Attendance Zones Research Articles

School desegregation by redrawing district boundaries.

Schools in the United States remain heavily segregated by race and income. Previous work demonstrates districts can promote group diversity within their schools with policies like redrawing attendance zones. Yet, the promise of such policies in many areas is limited by the fact that most school segregation occurs between school districts, and not between schools in the same district. I adapt Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms from legislative redistricting to redraw school district boundaries that decrease segregation while maintaining desirable criteria like distance to school and using only existing school facilities. Focusing on New Jersey, where the segregation of Black and Hispanic students from White and Asian students is among the worst in the country, I demonstrate that redrawing school districts could reduce more than 40% of existing segregation in the median New Jersey county, compared to less than 5% for redrawing attendance zones alone. Finally, I show how my proposed methodology can be applied to as few as two districts to reduce segregation in proposed consolidations, when small districts are merged into a larger district.

Rezoning Educational Opportunities: The Relationship Between School Attendance Zone Boundary Changes and Access to Schools of Varying Quality

U.S. public schools provide substantially different educational opportunities to students—even within school districts, where attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) shape most children’s access to schools. The (re)drawing of AZBs is therefore a highly consequential policy decision. In this paper, I study how AZB changes in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area affect children of different races between 2000 and 2020, including how they alter children’s travel times to school and access to school-level educational opportunities. Findings are starkly unequal, with rezoning disproportionately negatively affecting Black and Hispanic children. Results highlight the need for educational leaders to explicitly consider how AZB changes will redistribute opportunity within their districts.

The role of noncontiguous attendance zones in shaping school populations: A case study of Tucson, Arizona and Fort Bend, Texas

Noncontiguous school attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) have a unique, relatively uncommon shape that assign two or more non-adjacent residential areas to the same school. Given their ability to shape school enrollments by taking advantage of residential sorting, noncontiguous AZBs have historically been linked to explicit efforts to both segregate and desegregate schools. In this paper, we use a novel, longitudinal dataset of AZBs and descriptive quantitative and geospatial methods to understand how the relationship between noncontiguous zones, school diversity, and neighborhood demographics changed from 1990-2020 in two southwestern school districts—Tucson Unified School District, Arizona and Fort Bend Independent School District, Texas. Each district has a unique legal history and demographic context that informs their use of noncontiguous AZBs. We find noncontiguous AZBs are more strongly associated with racially diverse schools and are more likely to bring together neighborhoods with different compositions in Tucson compared to Fort Bend. However, the association between Tucson’s noncontiguous AZBs and racially diverse schools has waned since 1990, as the district has negotiated the end of its court-ordered desegregation plan. Our findings provide insight into when and how noncontiguous AZBs can effectively contribute to ethnoracially diverse schools.

Rise and Fall: The Heterogeneous Impacts of School Federations on Housing Prices in China

School federations may promote the flow of education resources between headquarter and branch schools, yet there have been few studies on the heterogeneous effect of school federations on housing prices of headquarter and branch school attendance zones. This article uses a difference in difference in differences (DDD) model to examine this effect with house transaction data of Hefei, China. It found that school federations make housing prices in headquarter school attendance zones rise, while prices in branch school attendance zones fall. Results imply school-choice families prefer headquarter schools to branch schools of federations. Potential explanations imply that the federation makes headquarter schools capture more senior teachers, and may disclose the better education quality information about headquarter schools to school-choice families.

PERAN GURU DALAM MENGATASI MASALAH KEDISIPLINAN BELAJAR SISWA SEKOLAH DASAR

: This study aims to find out how the role of teachers in overcoming student learning discipline problems in elementary schools. This type of research is qualitative with a qualitative descriptive approach. The subjects of the study were 1 class teacher and 14 grade 5 students of SD Negeri 09 Tanjung Lay, with the object of research on the role of teachers in overcoming student learning discipline problems. The instruments used are interview guidelines, observation guidelines and documentation. The results of the study found 7 forms of roles used by the teacher to overcome the problem of student learning discipline, namely the role of the teacher as a teacher, as a guide, as a motivator, as a demonstrator, as a manager and as a counselor. Teachers use various ways to overcome student learning discipline problems such as providing motivation and appreciation, being an example and role model, guiding and embracing students and giving punishment with positive goals, time and action discipline, making approaches according to student characteristics and needs, evaluating results student learning as well as implementing student attendance zones to discipline student attendance time.

