Segregation, Scale, and Student Assignment Policies in Boston

Keywords: scale, residential segregation, school segregation
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

Segregation in schools and segregation in neighborhoods are broadly understood by researchers to be reciprocally related. The racial composition of schools plays a critical role in the social construction of school quality and, thus, parents’ home-buying decisions. These housing market dynamics then, in turn, reinforce sorting processes that feed back into school racial compositions. While existing research in education policy and sociology has studied these interrelationships between schools and neighborhoods, this area of research is still missing an explicit examination of the ways in which sorting processes happening at multiple scales work in tandem to shape or change outcomes in schools. In this paper I analyze the relationships among scale, segregation in schools, and residential segregation by examining a series of student assignment policies in the city of Boston. These student assignment policies, implemented over the course of four decades and in the wake of a violent response from white families to court-ordered desegregation in 1974, each operate at different spatial scales, from smaller community districts to large choice zones to an individualized, distance-based algorithm. I create a novel dataset, melding Decennial Census data, archival boundary data from Boston Public Schools, and enrollment information from the National Center for Education Statistics, to disentangle the interactions among housing segregation, scale, and student assignment over time and determine which factors are leading or lagging in shaping school segregation.