School Racial Composition Research Articles

The effect of academic outcomes, equity, and student demographics on parental preferences for schools: evidence from a survey experiment

Abstract How does competition for school resources, along with racial and socioeconomic biases, shape parental preferences for schools? In this article, I investigate how school attributes affect preferences and choice, which sheds light on the processes that maintain school segregation. To do so, I conduct a survey experiment that explores parental preferences and the tradeoffs inherent in the process of school selection using school profiles that resemble those available on widely used education data platforms. I find that parents hold the strongest positive preferences for learning opportunities and overall school achievement compared to other attributes, including school racial and socioeconomic composition. Additionally, though parents prefer schools that have higher equity rankings, highly equitable schools are less desirable to parents than schools with more status and learning opportunities. However, parents also hold independent racial and socioeconomic preferences and —on average—avoid schools with more students of color and low-income students. Furthermore, results suggest they are largely unwilling to make tradeoffs that would result in schools with higher fractions of students of color or low-income students. Taken together, this study links prior studies on the segregating effects of educational data with literatures on school segregation by illustrating the specific dimensions that drive school choice.

School Segregation and Health Across Racial Groups: A Life Course Study

PurposeContemporary school racial segregation is a manifestation of structural racism shown to harm Black children's health. Yet, evidence on its long-term impacts throughout life, as well as effects among children of other racial backgrounds, is sparse. MethodsData on Black and White children were drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Using multilevel models, we estimated associations between district-level school segregation and measures of short-term and long-term health, including self-reported outcomes and biomarkers. Models were run separately for Black and White children, adjusting for individual- and district-level covariates. We further carried out subgroup analyses by school racial composition (i.e., majority White vs. majority non-White schools). ResultsSchool segregation was associated with worsened short- and long-term risk factors of chronic disease among both Black and White students in terms of exercise and body mass index, but only in majority non-White schools. Moreover, Black students in these schools demonstrated less adolescent drinking and smoking with increased racial segregation and better self-reported health in young adulthood. DiscussionOur findings suggest that segregated majority non-White schools may be targets of systemic disinvestment and may therefore lack sufficient resources for physical education or nutrition. Improvements in some outcomes among Black children may reflect peer influence (i.e., Black adolescents generally drink less than White adolescents), reduced exposure to interpersonal racism from White peers, or positive health fostered by feelings of belonging in Black community. Ensuring all students go to schools with the resources they need to thrive may have positive spillovers for population health.

School Racial Composition and Changes in Black Children’s Academic Engagement and Motivation During Late Elementary School

School Racial Composition and Changes in Black Children’s Academic Engagement and Motivation During Late Elementary School

Traditional and Race-based Bullying in Racial-Minority Majority and Racially Diverse Schools.

Few studies in the U.S. have simultaneously examined general and race-based bullying with consideration of school-level racial composition. The current study examined victimization as a function of school racial composition, in minority-majority and diverse schools (N = 1911, Mage = 13.7 years) enrolled in 7th grade in 24 public schools (42.3% Hispanics, 9.0% non-Hispanic White, 28.9% non-Hispanic Black, and 19.7% non-Hispanic Asian). Multilevel regression analyses suggest student-level protective factors related to both forms of victimization, but, school racial composition was only significant in explaining race-based bullying. Specifically, minority-majority schools had lower levels of race-based victimization compared to racially diverse schools. Findings suggest that consideration of school contextual factors offers a more nuanced understanding of the relation between race and victimization.

Mental Health across the Early Life Course at the Intersection of Race, Skin Tone, and School Racial Context.

Prior research documents higher levels of depressive symptoms among Black Americans relative to Whites. Yet, we know less about the role of other dimensions of stratification (e.g., skin tone) in shaping mental health inequality between Black and White adults, and whether mental health trajectories by race and skin tone among Black adults are contingent upon social contexts in childhood and adolescence. To address these gaps, this study asks: 1) to what extent do self-identified race and interviewer-rated skin tone among Black respondents shape inequalities in depressive symptoms between Black and White Americans across ages 12-42? 2) Are trajectories of depressive symptoms by race and skin tone among Black respondents contingent on school racial contexts (e.g., school racial composition)? Using five waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and growth curve models, results suggest trajectories of depressive symptoms across ages 12-42 vary by race, school racial context, and skin tone among Black respondents. Specifically, Black students rated as having very dark, dark, and medium brown skin who attended high proportion Black schools in adolescence experienced lower levels of depressive symptoms than their White and light-skinned Black counterparts, particularly across the teen years and early 20s. Conversely, attending higher proportion White schools led to increases in depressive symptoms across earlier ages for Black students, particularly those who fell within the middle of the skin color continuum. Findings highlight competing advantages and disadvantages of navigating racialized spaces in childhood/adolescence for Black Americans of different skin tones.

