Neighborhood Change and the Neighborhood-School Gap

• In Event: 21.034 - Neighborhood Gentrification and Schools: Implications for Equity and Diversity

Abstract

Historically, nearly all children in the U.S. attended their neighborhood school. Residence-based school assignment systems, the primary method of assigning students to schools, created a strong link between a child’s home residence and where she attended school. Given this tight relationship, a school’s demographic makeup often closely resembled that of the neighborhood it served, and its economic and social resources were intimately tied to its neighborhood. Since the 1990s, however, the historically tight link between where families live and send their children to school has weakened. This neighborhood-school decoupling arises from the dramatic expansion of school choice, which provides parents increased opportunities to bypass their assigned neighborhood school. In 2014, nearly a quarter of all students attended a school other than their assigned school. The proportion of families opting out of the neighborhood school is even greater in urban areas where more than a third of all students attend non-assigned schools (Grady et al. 2010; NCES 2014).

In this study, I examine how neighborhood and school composition of school-age children in the U.S. correspond in socioeconomically changing neighborhoods. As the increasing provision of school choice options weakens the housing-school nexus, will schools in socioeconomically changing areas become more dissimilar to the neighborhoods they serve? Few studies have examined how school and neighborhood composition correspond over time, particularly in a context of neighborhood change. As neighborhoods diversify along racial and economic lines, will urban public schools also diversify or grow increasingly dissimilar from their surrounding areas?

Drawing upon multiple administrative datasets on neighborhood and school characteristics, including spatial data on school attendance boundaries, I construct a novel longitudinal dataset that links schools to the local community from which they draw in 2000 and 2010. I document: (1) how racial composition corresponds over time between traditional public schools and the neighborhoods they serve; (2) how the compositional gap changes when greater school choice is available; (3) and how the compositional gap varies between neighborhoods experiencing various trajectories of socioeconomic change.

I find an increasing mismatch in the white composition of traditional public schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, specifically that traditional public schools enroll fewer white students than the composition of the neighborhood. The compositional mismatch grows the most in neighborhoods experiencing demographic change and socioeconomic ascent, particularly as the number of nearby non-neighborhood schools increases. Findings bear on urban, housing and education policies and have implications for theories of neighborhood and school stratification, raising new questions about how residential and school sorting upholds existing racial hierarchies in an era of increasing choice and neighborhood change.

Author

• Jennifer Candipan, University of Southern California