerings, student discipline rates, and mean student achievement on standardized exams. Unequal school attendance zones perpetuate racial and ethnic segregation and amplify inequality between students of color and their white peers. Furthermore, many unequal school boundaries are linked to the New Deal's Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps, a notorious instance of explicit and consequential racist federal policy. Averaging across our list of racially unequal school boundaries, we find that the side with more Black or Hispanic residents is more likely to have a HOLC grade rated "hazardous" than the side with fewer Black or Hispanic residents, which is more likely to be rated "best" or "desirable." This evidence suggests that many of the racially unequal school boundaries in our data are direct vestiges of our cities' historic roots of explicit racism, not just an artifact of recent individual household choices. Persistent school segregation is the legacy of racist housing policy and the product of intentional decisions by the local governments that determine school attendance zones. Racially unequal school boundaries are highly inefficient preservations of old, problematic policy, and for many of these unequal boundaries, redrawing the line would remedy much of the inequality between schools. Policymakers invested in improving integration can use our novel approach to identifying unequal boundaries to create sustainable solutions to racial and ethnic inequality in public education. [This report was funded by the Charles Koch Institute.]

School segregation is one of the most enduring inequities in US public education, reinforcing racial and ethnic gaps in academic and socioeconomic outcomes. School boundaries, whether between districts or between schools within a district, often help perpetuate school segregation in otherwise racially and ethnically diverse cities and neighborhoods. To understand which school boundaries contribute most to school segregation, we developed measurement tools to analyze school attendance boundaries and district borders. Using the Atlanta metropolitan area as a case study, we highlight how these tools help identify the borders that play the biggest role in perpetuating school segregation in the area. Our analysis is based on census data on residential demographics and geographic information systems data on school boundaries. We define unequal school boundaries as those in which there are stark demographic differences in the populations living on either side of the boundary, resulting in stark demographic enrollment differences between neighboring schools. Key Findings: (1) Atlanta has dozens of school boundaries delineating stark differences in residential composition on either side. In many cases, simply switching the orientation of a school boundary line (e.g., from north to south as opposed to east to west) would lead to large gains in racial and ethnic integration; (2) Racial and ethnic disparities occur both between school attendance boundaries in the same district and across school district borders. School attendance boundaries can be changed by school districts, but district borders are a matter of state policy. In the Atlanta metropolitan area, 7 of the 25 most-unequal school boundaries are district borders; and (3) The most unequal elementary school attendance boundary in the Atlanta metropolitan area lies between Ashford Park Elementary School and John R. Lewis Elementary School in Dekalb County, where a residential road divides the two school attendance zones. Ashford Park, north of the road, serves a neighborhood that is 80 percent white, while John R. Lewis, south of the road, serves a neighborhood that is 70 percent Hispanic and 9 percent Black. Addressing school segregation requires the work of local policymakers and stakeholders, as well as state and federal governments. Elevating local inequities generated by school boundaries is foundational for further research and discussion toward developing a sustainable solution to racial and ethnic inequality in public education. [This report was funded by the Charles Koch Institute.]

Although increasing the racial and ethnic diversity on college campuses is a key component of any broad policy agenda aimed at reducing structural inequality, access to higher education does not always equate to graduation and equal labor market opportunities. For colleges, students, and society to reap the benefits of diversity, there needs to be more than just a diverse student population in colleges; there needs to be representation of all groups across all fields of study. To understand whether increasing diversity on campus is translating to equal access to opportunity, we examine racial and ethnic representation across college majors over time, finding that Asian, Black, and Hispanic students are often concentrated in majors with other students of the same race or ethnicity and that at institutions where Black and Hispanic segregation is worst, these students are least likely to graduate with high-paying degrees. We examine racial and ethnic imbalance within higher education institutions by using segregation indexes to summarize racial and ethnic sorting inside universities. We analyze whether students of different races or ethnicities are over- or underrepresented in certain fields of study, relative to the institutions they attend.

A growing number of US cities are organizing common application systems for families seeking free public preschool for their children, and many use the deferred acceptance (DA) algorithm to assign students to schools that receive more applications than they have seats. In this report, we examine the steps taken to use a common application system and centralized lottery within the District of Columbia's public prekindergarten program. By reconstructing and repeatedly simulating the lottery, we demonstrate that enrollment in the city's public prekindergarten program has a large effect on families' persistence in public schools. We conclude that the lottery evaluation methods used in the District of Columbia can be used by other cities to evaluate their own educational programs and examine the effects of public preschool.

Since 2014, the District of Columbia has used an annual common application to place new students from prekindergarten for 3-year-olds (PK3) through 12th grade in DC Public Schools (DCPS) and DC public charter schools. Though K-12 students have the right to attend their in-boundary school, this policy does not extend to students in PK3 or PK4 (prekindergarten for 4-year-olds). Instead, prekindergarten students apply through a common lottery for a spot at one of the District's public school options. In the first comprehensive description of DC public prekindergarten applicants and application patterns, we demonstrate that PK3 and PK4 lotteries differ substantially, both in families' application choices and in outcomes. We find that applicants and matched applicants closely resemble their respective populations of 3- and 4-year-old children in DC, but wait-listed applicants disproportionately represent socioeconomically advantaged 3- and 4-year-old children in DC, as well as families in immigrant communities.