School Racial Composition as a Moderator of the Effect of Discrimination on Mental Health and Substance use Among American Indian Adolescents

PurposeTo examine the relationships between individual-level perceived racial/ethnic discrimination and mental health and substance use outcomes by school-level racial composition among American Indian (AI) adolescents. MethodSelf-reported survey data on individual-level variables come from a sample of AI adolescents (n = 510) living in or near the Cherokee Nation during the fall of 2021. School-level data come from publicly available databases. Multilevel linear and logistic regression analyses were performed to test for and examine the interaction between perceived racial/ethnic discrimination and school racial composition in relation to symptoms of anxiety and depression, past 30-day use of alcohol and marijuana, and misuse of prescription opioids. ResultsAdjusted analyses showed a significant interaction effect between discrimination and racial composition on anxiety symptoms, such that the effect of discrimination was more pronounced at lower % AI (10th percentile) than at more equivalently mixed (50th percentile) or higher % AI (90th percentile) school settings. No significant interactions were observed with depressive symptoms or substance use outcomes. DiscussionSchool racial compositions of higher percentage AI may buffer the adverse effect of racial/ethnic discrimination on anxiety symptoms among AI adolescents.

Student-Faculty Interactions, University Environment, and Academic Attitudes Among Black College Students: The Role of School Racial Composition

ABSTRACT This study examined student-faculty interactions and university environment as predictors of devaluing academic success and the intention to persist among a sample of Black college students attending historically and/or predominantly White institutions (H/PWIs) and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Results indicated the hypothesized model fit the data reasonably well across schools. However, notable differences were found. The paths from respectful student-faculty interactions and university environment to devaluing academic success were significant for students attending HBCUs but not H/PWIs. Additionally, university environment was a significant mediator of devaluing academic success for HBCUs but not H/PWIs. Findings suggest that the university environment and student-faculty interactions play a more important role in the academic attitudes of Black students attending HBCUs than H/PWIs.

Unmasking racial avoidance: Experimental evidence on parental school choice and public health policies during the Covid-19 pandemic

BackgroundCOVID-19 drastically changed the school choice landscape as families considered schools with varying public health protocols as well as academic and demographic characteristics. Our understanding of families’ preferences during the pandemic is limited, however, because it primarily derives from surveys asking parents about a single school characteristic. ObjectiveWe aimed to understand how families' preferences for schools’ racial composition and public health policies may interdepend. MethodsWe conducted an original school choice survey experiment with U.S. White parents in August 2021. Parents indicated their willingness to enroll their student in hypothetical schools with experimentally randomized school quality ratings, racial and socioeconomic demographics, and COVID mitigation strategies (i.e. instructional modalities, mask and vaccination mandates). ResultsWe find novel causal evidence that White parents' preferences for schools’ racial demographics and public health policies are interdependent. Among otherwise similar schools, parents expressed stronger preferences to avoid Black, Latinx, and Asian schools when there were fewer COVID mitigation policies. Relatedly, parents required more stringent COVID protocols for their children to attend predominantly Black, Latinx, and Asian schools while showing no preferences for COVID policies among predominantly White schools. The interdependence of preferred racial demographics and public health polices was amplified among White parents who held stigmatizing beliefs about Asian populations carrying the COVID virus and pro-White sentiments. Although Democrats expressed stronger preferences for schools with more COVID mitigation strategies than Republicans, for White parents across the political spectrum school racial composition and COVID mitigation preferences interdepended. ConclusionsThis study suggests families may leverage flexible student assignment policies and schools of choice to enroll in or avoid schools based on both preferred public health policies and racial demographics. Districts should consider how adopting strong public health policies during infectious disease outbreaks may help mitigate hardened racial avoidance and school racial segregation.

The Relationship between Ninth Graders' Perceptions of Teacher Equity and Their Math Identity: Differences by Student Race and School Racial Composition.

Using data on ninth graders, math teachers, and schools from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we investigate the following questions: (1) How do ninth graders' perceptions of their math teachers as equitable relate to their math identity at the intersection of adolescents' race and gender? and (2) Do differences in the percentage of students at the school who share the adolescent's race moderate (i.e., differentiate) the salience of perceptions of math teachers for adolescents' math identities? Our results suggest that adolescents who perceive their math teachers as equitable typically have higher levels of math identity regardless of their race or gender. Adolescents' perceptions of their math teachers as equitable are most salient for adolescents' math identity in racially diverse schools, where racial differences and stereotypes may be more visible. Findings also indicate the seeming resistance of Black youth to racist stereotypes, whose math identity remains high regardless of their perceptions of their teachers.