The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’s Zones of Choice

Abstract Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This article studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level effects of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a difference-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

Data Access and the Study of Educational Equity: Implications from a National School Boundary Data Collection Effort

Abstract 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.

Exploring Tradeoffs in Automated School Redistricting: Computational and Ethical Perspectives

The US public school system is administered by local school districts. Each district comprises a set of schools mapped to attendance zones which are annually assessed to meet enrollment objectives. To support school officials in redrawing attendance boundaries, existing approaches have proven promising but still suffer from several challenges, including: 1) inability to scale to large school districts, 2) high computational cost of obtaining compact school attendance zones, and 3) lack of discussion on quantifying ethical considerations underlying the redrawing of school boundaries. Motivated by these challenges, this paper approaches the school redistricting problem from both computational and ethical standpoints. First, we introduce a practical framework based on sampling methods to solve school redistricting as a graph partitioning problem. Next, the advantages of adopting a modified objective function for optimizing discrete geometry to obtain compact boundaries are examined. Lastly, alternative metrics to address ethical considerations in real-world scenarios are formally defined and thoroughly discussed. Our findings highlight the inclusiveness and efficiency advantages of the designed framework and depict how tradeoffs need to be made to obtain qualitatively different school redistricting plans.

Attendance zones in the suburbs

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.

Demographic Change and School Attendance Zone Boundary Changes: Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia, Between 1990 and 2010

We analyze the relationship between residential populations, school attendance zone boundaries (AZBs), and school enrollments in two large, countywide suburban districts, Fairfax County, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, from 1990 to 2010. A steep decline in white, school-age children and an increase in black, Hispanic, and Asian children in both neighborhoods and the schools that serve them suggests that white households reluctant to send their children to diversifying schools are exiting (or never entering) these districts entirely rather than sorting within them. AZB changes, often due to the opening of new schools, affect a large portion of both districts, but boundary changes are associated with only a small portion of increased segregation observed in both schools and neighborhoods between 1990 and 2010. Our findings speak to the complex, multidirectional relationships between demographic trends and AZBs in diversifying, growing suburbs.

The Effects of School Choice Competition on an Underserved Neighborhood Public School

This critical ethnography utilizes critical policy analysis and a theoretical understanding of neoliberal racism to examine the practiced reality of school choice in a public, under-resourced, and historically underperforming neighborhood elementary school attended predominantly by Latina/o/x students. Despite improvement initiatives that resulted in performance distinctions, the school under study experienced substantial enrollment decline amidst the poaching of students by charter schools within the attendance zone. Moreover, the competitive school choice market within the school’s district resulted in the reshuffling of teachers, reinforcement of neoliberal improvement discourses, and even the exploitation of dual language students to raise the school’s market profile. The study provides a unique, up-close representation of marketization in public schools and the residualizing effects that school choice policies can have on public education writ large.

Physical activity environment inside and outside school and youth fitness: A spatial analysis at the level of elementary school attendance zone in Georgia

The present study investigates the spatial correlation between built and natural environments that promote physical activity (PA) and children’s fitness. Previous work has been conducted on various geographic scales such as from a county level. However, evaluations from a school attendance zone level, which are the policy and program administration units for schools, have yet to be investigated. Using a factor analysis, 24 PA-related environmental variables were reduced to six environmental factors and then run factors with geographically weighted regression (GWR) at the level of the elementary school attendance zones (ESAZ) in Georgia. The outside-school environmental factors (park, recreation, terrain, nature and camping) and inside school environmental factor (school PA time) were constructed by ESAZ. We found that of all the PA environment factors, the most highly associated with promoting PA and children’s fitness were inside-school PA environment. The outside factors of the park and terrain environment indicated strong local geographic variation in youth health. The result showed local variation in the association between PA environment and fitness among elementary school children in Georgia and highlighted the geographically customized efforts for different regions’ policy changes to improve child health.

