School Segregation Research Articles

My School District Isn’t Segregated: Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Information on Parental Preferences Regarding School Segregation

U.S. public schools are increasingly segregated by income, resulting in substantial educational inequality among U.S. schoolchildren. We conducted a nationally representative survey to explore the relationship between parental beliefs about and preferences regarding school segregation. Using experimental manipulation, we tested if learning about levels of school segregation in their local school district affects a parent’s attitudes and preferences regarding school segregation. In doing so, our study helps elucidate whether disagreement with respect to segregation-reducing policies stems from differences in parental beliefs about the extent of segregation in their district or from differences in parental preferences given existing levels of segregation. We found that parents hold largely inaccurate beliefs about local segregation levels and underestimate, on average, the economic segregation in their district. However, information treatments that correct inaccurate beliefs do little to influence support for policies to reduce segregation.

Segmented assimilation of migrant children in urban public schools of China: Impact of family resources and school segregation on their educational aspirations

Rural–urban migrant children are a rapidly growing population in Chinese cities. There is emerging literature on the educational inequality faced by migrant children, but most studies focus on their educational performance or attainments and use non-migrant children with non-agricultural hukou in urban areas as one single reference group. This paper argues that Chinese society is segmented by both hukou type and location, and examines the educational aspirations of migrant children from the perspective of segmented assimilation theory. On the basis of the 2013–2014 wave of the China Education Panel Survey, the results show a segmented assimilation pattern: migrant children with non-agricultural hukou had a similar likelihood of aspiring to tertiary education or above; whereas migrant children with agricultural hukou showed higher aspirations of completing at least tertiary education, and the disparity remained significant after considering family resources and school segregation. In family resources, social capital, in form of social communication with parents, benefited migrant children’s aspirations more than it did for their non-migrant counterparts, regardless of their hukou type. In school segregation indicators, academic segregation channeled migrant children with agricultural hukou to a less desirable condition. These findings carry practical and policy implications for understandings of migrant children’s educational aspirations.

"The kids get haggled over": how institutional practices contribute to segregation in elementary schools.

School segregation is a key topic in urban, educational and inequality research. While previous studies have mainly focused on the effects of both parental school choice and residential segregation patterns on the composition of schools, we draw attention to institutional players steering access to elementary schools as one important dimension of institutional discrimination. Combining expert interviews with school principals and the local schools department with a quantitative survey among parents, we scrutinize the interplay between institutional structures and practices and parental school choice strategies. We identify three dimensions of institutional discrimination as being particularly relevant for school access, and thus for school segregation and inequality: a school's guidelines and strategic objectives in dealing with segregation, the enrollment process, and a school's profiling and information policies. These factors prove to be rather subtle, yet crucial facets of institutional discrimination, co-producing and perpetuating spatial inequalities.

Test-based accountability and educational equity: Breaking through local district politics?

A central premise of the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was that test-based accountability systems would break through local politics and lead districts to prioritize the needs of disadvantaged students. Yet, no research examines the equity-related effects of NCLB’s district accountability system. Focusing on a state with rich data, we find that negative ratings (which put districts at higher risk of state intervention) led to the disenrollment of economically disadvantaged students (ostensibly leading to a decline in income-based school segregation) and a corresponding (suspicious) jump in test scores. Negative ratings also led to changes in collectively bargained personnel policies and the replacement of teachers in disadvantaged students’ schools. There was no redistribution of funds toward disadvantaged students’ schools, however, and likely minimal impact on district elections. The results put into question whether a shift in district governance helps explain NCLB’s well-documented positive impacts on low-income students’ academic outcomes.

Gifted education advances school integration and equity

Gifted and talented services have a long and tainted history. Since their inception, they have not served a student population that mirrored the racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic diversity of the nation as a whole. But this need not be the case. Contemporary approaches to gifted education can advance the goals of equity and school integration. In short, they can be a means through which schools serve a more diverse student population. This is possible by mandating access to gifted services in all schools, making sure all students are universally screened for eligibility, and using within-building comparisons to determine eligibility. Scott J. Peters, Matthew C. Makel, and James S. Carter III outline this perspective and explain why it would be effective at mitigating school segregation and popular among a broad range of constituencies.

K–12 Schools in Ohio Are Separate and Unequal

Schools are one of the main determinants of lifetime employment and wages. In the 1950s and 60s, many Black leaders were concerned that Supreme Court rulings outlawing the racial segregation of schools might not effectively eliminate school segregation. This Economic Commentary uses data from Ohio to show that, even today, Black and white students attend largely separate K–12 schools that provide unequal educational opportunity.

