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The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents' perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school choice system in New York City. We find that parents' critique the choice policies and the unfair burdens they place on low-income and immigrant families while engaging in opportunity hoarding to ensure their children's privileged access to the most competitive schools, all while dismissing claims that school choice is meritocratic. Ultimately, advantaged parents' suggest returning to neighborhood zoning which would preserve their access to exclusive, high performing schools and avoid the stress and inequities of school choice policies. This study offers further examples of the powerful influence of contradictory White discourse in the context of education policy and reform.

School rezoning, or redistricting, is the process by which school boards draw and redraw school attendance boundaries. These boundaries are key drivers of racial and economic school segregation but can also work to ameliorate it. Using a critical orientation to narrative policy analysis, this study examined the cultural politics of race and whiteness in an urban school district undergoing school rezoning. Drawing on semistructured interviews with 15 school leaders and community stakeholders, findings provide a lens for school leaders and policymakers to better understand how and to what extent race is imposed in school attendance boundary decisions. Our findings expand current literature on school rezoning by shedding new light on racial narratives embedded within the political process. We conclude with policy and practice implications.

This article examines how school and non-school policies interact to reinforce or disrupt school segregation in the context of suburban communities and how these systems are maintained by structural and institutional mechanisms. Methodologically, we use a case study approach to delve deeply into the interpretation and implementation of school attendance zone redesign and non-school policies, specifically land use policies and tools. We draw on neo-institutionalist theory and Ray's (2019) framework of racialized organizations to make sense of school districts, planning agencies, and their policies. We find that school district rezoning policies provide a weak regulatory framework for desegregating schools because school zoning decisions are not made in a vacuum but rather are shaped by policies and actions taken by other actors in a multi-level governance structure. School zoning policies themselves prioritized capacity over desegregation, and regulations and norms governing the public engagement processes privilege opposition to desegregation. Our study points to the importance of greater coordination across governmental levels and policy arenas, and underscores how desegregation policy is part of a political and relational process between advocates, elected leaders, families, and youth across policy sectors.

This article traces the spatial history of New York City's geographic school subdistrict boundaries throughout the 20th century, exploring the historical relationship between race, space, and schooling in New York City and beyond. It seeks to both make the case for studying the spatial history of within-district education boundaries and put the results of our historical mapping project into the public domain. Ultimately, we hope that researchers will use our data to explore their own questions about the history of New York City, its neighborhoods, and its schools, and that some may embark on similar boundary-mapping projects for other cities, counties, and school systems.

Until the last quarter of the 20th century racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but is the result of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. Segregation by intentional government action is not "de facto." Rather, it is what courts call "de jure:" segregation by law and public policy. This article discusses how racially explicit government policies to segregate metropolitan areas were neither subtle nor intangible and were sufficiently controlling to construct the "de jure" segregation that is now present in neighborhoods (and hence in schools). African Americans were unconstitutionally denied the means and the right to integration in middle-class neighborhoods, and because this denial was state sponsored, the nation is obligated to remedy it. [This article is excerpted from "The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America" by Richard Rothstein. Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2017.]

This research aims to determine the perceptions of new students on the implementation of zoning-based PPDB (New Learner Admission Activities). The method in this research was mixed-method approach. Primary data was obtained through distributing questionnaires filled out by students. Samples were taken using purposive sampling technique in five cities, including Bandung, Surakarta, Surabaya, Pontianak and Serang. The data analysis technique used the Miles and Huberman model. The results show that the school which initially received the favourite label is still the favourite one because of the facilities and infrastructure and the implementation of the existing learning process in the school. The zoning system based on student perceptions does not reduce enthusiasm for learning. The zoning-based PPDB for junior high school and senior high school is more guaranteed for students who live close to the school to get the target school. The zoning system has been well implemented in four cities, including Surabaya, Bandung, Surakarta and Pontianak. In addition, the zoning system can save money.

