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While suburban schools across the country have become increasingly racially and economically diverse in recent decades, many remain highly segregated. School attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) play a critical role in shaping these patterns of within-district segregation. AZBs are especially important in suburban areas with growing and diversifying student populations. Using novel, longitudinal AZB data dating back to 1990, authors Sarah Asson, Erica Frankenberg, Christopher Fowler, and Ruth Krebs Buck studied the relationship between AZBs and segregation over time in three large suburban districts. They found AZB changes have not yet been realized as a force for desegregation. To do so will require more explicit action prioritizing racial and economic diversity.

School attendance zone boundary (AZB) data remain relatively underdocumented and understudied within the field of education, despite their critical implications for educational (in)equity. AZBs shape student outcomes and residential sorting patterns both by determining the public schools a student is assigned to and by signaling neighborhood characteristics to prospective homebuyers. The limited access, regulation, and review of AZB data to date has left a gap in the knowledge base, having the potential to leave intact (and exacerbate) patterns of segregation that maintain inequities in educational opportunity. Lack of data also limits our ability to know whether and when AZBs may mitigate segregation. In this brief, we examine a novel data collection effort of current and historical AZB data--the Longitudinal School Attendance Boundary System--to explore the contextual and political factors associated with data access and data quality. We aim to show how factors that hinder access to quality AZB data affect the study of educational equity, and we advocate for more comprehensive, top-down governmental efforts to create, maintain, and collect these data.

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Impact of networks in transport geography is analyzed with reference to transportation of containers to the West coast of the United States.

Neighborhoods and neighborhood change are often at least implicitly understood in relation to processes taking place at scales both smaller than and larger than the neighborhood itself. Until recently our capacity to represent these multi-scalar processes with quantitative measures has been limited. Recent work on "segregation profiles" by Reardon and collaborators (Reardon et al., 2008, 2009) expands our capacity to explore the relationship between population measures and scale. With the methodological tools now available, we need a conceptual shift in how we view population measures in order to bring our theories and measures of neighborhoods into alignment. I argue that segregation can be beneficially viewed as multi-scalar ; not a value calculable at some 'correct' scale, but a continuous function with respect to scale. This shift requires new ways of thinking about and analyzing segregation with respect to scale that engage with the complexity of the multi-scalar measure. Using block level data for eight neighborhoods in Seattle, Washington I explore the implications of a multi-scalar segregation measure for understanding neighborhoods and neighborhood change from 1990 to 2010.