Racial Segregation, Spatial Imaginary, and School Choice

• In Event: Race, Place, and the Marketization of Education: Understanding How Spatial Imaginaries and Structures Shape Schooling

Abstract

Over the past two decades, a growing number of parents and market-oriented think tanks have weighed in on allowing parents to choose their children’s schools, describing the benefits of this practice even while research continues to show that school choice generates school stratification and student sorting based on racial and social characteristics (see Yoon, Lubienski, & Lee, 2018). My presentation will showcase a recently completed study that examines the geography of racial and social segregation which constrains school choice options for historically and racially marginalized children and families in an urban context. In conducting this research, my goal is to move our current policy discussion of choice beyond the discourse on the inherent democratic rights of parents and toward a geographic interrogation that allows us to examine the ways in which existing racial segregation hinders equality of choice for marginalized children.

My study is guided by the complementary theories of George Lipsitz (2011) and Laura Pulido (2000). These theories are used to explore the historical and contemporary production of urban areas through the white spatial imaginary (Lipsitz, 2011) and environmental racism (Pulido, 2000). These theories also guide the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a methodology to map the schools and choice programs in a public school district in a mid-sized central Canadian city (Schuurman, 2010). I used student enrollment data obtained from the public school district (2017) and Canadian Census data (2006 and 2016) to examine the historical geography of the school district and to analyze student enrolment and mobility related to school choice.

My talk will proceed in three parts. First, I will discuss the historically formed racial and social geography and imaginary of the public school district. Second, I will delineate the spatial distribution of different types of schools and their choice programs and compare the schools’ neighborhood characteristics in terms of race, class, and culture. Then, I will present my analysis of the affinity between two things: first, the characteristics of the neighborhoods where the schools and their respective programs are located; and second, the racial and social groups living in those same neighborhoods. This analysis will focus on both racial and social segregation and reproduction. Lastly, I will analyze school choice mobility patterns based on student characteristics and assess the effect of school choice on school segregation.

It is my hope that my presentation on an increasingly unequal city in Canada will help broaden the current school choice discussion, which focuses on academic achievement, by highlighting the deeper impact that school choice has on the (re)production of racial and social dis/advantages among children due to the dominant spatial imaginary and racism.

Author

• Ee-Seul Yoon, University of Manitoba