Racialized Perceptions of Anticipated School Belonging.

Families indicate that fit and safety are priorities in school selections. It is not clear, however, whether school racial composition shapes families' perceptions of anticipated school belonging. Using a survey experiment with students and parents actively choosing NYC schools, I find that families expressed racialized judgments of belonging. Among schools that were otherwise similar, respondents anticipated feeling most welcome in schools with the highest proportion of their racial group and least welcome in schools with the lowest portions of their ingroup. Families' race-based assessments of school quality could be a key mechanism to explain racial segregation in school choice programs.

Cops on Campus: The Racial Patterning of Police in Schools

This article describes how the use of sworn law enforcement in American schools is patterned by school racial composition. Three distinct measures are constructed using data from the Civil Rights Data Collection and the School Survey on Crime and Safety: police prevalence, the degree of exposure that students have to police officers within their schools, and the roles of officers within those schools. Results show that police have become increasingly prevalent in schools with the largest shares of white students, especially at the elementary level. Yet youth in schools with the most Black, Latinx, and Native American students experience the highest exposure to police, and police in these schools are more frequently directed to carry out punitive tasks such as discipline. Student exposure to police is also relatively common in the whitest schools, but officers in these settings are more often used for tasks unrelated to punishment, such as teaching.

Racial Preferences for Schools: Evidence from an Experiment with White, Black, Latinx, and Asian Parents and Students.

Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents' and students' willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics potentially correlated with race, white and Asian families preferred white schools over black and Latinx schools, Latinx families preferred Latinx schools over black schools, and black families preferred black schools over white schools. Results, importantly, demonstrate that racial composition has larger effects on white and Latinx parents' preferences compared with white and Latinx students and smaller effects on black parents compared with black students. To ensure results were not an artifact of experimental conditions, I validate findings using administrative data on New York City families' actual school choices in 2013. Both analyses establish that families express heterogenous racialized school preferences.

JUE Insight: Desegregated but still separated? The impact of school integration on student suspensions and special education classification

In this paper I study the impact of court-mandated school desegregation by race on student suspensions and special education classification. Simple descriptive statistics using student enrollment and outcome data collected from the largest school districts across the country in the 1970s and 1980s show that Black-White school integration was increasing for districts under court order, but not for a set of comparison districts. Similarly, Black student suspension rates were increasing at faster rates in integrating districts relative to comparison districts, and their classification rates as having an intellectual disability were decreasing at slower rates. Differences-in-differences and event study models confirm these patterns I observe in the raw data: after integration, school districts experienced statistically and practically significant reductions in racial isolation across schools and growth in racial disparities in discipline and special education classification. The impacts of integration are immediate, sustained, and robust for student suspensions in particular. My results thus provide causal evidence confirming prior descriptive and theoretical work suggesting that the racial composition of schools may influence measures of categorical inequality by race.

The Long-Run Effects of School Racial Diversity on Political Identity

How do early-life experiences shape political identity? We examine the end of race-based busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, an event that led to large changes in school racial composition. Using administrative data, we compare party affiliation in adulthood for students who had lived on opposite sides of newly drawn school boundaries. Consistent with the contact hypothesis, we find that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of minorities in a White student’s assigned school decreased their likelihood of registering as a Republican by 2 percentage points (12 percent). Our results suggest that schools in childhood play an important role in shaping partisanship. (JEL D72, H75, I21, I28, J15)

Gentrified Discipline: The Impact of Gentrification on Exclusionary Punishment in Public Schools

Abstract This study examines the effects of gentrification on exclusionary punishment in urban schools across the United States. Integrating longitudinal data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Civil Rights Data Collection, the U.S. Census, and the American Community Survey, this study estimates the effects of gentrification on suspensions, expulsions, law enforcement referrals, and school arrests through a series of negative binomial regression models. Results indicate that gentrification does not have broad or striking influences on school disciplinary environments overall, but it does promote modest increases in out-of-school suspensions as well as racial disparities in suspensions. Little evidence is found that effects vary by sex, grade level, or school racial composition. A battery of sensitivity analyses suggests that overall findings are generally robust to the presence of unobserved confounding and are broadly consistent across alternative model specifications and different measures of gentrification.