While school choice has been well studied, there is little existing research exploring the role of transportation, in general, and school buses, in particular, to school choice decisions. We examine the effect of school buses on school choice decisions using data on kindergarten students and their eligibility for transportation assistance in New York City public schools in 2017. Using both conditional logit school choice models and regression discontinuity designs, we provide both descriptive and credibly causal evidence on the impact of school proximity, bus eligibility, and their interaction on school choice decisions. Our results indicate that proximity and buses both matter. Specifically, while distance significantly deters choice, school bus eligibility increases the likelihood of choosing a school by 1.4-4 percentage points (or 12-30 percent). Compared to a high-quality school, we find that bus eligibility has twice as large an impact on reducing the negative distance effect in the 0.5 to 1 mile range from school (27 versus 12 percent). These results will be useful for policy makers looking to leverage school transportation policy to improve school choice decisions, and ultimately student outcomes.

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.

Growing global debates surrounding parental school choice underscore the relevance of school place allocation. While there is much research on school choice, the enactment of such allocation policy is rarely analysed. Responding to this research gap, this article investigates how local politicians in Berlin put public primary school place allocation into practice. Building on approaches of policy enactment and policy field analysis, this article examines the 'doing' of Berlin primary school place allocation with the concurrency of catchment areas and parental school choice. Methodologically, this article draws on semi-structured interviews with three inner-city district school department heads in Berlin. Using qualitative content analysis, their political objectives, scope and strategies are analysed. The findings demonstrate that local politicians can interpret the allocation process in line with their political objectives. Consequently, there is surprising variation between the districts' enactment of primary school place allocation policy. Policymakers' political preferences for either school choice or social diversity are influential, as is the local context (e.g. school place shortages). The study highlights the importance of local actors and identifies three political strategies used to influence school place allocation, which might inform local politicians' strategies elsewhere.

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.

Drawn from interdisciplinary perspectives of special education, critical geography, and education policy, in this study, we examined the spatial patterns of residential areas, school attendance zones, and school discipline rates of an urbanizing school district in Wisconsin to understand the construction of spatial "Other." We measured the city's dissimilarity index to examine racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and elementary schools. We also measured the school district suspension rates to examine racial disproportionality in school discipline. We then analyzed to what extent the redrawing of elementary school attendance zones in the 2007-2008 school year was able to reduce the spatial concentration of racially and economically minoritized students in one elementary public school. We found that despite the well-intentioned efforts of the rezoning committee to lower the percentage of students from low-income families, spatial othering at the neighborhood level continued to funnel students from racially and minoritized backgrounds into the school, due to the concentration of low-income housing in the neighborhood of the school.

The current study explored the experiences and activities of school resource officers (SROs) in an urban school district. Twenty-eight SROs completed a survey assessing their roles in schools and a focus group explored how the SROs build relationships with students and the types of student concerns they help resolve. Themes from the focus group included the SROs' attempts to navigate change in policies and procedures in the school system; the community contexts of the school system and its impact on SRO duties; and role ambiguity, including differences in how SROs perceived their roles within schools compared to how others saw them. Study findings call attention to underlying tensions between SROs and positive youth development in an era where SRO presence in schools is highly debated. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED624649.]

The paper is relevant since tourism is considered as an element of sustainable development of the region, which means not only growth but also formation of a fundamentally new system of land use planning with tourism as its integrator. The purpose of the paper is development of theoretical-methodological and cartographic instruments for identifying homogeneous territorial complexes, which can be grouped based on the similar functional features and represented as strategic instruments for development of the region. The differential matrix method for distinguishing typological structures in the economic complex of the region is the basic research method. This method in turn is based on the targeting method for the purpose of planning development of a region, the structural method aimed at forming clusters on the branch principle and the forecasting method with an eye to determine whether implementation of suggested measures will cause an increase in Gross Regional Product. It's suggested to implement recreational monitoring based on the concept of recreational digression stages with diversification of tourist product in each natural recreational area and identifying a few cycles of recreational activity, which allow, if conditions changed, refocusing recreational activity to a different, optimum direction and creating cross-border protected areas, coordinating actions of existing near-border areas. Zoned territories can be useful for investment companies, economic associations. The territories, which could be designated as additional protected areas in the Ukok, Chuya-Kuray, North-South-Chuya natural recreational regions, can be included into the Golden Ring as far-reaching paths.