When social policy walks into the justice system...

Abstract This paper aims to elaborate on the dilemmas Hungarian courts face when they appear in the forefront of policy implementation. Firstly, what kind of (legal) sources and documents should the court involve in in its legal interpretation? Secondly, what are the trade-offs between offering effective remedy sanctions and respecting the differences between branches of law and the division of power? For purpose of this analysis, we turn to the example of school segregation lawsuits between 2007 and 2022. In terms of equal and equitable education, the regulatory frameworks in the CEE Countries are harmonized to the EU standards and are strongly based on the anti-discrimination approach. In theory, policy programs and documents could be used as a source of facts, as well as a source of information regarding legislative goals and policy context. In theory, courts should aim to opt for sanctions with the most potential to achieve effective remedy. If this leads to specific policy-type sanctions, within the bounds of the parties’ actions courts should be able to decide so. However, courts tend to refrain from such sources and decisions. In the context of democratic backsliding the possibilities of such activism are somewhat unclear. Issues around the independence of the judiciary, the attitude of the executive branch towards certain social policy issues, and the practice of overwriting by amendment on part of the National Assembly supermajority may discourage courts and judges from policy-sensitive or innovative adjudication of cases with social policy relevance.

School segregation, student achievement, and educational attainment in Hungary

Using large-scale administrative data from Hungary, we examine the effects of attending a high-poverty school in Grade 8 on academic achievement and later educational attainment, using a matching approach. We find that attending a high-poverty school is negatively associated with reading scores and secondary education attainment, while there is no significant association with math scores. Estimates are negative in the case of higher education enrollment, but their statistical significance depends on model specification. We find suggestive evidence that attending a high-poverty school has a large direct negative effect on educational attainment, over and above the indirect effect through lower test scores. This suggests that the negative effect of high-poverty schools on students’ noncognitive skills and later educational choices can be as important as the effect on achievement.

Social Exclusion and Ethnic Segregation in Schools: The Role of Teachers' Ethnic Prejudice

Abstract Using data on primary school children and their teachers, we show that teachers who hold prejudicial attitudes towards an ethnic group create socially and spatially segregated classrooms. Leveraging a natural experiment where newly arrived refugee children are randomly assigned to teachers within schools, we find that teachers' ethnic prejudice, measured by an implicit association test, significantly lowers the prevalence of interethnic social links, increases homophilic ties among host children, and puts refugee children at a higher risk of peer violence. Our results highlight the role of teachers in achieving integrated schools in a world of increasing ethnic diversity.

Drawn Into Policy: A Systematic Review of School Rezoning Rationales, Processes, and Outcomes

School rezoning is the process of drawing and redrawing school attendance boundaries (SABs). However, studies explicitly focused on changing SABs through rezoning or other mechanisms are spread across multiple bodies of literature. Rezoning is also a politically contentious issue governed by local school boards, tying it to conceptual work on the politics of education. This systematic literature review on school rezoning brings together fragmented but related bodies of work to develop a comprehensive understanding of the rationales for school rezoning, the strategies and processes underlying it, and its associated outcomes. Grounded in a contested legal landscape, findings indicate that rezoning involves overlapping and interacting policy issues as well as multiple stakeholders that complicate the theory of action. Limitations in prevailing student assignment plans influence the degree to which rezoning can disrupt racial and socioeconomic segregation in schools. This review highlights the need to reconceptualize rezoning as a transformative tool, rather than one that replicates (or worsens) systems of educational inequity.

Testing mediating pathways between school segregation and health: Evidence on peer prejudice and health behaviors

School racial segregation is increasingly recognized as a threat to US public health: rising segregation in recent decades has been linked to a range of poor health outcomes for Black Americans. Key theorized mediators of these harms remain underexamined, including experiences of interpersonal and institutional racism driving increased stress, and peers' health behaviors influencing students' own. Using cross-sectional survey data on a national sample of adolescents, we investigated associations between school segregation and these two potential mediating pathways, operationalized as adolescents’ perceptions of prejudice from fellow students and the health behaviors of their peers (drinking and smoking). We further investigated whether associations were modified by individual race/ethnicity and school racial composition.Pooling across all schools and students, higher levels of school segregation were associated with decreased perceptions of peer prejudice (OR 0.54, 95% CI = 0.34–0.86), but not with peers' health behaviors. However, this masked important differences by respondents' race/ethnicity and school racial/ethnic composition. In predominantly White schools, school segregation was not associated with Black students' perceptions of peers' prejudice, but higher levels of segregation were associated with increased rates of peers' drinking and smoking. In predominantly non-White schools, in contrast—where most Black students are educated—higher levels of school segregation were not associated with perceived peer prejudice nor unhealthier peer behaviors for Black students (in fact, peers’ health behaviors improved). And across both school types, higher levels of district segregation were associated with lower odds of reporting peer prejudice among non-Black students of color.Our findings suggest that the paths between school segregation and poor health depend on the type of school children attend in segregated districts. In schools predominantly serving students of color, structural factors upheld by school segregation—i.e., material, educational, disciplinary, or economic disadvantage—likely dominate over peer behaviors as the primary drivers of segregation's health harms.