Reducing racial segregation of public school districts

Racial segregation in public education has been declared as unconstitutional for over 60 years in the United States. Yet many public school districts remain largely separate and unequal. A commonly used approach to reduce school segregation is redelineating school attendance zones to create more racially diverse classrooms. However, there is a need for a school districting approach that can minimize racial or socioeconomic segregation at the district level. In this paper, we develop a spatial optimization model that delineates school attendance zones with the aim of minimizing racial segregation of school district to enable the assessment of the impacts of school attendance zones on the racial segregation of school district. Applications of this model to Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) and San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) in California, USA show that it is possible to reduce racial segregation by 64% at RUSD and 56% at SDUSD, demonstrating the potential of the proposed model.

Quantifying the effect of improved school and residential building codes for tornadoes in community resilience

Tornadoes can destroy or severely damage physical infrastructure including buildings in a community. This can result in direct losses but also indirect losses such as the closure of key social institutions reverberating further through the community (e.g., schools). Despite significant losses in past events, building codes and standards have not previously included tornado hazards because of the relatively low probability of a direct strike. The recent release of the ASCE 7–22 standard considers tornadoes for Risk Category 3 and 4 buildings, i.e. ranging from schools to critical facilities. This study proposes a series of design combinations of a reinforced masonry school building with different performance targets intended to enable schools to reopen sooner. Tornado fragilities were developed for a school building having improved designs using tornado loads determined based on the new tornado chapter in ASCE 7–22, and then integrated into a community level model with school attendance zones to examine the effect. The ultimate goal in this study is to investigate the effect of improving school building designs would have on maintaining school continuity (and more rapid return) for school children.

АРЕАЛЫ НЕНАСЕЛЕННОСТИ: СТРУКТУРА И ФУНКЦИОНАЛЬНОЕ ЗОНИРОВАНИЕ НА ПРИМЕРЕ СЕВЕРНОГО УРАЛА

The article studies unpopulated areas as testing grounds for the development of nature-oriented tourism. The purpose of the research is to investigate the structure and carry out functional zoning of the unpopulated area in the Northern Urals. The tasks are: 1). to define and concretize the term ‘unpopulated area’; 2). to analyze the structure and features of boundary delimitation for such areas; 3). to study the structure and features of the socio-economic functioning of the unpopulated area in the Northern Urals. The paper defines unpopulated areas as territories surrounding the poles of inaccessibility and limited on all sides by boundary objects, which include settlements, year-round roads or railways, the shoreline of navigable water bodies, as well as territories with ongoing economic activity with a change in the landscape type (agricultural land, industrial areas, etc.). The structure of unpopulated areas, expressed in the presence of a center and a periphery, has been studied. Approaches to the delimitation of the boundaries between the periphery and the center in such areas are proposed. There should be qualitative and quantitative differences between them. To reveal those, the impact of economic activity on the natural environment was graded into four levels. Accordingly, the center and the periphery are supposed to belong to different levels. In terms of quantitative differences, it is most logical to use the predominance of a specific level of economic activity in a separate section of the uninhabited area: if more than 50 % of the territory of a particular site belongs to the same level as the center, then this site belongs to the center; if less than 50 %, then ̶ to the periphery. The structure of the unpopulated area in the Northern Urals, which is heterogeneous and has two centers and a periphery, has been studied. The functional zoning of this area showed that there are five types of attendance zones on its territory, and the socio-economic functions of the area include: recreational and tourist, environmental, research, buffer, and economic.

School desegregation, school re-zoning, and growth management in two Maryland counties

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.

Student Assignment Policies and Racial and Income Segregation of Schools, School Attendance Zones, and Neighborhoods

Purpose: This article examines the relationship between educational and residential segregation in three school districts with differing approaches to student assignment. Racial and income segregation within school districts is often only examined at the school level, even as school patterns are often related to residential and attendance zone segregation depending on integration policies aimed at decoupling these relationships. Research Method/Approach: Using an innovative data set, the School Attendance Boundary Survey, along with Census and Common Core of Data data, this analysis examines racial and income segregation at the neighborhood, school zone, and school levels in three districts with varied student assignment policies to explore the relationship between districts’ diversity policies and school, attendance zone, and residential segregation. Findings: We find that, despite high residential segregation, educational segregation varies in these three districts. In the two districts that sought to increase diversity in their student assignment policies, educational segregation was lower than in the third district that did not consider diversity, despite similar levels of residential segregation. The findings suggest that district leaders’ use of diversity-focused student assignment policies may be one way to disrupt the link between residential and school segregation. Conclusions: Understanding the segregation of educational boundaries within school districts, and the relationship between school zone segregation and segregation at other geographic scales, offers insights into how district leaders could utilize student assignment policies to reduce racial and income segregation.

