Race and the Structure of School Districts in the United States

Abstract

We believe that tastes for association could play an important role in determining the structure, conduct, and performance of the system of local governments in the United States. Accordingly, we incorporate racial discrimination into a model of jurisdiction formation. If one group is prejudiced, the model demonstrates that as the population of a region becomes more racially heterogenous a greater number of jurisdictions is required to satisfy their taste for disassociation. Using state and metropolitan area panel data, we test this implication of the model. We find that, controlling for other relevant variables, increasing racial heterogeneity of a state population increases the number of school districts. We discuss the robustness of our results. We compare the impact of racial heterogeneity on special districts with its impact on school districts. In sharp contrast to our school district result, we find no evidence that increasing racial heterogeneity affects the formation of special districts.