Ending School Desegregation Plans and High School Completion Rates

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Over the last two decades, half of the school districts that were ever under court desegregation orders have been released from their obligation to maintain desegregated schools (Reardon, Grewal, Kalogrides, & Greenberg, 2012). After release from desegregation court orders, many school districts removed their school desegregation plans and adopted alternative policies governing the assignment of students to schools (i.e. school assignment policies). A number of studies have found that these changes increase racial school segregation (Clotfelter, Vigdor, & Ladd, 2006; Lutz, 2011; Orfield & Eaton, 1996; Reardon et al., 2012). This study estimates whether ending school desegregation plans in the 1990s and 2000s affects high school completion rates. In addition, I explore whether the effects on high school completion rates are associated with remedial policies that improved extracurricular activities and facilities of minority-majority schools.
Because the removal of school desegregation plans affects school segregation, it changes the characteristics of school peers such as their race and family socioeconomic backgrounds. Substantial literatures on the effects of school peer composition on student outcomes suggest that changes in these factors can influence student outcomes such as high school completion. High school graduation is a key prerequisite for post-secondary education and labor market success (Autor, Katz, & Kearney, 2005; Oreopoulos, 2007; Rouse, 2007), and majority-minority differences in high school graduation rates have remained large for several decades (Heckman & LaFontaine, 2010). This proposed study provides much needed information on questions about the relationship between student assignment policies and high school completion rates.
The sample comes from the school districts included in the seminal study by Welch and Light (1987) which provides information on a sample of school districts that implemented school desegregation plans. The Welch and Light (1987) sample includes around one half of the school districts that were ever subject to school desegregation orders with the enrollment greater than 10,000 and with the proportion of black students between 10 and 90 percent in 1990. This study excludes the following districts from the Welch and Light sample. First, the 16 districts in the sample that did not adopt any desegregation plans are excluded. As this study focuses on estimating the effect of major changes in school desegregation plans, it is inappropriate to include districts that did not have desegregation plans. The districts excluded by this restriction are 15 districts with the “No plan” classification and one district (New Orleans in Louisiana) which only had a “Freedom of choice” plan by Welch and Light (1987). Second, eight districts with a white population of less than 10 percent and six districts with a black population of less than 10 percent in the earliest year when student enrollment by race appears in the data are excluded.

Author

• Sun Jung Oh, Syracuse University