Homeowner and Renter Payment for School Quality in Beijing: Boundary Fixed Effect Analysis with Housing Price–Rent Comparison

The commonly used traditional hedonic price model is likely to be biased in exploring residents' willingness to pay for school quality because of unobservable characteristics. To circumvent this issue, using city-level and district-level key primary school attendance zones data and average home value data of communities in Beijing in December 2016, we employ paired difference regression using a boundary fixed effect approach to explore the capitalization of school quality, with 750 m as the threshold distance within community pairs and 500 and 1,000 m for robustness checks. The results indicate that housing prices respond significantly to both city-level and district-level school qualities in Beijing, with premiums of 17.2% and 8.37%, respectively. However, we find no premium for housing rent. Homeowners show concern over good school quality and are willing to pay more for higher school quality, while renters will not pay for it. This study further suggests that the traditional hedonic price model has overestimated the capitalization of school quality in housing. The estimation results from the boundary fixed effect approach are more robust and reliable. Based on these findings, urban policy recommendations and action plans are proposed.

Race, Ethnicity, and Neighborhood Food Environment Are Associated with Adolescent Sugary Drink Consumption During a 5-Year Community Campaign

BackgroundA multi-level county-wide campaign to reduce sugary drink consumption was associated with significant decreases in retail sales of soda and fruit drinks. The aim of the current study was to examine changes in adolescent beverage consumption during the campaign by race/ethnicity and neighborhood food environment.MethodsBeverage consumption among adolescents was evaluated at four time points in a repeated cross-sectional survey of a racially and ethnically diverse sample of sixth graders (N = 13,129) from public middle schools in the county. Each school’s surrounding attendance zone (i.e., neighborhoods where students live) was characterized as providing high or low exposure to unhealthy food retail (e.g., convenience stores, fast-food restaurants). Logistic and multiple linear regression models were used to evaluate changes in beverage consumption over time by student race/ethnicity and high versus low unhealthy food exposure.ResultsOver the 5 years, there were significant declines in the overall share of students who reported daily sugary drink consumption (49.4 to 36.9%) and their reported daily calories from these products (220 to 158 calories). However, disparities were observed, with higher levels of consumption among Black and Hispanic youth and among youth living in neighborhoods with more unhealthy food retail. Notably, Black students living in healthier neighborhood food environments reported significant decreases in daily consumption and calories after 5 years, while Black students living in neighborhoods with more convenience stores and fast-food outlets did not.ConclusionThese findings suggest that both race/ethnicity and neighborhood food environments are important considerations when designing interventions to reduce sugary drink consumption among adolescents.

Supports and Barriers for the Implementation of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program in Urban Middle Schools in Low-Income Areas

Identifying factors that help or hinder the implementation of school environment interventions such as the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP) is needed to inform strategies that bolster implementation quality in low-income urban middle school settings. We used qualitative methods to identify supports and barriers for OBPP implementation from the perspective of administrators, Bullying Prevention Coordinating Committee members, and teaching staff at two urban middle schools in low-income attendance zones that primarily served African-American adolescents. Interviews and focus groups with 42 participants (Mage = 46; 74% female; 79% African-American) yielded seven themes that impeded OBPP implementation: (1) lack of time, (2) unanticipated changes and events, (3) varying staff commitment and implementation consistency, (4) school context, climate, and structural changes, (5) difficulty identifying bullying incidents, (6) social media influences that exacerbated bullying behaviors, and (7) limited fiscal and staff resources. Participants also identified four themes that supported implementation: (1) endorsing the OBPP as seen by administrator prioritization of the program and staff presence, involvement, and commitment, (2) staffs’ clear communication about OBPP roles and responsibilities, and teamwork and collaboration within and across levels of organizational leadership, (3) intervention dynamics (e.g., flexibility in class meeting delivery), and (4) logistics such as having support materials for class meetings and staffing resources. These findings inform OBPP efforts, especially those focused on enhancing program implementation in urban middle school settings located in low-income areas.