Rezoning Educational Opportunities: The Relationship Between School Attendance Zone Boundary Changes, Racial Segregation, and Educational Inequality (Poster 1)

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

Abstract

The school-aged population in the U.S. is becoming increasingly ethnoracially diverse, but many schools remain segregated, raising important questions about the educational boundaries that sort students among public schools. In most school districts, attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) assign students to schools based on residence. These critical boundaries determine students’ access to educational opportunities and shape large portions of metropolitan segregation. They are also commonly redrawn by district leaders in a process known as rezoning. