School Choice, Neighborhood Change, and Racial Imbalance Between Public Elementary Schools and Surrounding Neighborhoods

Kendra Bischoff,Laura Tach

doi:10.15195/v7.a4

Abstract

The expansion of school choice in recent years has potentially generated demographic imbalances between traditional public schools and their residential attendance zones. Demographic imbalances emerge from selective opting out, when families of certain racial and/or ethnic backgrounds disproportionately choose not to enroll in their neighborhood-based public schools. In this article, we use a unique data set of school attendance zones in 21 large U.S. school districts to show how changes in neighborhood conditions and school choice options influence race-specific enrollments in locally zoned public elementary schools from 2000 to 2010. We find that the presence of more school-choice options generates racial imbalances between public elementary schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, but this association differs by type of choice-based alternative. Private schools, on average, reduce the presence of non-Hispanic white students in locally zoned schools, whereas charter schools may reduce the presence of nonwhite students in locally zoned schools. Increases in neighborhood-school racial imbalances from 2000 to 2010 were concentrated in neighborhoods undergoing increases in socioeconomic status, suggesting that parents' residential and school decisions are dynamic and sensitive to changing neighborhood conditions. Selective opting out has implications for racial integration in schools and the distribution of familial resources across educational contexts.

Highlights

We extend prior research on the association between local residential conditions and parents’ schooling decisions by creating a data set that integrates information on the racial and/or ethnic composition of children living in school attendance zones and students in the corresponding public elementary schools in 21 of the largest U.S school districts from 2000 to 2010
Magnet schools seem to be associated with slightly larger gains in racial imbalance in declining neighborhoods relative to those with average change, though the magnitude of the association is small. These results suggest that private schools in proximity to declining neighborhoods may not serve very advantaged populations and do not disproportionately draw white students out of local public schools, whereas magnet schools within reach of declining neighborhoods are more likely to enroll a disproportionate share of white students from that neighborhood
This increase in school choice has potentially weakened the link between neighborhood and school populations if enrollment in choice schools occurs selectively based on students’ race and/or ethnicity

Summary

Introduction

Demographic imbalances emerge from selective opting out, when families of certain racial and/or ethnic backgrounds disproportionately choose not to enroll in their neighborhood-based public schools. We use a unique data set of school attendance zones in 21 large U.S school districts to show how changes in neighborhood conditions and school choice options influence race-specific enrollments in locally zoned public elementary schools from 2000 to 2010. Divergence between school and neighborhood populations—which we refer to as demographic imbalance—emerges from selective opting out, when families of certain racial and/or ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds disproportionately choose not to enroll in their neighborhood-based public schools. Selective opting out has implications for inequality through its effect on racial and/or ethnic and socioeconomic integration in schools and through the distribution of familial resources across educational contexts. Despite competing concerns surrounding the use of local public schools in rapidly changing communities, there is little largescale quantitative evidence about how children’s enrollments in local schools vary as a function of school choice options and changing socioeconomic conditions

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Conclusion