A robust body of geographic education policy research has been amassing over the past 25 years, as researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds have recognized the value of examining education phenomena from a spatial perspective. In this chapter, I synthesize 42 studies that examine education issues using a geographic information system, or GIS. The review is framed by the major thread that runs through this body of research: educational equity, access, and opportunity. I summarize the research within seven theme-based research topics and offer examples of geospatial analysis as applied to education. The chapter includes a discussion of the major barriers and limitation facing GIS researchers and offers thoughts about the future.

In this study, I employ geospatial techniques to assess the impact of school attendance zone "gerrymandering" on the racial/ethnic segregation of schools, using a large national sample of 15,290 attendance zones in 663 districts. I estimate the effect of gerrymandering on school diversity and school district segregation by comparing the racial/ethnic characteristics of existing attendance zones to those of counterfactual zones expected in the absence of gerrymandering. Results indicate that the gerrymandering of attendance zones generally exacerbates segregation, although it has a weaker effect on the segregation of Whites from Blacks and Hispanics. Gerrymandering is particularly segregative in districts experiencing rapid racial/ethnic change. However, gerrymandering is associated with reductions in segregation in a substantial minority of districts, notably those under desegregation orders.

In this article, I discuss the promise of geospatial techniques for education policy research and how increased attention to the historical context of spatial data can enhance that work. While scholarship utilizing geographic information systems has added considerable breadth to our understanding of education policy, recent geospatial studies in education policy tended to neglect long-term, historical trends. Drawing on research in geography dealing with temporality, this article discusses the critical importance of historical context for spatial analysis. Then, to illustrate this point, I use the example of education policy research on school district boundaries to suggest the benefits of extending our temporal frame when conducting geospatial educational research. Greater attention to the historical context of geospatial data can (1) help policy researchers generate new research questions, (2) enhance their use of quantitative spatial analysis techniques, and (3) deepen their understanding of the underlying causes of contemporary patterns in the distribution of educational opportunity.

Today, our schools are more racially segregated than at any time in the last 40 years, mainly because the neighborhoods in which they are located are themselves racially segregated. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2007 Parents Involved ruling, prohibited school districts from implementing even modest race-conscious desegregation plans. If people of differing races live in different neighborhoods, the Court found, it is because of de facto segregation (e.g., private individuals' choices about where to live), which the government has no power to remedy. But in fact, argues Richard Rothstein, residential segregation can be traced back to specific decisions made by public officials at the local, state, and federal levels. De facto segregation is a myth, and there's no reason why the government shouldn't take action to integrate schools in segregated neighborhoods.

The nation's greatest anti-racist education policy -- school desegregation -- has proven no match for the adaptations of institutionalized racism. Over the last 40 years, school segregation has evolved and reemerged in housing patterns, school zoning policy, and curricular tracking. This has led to calls for new solutions to the problem of racial segregation in schools. Is it possible, however, that the pursuit of such solutions is a form of avoidance, an unwillingness to face the intractable nature of institutionalized racism? Jerry Rosiek considers the power of pessimism about racial justice as a stance for educators in an era of resegregating schools.