Debating the Mixed Gender Classroom and Saudi Female Students Visibility in Coeducation

In Saudi Arabia, the country is making strides to improve its educational sector, specifically in coeducation. While the concept of female students in leadership positions is novel in this country, the government is endeavoring to reduce gender segregation and same-sex education in schools, to empower women. There are already existing coeducation opportunities for females pursuing undergraduate levels in medical majors, including for scholarship pursuits outside the nation. Many universities aim to enroll thousands of students in Saudi Arabia's first coeducational higher-education programs. Furthermore, studies show that education can be even more reinforced through enhancing ESL methods in this higher education, enabling both male and female graduates to compete with peers worldwide. Therefore, this study examined three Saudi ESL students who took English classes at Root Hall, Union University (pseudo name), exploring their viewpoints about mixed-gender classrooms and their influence on English language development. The results determined that their confidence significantly improved through coeducational programs and English language proficiency.

Before Brown v. Board of Education : Paul J. McCormick, the Mendez v. Westminster Decision, and its Religious-Social Context

Abstract: Paul J. McCormick (1879–1960), judge of the United States District Court of Los Angeles, rendered in 1945 the most impactful decision of his career. His decision in Mendez v. Westminster was the prelude to the civil rights movement in the United States. McCormick's Catholic faith and his relationship with the immigrant community in Los Angeles influenced his opinion. Nearly a decade before Brown v. Board of Education , McCormick delivered a verdict favoring Mexican families seeking equality in education. His decision favoring the desegregation of schools in southern California marked the beginning of the end of school segregation throughout the United States. This study of the decision's religious and social contexts shows how Mendez v. Westminster complicates the historical narrative of racial desegregation.

Linearity, delay, and lost language learning opportunities. Newly arrived adolescent students’ experiences with school segregation in Norway

ABSTRACT This study investigates school segregation for newly arrived adolescent students (aged 16–22) in Norway. Based on an interview study in two Norwegian adult education establishments and drawing on a sociocultural framework, the article highlights the students’ experiences with and perceptions of school segregation. More specifically, it analyzes which notions of second language learning come to the fore when the students reflect upon their school situation. The main finding is that the students are critical of the segregated system because it makes it hard to get to know Norwegian-speaking peers and thus, to learn Norwegian. They resist the linear model of language learning intrinsic to school segregation and feel that their language learning and their integration are being delayed as a result of the segregated system. As such, they perceive second language learning as dependent on social participation in second language communities, in line with sociocultural approaches.

Unmuted: The racial politics of silent classrooms

Instructional resources often assume that students learn best when they have access to a quiet environment. This article interrogates silence’s presumed objectivity and innocuousness as the sonic backdrop for schooling. I argue that norms and expectations around silence in schools in the United States (US) inscribe a sonic color line. Such standards codify white, middle-class ways of sounding as an indicator of rationality. Simultaneously, they construct other ways of being sonically, particularly those traditionally associated with Black cultural norms, as generally unfit for school. The sanctioning of silent comportment in schools likely affects the academic achievement and sense of belonging of students whose sonic cultures differ from the schools’. I illustrate my argument with examples from classroom management resources published between 2001 and 2021. While silence’s role in constructing raced, gendered, and classed subjectivities prevails across school subjects, I focus specifically on materials for music educators. This school subject emphasizes sound production and reception, which makes its resources particularly explicit about sound management. I conducted a close reading of the materials informed by Foucault’s (1980, 1978/1991) approach to the analysis of discourses, paying close attention to how silence-related norms and expectations shape students’ academic and ontological horizons. By mapping out silence’s role in producing a racial color line, this article underscores the central role that anti-Blackness continues to play in US schools nearly 70 years after school segregation was ruled unconstitutional.

Social dominance orientation, intergroup contact and belief in traditional school culture as predictors for parents' attitudes to school segregation in the Czech Republic.