The US population is becoming more educated, but large gaps in postsecondary attainment based on race or ethnicity remain, particularly at more selective colleges. As a growing number of jobs require a college degree, it is imperative to increase college access among all racial and ethnic groups. In this report, we examined whether different racial and ethnic groups have equal access to higher education by looking at representativeness across postsecondary institutions. We constructed a new measure that compares each college's racial and ethnic demographics with the demographics of the college's market, evaluating whether each racial or ethnic group is over- or underrepresented at individual colleges and college sectors, relative to that college's or sector's pool of potential students. We confirm the presence and persistence of large national gaps in representation and find that Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented at more selective schools in ways that cannot be explained by differences in community demographics.

Many students are enrolled in segregated school systems with unequal access to resources. In this report, we present a measure that can help policymakers identify the schools in their system that are contributing the most to segregation. How our measure differs from traditional metrics: Much research on segregation relies on an absolute measure of segregation, which evaluates exposure and isolation between students of different racial groups within individual schools. But these measures can be misleading because they are strongly influenced by the racial composition of students in the neighborhood or system. Schools in areas with few white students could be considered "hypersegregated" for simply reflecting the pool of students they draw from. On the other hand, because these metrics often consider exposure of historically underserved populations--blacks and Hispanics--to other students--whites and Asians--they can miss schools that are predominantly white and Asian with a small minority community while penalizing schools that are predominantly black or Hispanic. Our Segregation Contribution Index assesses how much each school within a system--whether a district, county, or city--contributes to segregation by examining what would happen to segregation within the system if a school's actual racial composition were perfectly integrated--that is, replaced with a composition corresponding to that of the school system. Because redistributing students across a system could require students to travel long distances or create other logistical problems, we also assess whether systemwide integration would be improved if schools more closely resembled their neighborhoods. Our Segregation Contribution Index allows stakeholders to see which schools in a system contribute most to segregation or integration, helping policymakers better target their school integration efforts. Which schools contribute most to segregation? The measure can also be applied to groups of schools, allowing us to analyze different sectors. Our analysis finds the following: (1) Holding school size constant, private and charter schools tend to have higher average contributions to segregation than traditional public schools; (2) Charter schools are overrepresented among schools that are both significantly more and less black and Hispanic than the surrounding neighborhood; and (3) In neighborhoods with low shares of black and Hispanic students, private schools are 30 percentage points more likely than traditional public schools to segregate the system. Context matters: Private schools account for a large share of segregation relative to their enrollment share. Charter schools' contributions are high often because of where they are located. But traditional public schools serve almost 90 percent of students--segregation cannot be eliminated unless these schools better integrate. The index is not perfect. It does not, for example, demonstrate causal relationships and should not be used to assign blame to individual schools or types of schools. If one school significantly contributes to segregation, closing it will not necessarily better integrate the system because those students might sort into other schools in ways that exacerbate segregation. Our intent is to shed light on which schools contribute more to segregation in order to guide policymakers as they work to improve integration.

Private school choice programs are rapidly gaining traction, with nearly 450,000 student participants in 2019--an increase of 300,000 students in just 15 years. This report evaluates how well some of these programs prepare students for college by examining college enrollment and completion data from the Florida Tax Credit scholarship program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, and the Washington, DC, Opportunity Scholarship Program. Unlike previous research on private school choice, this body of work takes a long-term approach, focusing on college enrollment and graduation rates rather than student satisfaction and test scores. Over the past three years, this research has demonstrated that private school choice programs yield varying results on graduation rates, with positive outcomes for students in the Florida and Milwaukee programs and no statistically significant positive or negative outcome in DC. This report presents the most up-to-date data and proposes topics for future research that would better equip policymakers to make decisions. The updated data in this report show more consistent positive effects of Milwaukee's private school choice program, and the results in DC still show no significant effect, even as we broaden the sample to include more students. [Additional funding for this report was provided by the Bill and Susan Oberndorf Foundation and by Kate and Bill Duhamel.]

In this study, the authors provide the first nationally comprehensive examination of charter school effects on school segregation using longitudinal data on public school enrollment by grade level and race or ethnicity. The authors identify the causal charter school effects on segregation exploiting between-grade-level variation in the dynamics of charter school enrollment share within a school district in a given year from 1998 to 2015. Key findings include: (1) The finding that increasing charter school enrollment leads to small increases in segregation holds for cities and counties as well as school districts. The averages, however, mask considerable variation across districts, cities, and states; (2) The segregative effects of charter schools are greater in urban districts with high shares of black and Hispanic students and in suburban districts with low black and Hispanic representation; and (3) Charter schools have no discernible impact on the segregation of metropolitan areas. This is because the increase in segregation within districts in metropolitan areas is offset by greater integration between districts within the same metropolitan area. Essentially, districts within a metropolitan area become more diverse, but the schools within those districts do not become more integrated. [Olivia Piontek provided assistance in preparing this paper.]