Much public attention and many resources are focused on medical research to identify risk factors and mitigate symptoms of disability for individual children. But this focus will inevitably fail to "prevent" disabilities. Stephen Rauch and Bruce Lanphear argue for a broader focus on environmental influences that put entire populations at risk. They argue that identifying and eliminating or controlling environmental risk factors that incrementally increase the prevalence of disability is the key to preventing many disorders. Rauch and Lanphear examine emerging evidence that many disabilities of childhood have their roots in the environment--from toxins in air, water, and soil, to the stressors of poverty, to marketing practices that encourage unhealthy choices or discourage healthy ones. They review research on well-known environmental causes of disability, such as exposures to lead, cigarette smoke, and industrial air pollution. They point to new evidence suggesting that chemicals found in commonly used plastics may have subtle but serious effects on child development, and that many disabilities spring from the complex interplay of environmental risk factors and genetic susceptibility. Rauch and Lanphear make a case for turning our attention to societal or population-level interventions that would rely less on medical and genetic technology and more on policies and regulations that would reduce children's exposure to ubiquitous environmental risks. Examples include required testing of new chemicals for developmental toxicity before they are put on the market; zoning regulations that separate residential communities from industrial areas; and restrictions on advertising of unhealthy products, such as tobacco, alcohol, and junk foods, to children. Rauch and Lanphear outline and assess the effectiveness of interventions that could be adopted, and suggest what a healthy modern community might look like. Such interventions, they acknowledge, are likely to be highly controversial, require both long-term investments and shifts in societal thinking, and produce less well-defined outcomes than individual medical treatments. But in the long run, the authors contend, such interventions could prevent many of the disabilities that now afflict millions of children and adults. (Contains 114 endnotes, 1 table and 1 figure.)

This study outlines the processes used by University of Wisconsin--Extension, Lincoln County (UWELC), educators over an eight-year period to facilitate the development of a county land use plan and to guide committees through a review of the new proposed county zoning ordinances based on that plan. As a partner in these projects, UWELC helped create a model of public participation for other counties and municipalities conducting land use planning based on Wisconsin's comprehensive planning law passed in October 1999. UWELC educators drew on the expertise of University of Wisconsin system faculty based outside Lincoln County to provide information about land use and zoning issues.

Adolescent smoking prevention is an important issue in health care. This literature review describes the theoretical concept of ecological model for adolescent smoking and tobacco retailers and summarizes previous studies on the association between the density and proximity of tobacco retailers and adolescent smoking. We reviewed nine studies on tobacco retailer density and proximity in relation to adolescent smoking, published in peer-reviewed journals between 2004 and 2014. The tobacco retailer density and proximity were correlated with adolescent lifetime smoking, past 12-month smoking, past 30-day smoking, and susceptibility to smoking. School nurses or other school health professionals may need to include the density and proximity of tobacco retailer factors around schools in school-based tobacco-use prevention programs. Health policy makers may need to consider zoning or licensing restrictions of tobacco retailers around schools for adolescent smoking prevention.

Purpose: Layered with myriad considerations, school closure and rezoning processes in urban school systems are politically fraught with the potential for damaging consequences. This article explores the politics and impacts of a closure and rezoning process in Richmond, Virginia, through the lens of themes applicable to urban school systems and students across the nation. These include the intersection of closure and rezoning with growing White reinvestment in urban school systems, as well as the importance of focusing on diversity and equity during a time of intense pressure to close schools. Research Methods/Approach: Drawing on the case of Richmond, Virginia, we use an explanatory sequential mixed methods research design, employing qualitative methods to examine the political process of a 2013 school closure and elementary school rezoning effort and quantitative and spatial methods to examine its impact on racial composition and segregation in attendance zones and schools. Findings and Implications: We find that the political process of redrawing elementary school attendance boundaries in Richmond was associated with a dramatic increase in racial segregation between elementary attendance zones over a short period of time. Leadership changes and political considerations drove a rapid and antagonistic decision-making process that minimized broad-based public participation and privileged the voices of White families in a city school system that is less than 10% White. Despite a contentious and opaque decision-making process and starkly segregative impacts, community response and support for school diversity points to the potential for leveraging urban population shifts to increase rather than decrease diverse school settings.