The over-representation of Roma children in segregated schools is well documented as a prevalent form of institutional racism in the Czech Republic. In the paper, we examine the inclination of parents to support school segregation. The paper looks at parents' preference for school segregation and explores its association to social dominance orientation, intergroup contacts, belief in traditional schooling and the absence of Roma children in school as proof of the school's good quality. The first hypothesis examines an association between parents' preference to withdraw their children from ethnically diverse schools and social dominance orientation (one's degree of preference for inequality among social groups). The second one tests the belief in traditional schooling as a factor contributing to a preference for ethnically motivated withdrawal. The third one studies the extent to which parents' preference to withdraw their children from ethnically diverse schools is affected by contact with Roma in their everyday life. The final hypothesis tests if parents who view Roma students as an indicator of poor education in a given school are more likely to oppose the presence of Roma students among their children's peers. Quantitative data collection was carried out on a sample of 1,803 respondents. The target group were families with at least one child of primary school age (6-14 years). A binary logistic regression analysis was implemented to assess these relationships. The study confirmed that ethnically motivated school withdrawal is associated with social dominance orientation, belief in traditional school culture and education. On the other hand, the role of inter-group contact in a school environment was not proved. However, the final statistical model was rather weak explaining approximately 9% of variance in segregation endorsement. The model fit improved significantly when an additional variable - absence of Roma as a sign of a good school - was added. Approximately 15% of the variance in segregation endorsement was explained by the modified set of predictors. The study argues that ethnically motivated school withdrawal is a result of individual attitudes and situational factors. This means that researchers interested in informal school segregation will need to consider both groups of factors.

Novice teachers in Chile: ELT teaching capability development and social (in)justice awareness in educational marginalization

ABSTRACT The Chilean system is known worldwide for the detrimental effect of neoliberal policies on public education and school segregation (Bellei et al. 2022). Drawing on Sen’s Capability Approach (1999), this paper examines how novice teachers of English balance the tension between the constraints of the social and educational systems (unfreedoms) to develop agency and transform challenges into English-language teaching opportunities (capabilities), and how they develop social (in)justice awareness to become helpful, caring, and committed ELT practitioners in their school communities. Data collected through open-ended surveys and semi-structured interviews reveal that novice teachers understand and question systemic unfreedoms (social, institutional, market-driven educational constraints) and social (in)justice in Chilean education and ELT. Such reflections allow them to distance themselves from curricular mandates, to develop ELT capabilities based on the academic and emotional needs of their learners, and intertwine English teaching with affective care and commitment to their schools’ educational projects and the wellbeing of marginalized students.

Fragmented spaces in the urban landscape: A socio‐spatial analysis of educational supply in the city of Madrid

AbstractThe geography of school choice critically shapes families’ educational opportunities. Residential segregation, social inequalities and the educational marketplace interact in complex ways and produce spatialised educational opportunities for families. This paper analyses the link between these dimensions and how they structure families’ educational opportunities in the city of Madrid. Based on several administrative datasets that capture students’ residential location, their socio‐economic position, the schools they attend and the characteristics of school supply, our analysis reveals the uneven spatial distribution of the different school modalities in Madrid, where advantaged families and neighbourhoods have more diversified and socio‐economically homogenous nearby schooling options. The results also depict the way the city is spatially divided along a continuum of ‘privileged’ residential and educational assets. The paper reflects on how reforms expanding school choice and diversification of the educational market undertaken by the regional government may have increased the link between residential and school segregation.

School Attendance Boundaries and the Segregation of Public Schools in the United States

School segregation is determined both by residential sorting and local policies, such as the drawing of attendance boundaries and school siting. This paper develops an approach to understanding the relative importance of these factors by calculating the distance-minimizing assignment of students to schools and assessing whether actual assignments differ systematically by race. Using census data and attendance boundary maps for nearly 1,600 school districts, I find that attendance boundaries create 5 percent more integration than a distance-minimizing baseline, while school siting plays almost no role. Residential segregation alone explains more than 100 percent of school segregation in the United States. (JEL H75, I21, I28, J15, R23)

Moving Toward Integration or Segregation? Racial Change in Suburban Public Schools

Suburbs across the US are experiencing demographic shifts with consequences for suburban schools. While scholars have expressed concern about rising segregation among suburban public schools, we extend this work by examining changes in racial/ethnic school segregation across a typology of suburban municipalities in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metropolitan area between 2007 and 2018. Our findings are mixed- contingent on the measure of segregation employed. We find that Black-white and Hispanic-white segregation in mature suburbs is rising, but is at least in part driven by shifting demographics. The results suggest intra-suburban variation in segregation, highlighting the connection between race and neighborhood change.