Socioemotional competence in context: Black adolescent boys' socioemotional competence, neighborhood‐school racial (in)congruence, and social adjustment

The current study examined patterns of Black adolescent boys' socioemotional competence (SEC) in the midst of racial (in)congruence of their neighborhood and school contexts and the associations of these patterns with self- and teacher-reported social adjustment. Data collected from 417 Black adolescent boys in 7th-11th grade were analyzed using a multilevel class analysis to derive student-level classes of SEC and neighborhood racial composition and school-level classes of school racial composition. Class associations with social adjustment were examined via analysis of variance andanalysis of covariance among a subsample of 258 Black males. Four patterns of SEC-neighborhood racial composition and two patterns of school racial composition were identified; the former were associated with self- and teacher-reported social adjustment. Interactive patterns of SEC-neighborhood racial composition classes and school racial composition classes were associated with teachers' reports of negative social adjustment. Study findings suggest that considering SEC within racialized contexts is important for understanding Black adolescent boys' adjustment.

Choosing Predominantly Black Magnet Schools: The Importance of School Racial Composition in Parental Decision-Making

ABSTRACT Does school racial composition influence where parents choose to send their children to school? This paper contributes to the literature on school racial composition and parental choice by examining the reasons parents give for enrolling their children in predominantly Black magnet schools. We use data from a survey of parental school decision-making that was administered in one countywide, Southeastern school district in the 2002–03 school year. The survey data was collected a few years after the district’s release from its court desegregation order as Black students comprised an increasing share of magnet school enrollments. As such, we are able to assess parental decision-making at a critical time point in which school racial composition may have been an especially prevalent factor in where parents were choosing to enroll their children. We find that parents of White children only mentioned school academic quality in their discussions of magnet school choice. In contrast, parents of Black children mentioned that the joint combination of academic quality and racial composition of magnet schools was important in their school selection process. Specifically, Black parents expressed that the predominantly Black and high-achieving school environment of magnet schools provided their child with the opportunity to succeed academically among students of a similar racial background while experiencing less race-based discrimination and comparisons.

Does the Negro Need Separate Schools? A Retrospective Analysis of the Racial Composition of Schools and Black Adult Academic and Economic Success

W.E.B. Du Bois asserted that black students are better served by attending predominantly black schools than hostile integrated schools in a context of racial discrimination. The conventional assumption is that black students benefit educationally by attending schools with more white peers, which have access to greater resources. However, the theory of the functionality of discrimination advances the idea that black students may face greater discrimination in school settings with numerous white peers as a result of a competitive process and white appropriation of preferred resources. Using the National Survey of Black Americans, we find evidence of a nonmonotonic relationship between high school racial composition and years of schooling completed, high school graduation, likelihood of being employed, and likelihood of owning a home. We conclude, contrary to conventional belief, that it is not unambiguously the case that black students gain from attending schools with more white peers.

Racial Discrimination Stress, School Belonging, and School Racial Composition on Academic Attitudes and Beliefs among Black Youth

It is important to consider racialized experiences and proximal indicators of academic success for Black youth when understanding the achievement gap. Acknowledging that racial discrimination is detrimental for the academic success of Black youth, this study extended previous research by examining the influence of racial discrimination stress. Using hierarchical regression analysis and a moderated moderation model, this study examined racial discrimination stress and school belonging as predictors of academic attitudes and beliefs among 344 Black youth (M age = 15.6). Additionally, we examined the interactive effects of school belonging as a buffer for racial discrimination stress, with particular focus on majority White schools. Analyses revealed that school belonging was linked with academic competence, academic efficacy, and academic skepticism. Furthermore, school belonging buffered the impact of racial discrimination stress on academic efficacy among Black youth in majority White schools. These findings highlight the co-occurrence of risk and protective factors among Black youth and demonstrate the additive influence of school racial composition on academic attitudes and beliefs. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings demonstrate the crucial role of school context in understanding risk and protective factors for the academic attitudes and beliefs of Black youth.

Protecting the Flock or Policing the Sheep? Differences in School Resource Officers’ Perceptions of Threats by School Racial Composition

AbstractLaw enforcement officers (often called school resource officers or SROs) are an increasingly common feature in schools across the United States. Although SROs’ roles vary across school contexts, there has been little examination of why. One possible explanation is that SROs perceive threats differently in different school contexts and that the racial composition of schools may motivate these differences. To investigate this possibility, this study analyzes interviews with 73 SROs from two different school districts that encompass schools with a variety of racial compositions. Across both districts, SROs perceived three major categories of threats: student-based, intruder-based, and environment-based threats. However, the focus and perceived severity of the threats varied across districts such that SROs in the district with a larger proportion of White students were primarily concerned about external threats (i.e., intruder-based and environment-based) that might harm the students, whereas SROs in the district with a larger proportion of Black students were primarily concerned with students themselves as threats. We consider how these results relate to understandings of school security, inequality among students, racially disparate experiences with school policing, and school and policing policy.