We indicate the size of family background effects in Sweden, Finland, and Estonia--countries that differ in both the rhetoric and extensiveness of the system-level school choice policies. Family background effect is defined as the dependence of student achievement on family background characteristics, such as parental education, income, and social status. The number of books at home is used as a proxy when operationalising family background, and its effect is measured as a percentage of individual-level PISA scores. Fixed-effect regression results reveal that family background remains a powerful determinant in the educational results of 15-year-old students in all three cases, being largest in Sweden. Furthermore, we show how the family background effect is moderated by school-level choice policy, that is, how students and schools are matched. The analysis reveals that zoning policies have statistically significant negative effects on the impact of the family background effect, independent of country-level policies.

In an era of increasing complexity, the majority of local land-use decisions in the United States are made by volunteer citizen planners. Often these elected or appointed volunteers enter their positions with a passion for their communities but without appropriate background training. The Michigan Citizen Planner Program was developed to address this gap. The study described in this article investigated the self-assessed impacts on graduates of basic and advanced training. Findings suggest that training conducted as the result of collaboration by university Extension, other state agencies, and nonprofit groups is essential to realizing the positive community development impacts expected by citizens and local officials.

For decades, educators have hoped to integrate geospatial tools into K-12 classrooms but struggled with barriers of time, technology, and curriculum alignment. The authors formed a design partnership with ninth-grade science and social studies teachers in an urban high school in order to conduct teacher professional development while also developing geospatially enabled curricula to enact in their classrooms. This article includes a description of the curriculum design principles and processes, as well as an explanation of the professional development strategies as participants worked shoulder to shoulder in designing engaging classroom instruction to enhance students' geospatial thinking and reasoning skills. One of the activities presented is an example of the design and development process, and lessons learned from the pilot test implementation are presented. This article may inform similar work with geospatial technologies in teacher professional development and curriculum development.

Redistricting, the redrawing of electoral district boundaries to reflect the latest population counts, occurs for most electoral districts after each decennial census. While normally a topic of concern mainly to politicians and politicos, redistricting can alter the opportunities for representation and policy alternatives. For a number of reasons, Latino representation at many electoral levels has lagged far behind Latino population percentages. Latino representation has been shown to increase Latino educational opportunities, access, and success. One higher education example of this is Texas' top ten percent plan (TTP) spearheaded by Latino/a legislators. This plan has led to substantially increased Latino enrollments in Texas' public universities. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 1 note.)

In this article, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley illuminates the challenges and opportunities posed by demographic change in suburban school systems. As expanding student populations stretch the enrollment capacities of existing schools in suburban communities, new schools are built and attendance lines are redrawn. This redistricting process can be used either to foster school diversity or to exacerbate racial isolation. Drawing on data from the U.S. Census, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and the school district, along with mapping software from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Siegel-Hawley examines the relationship between overcrowding, racial isolation, and the original, proposed, and final high school attendance zones in a changing suburban district. Findings indicate that school officials responsible for the rezoning process failed to embrace the growing diversity of the school system, choosing instead to solidify extreme patterns of racial isolation within high school attendance areas. The segregative impact of the district's new attendance zones may be subject to legal scrutiny, a consequence that could--and should--discourage other school systems from adopting similarly harmful redistricting policies.

Based on a comparison of school external evaluation processes in three countries (England, France and Switzerland), this article questions the possible quality turn in the governance of European educational systems. Using materials collected through qualitative methods (91 interviews, surveys of literature and observations) during a sociological and exploratory research, it shows that a relatively similar shift to a new set of policies and regulation tools may have a very different political meaning and give birth to very different policy configurations from one educational system to another. It also reveals that in each country references to foreign evidence are relatively rare and highly selective, depending on the domestic political circumstances, interests and frames of analysis of policy actors. Instead of invalidating the theory of a quality turn, the article concludes that the paths taken by each educational system strongly predetermine the forms, stakes and scope of this quality turn and that the main scientific challenge is to think about these two phenomena together.