The impact of demographic structure on citizen perceptions of school district efficiency

Abstract

ABSTRACT Researchers have found that elderly white voters are less supportive of school spending if they reside in a community with a high concentration of non-white school children, a finding typically attributed to growing intergenerational and ethnic conflict between older and younger generations. We test whether white voters living in high minority areas are more likely to perceive their schools as being inefficient and find evidence of such racial mismatch consistent with the literature. One explanation is that white voters in high minority areas may believe schools are inefficient because of the correlation between minority concentration and poverty, given that it is more expensive to educate children in poverty. A second possibility is that white voters in high minority areas believe schools are inefficient because of bias, whether conscious or unconscious. We find convincing evidence of this second explanation that bias produces the racial mismatch effect for older white individuals.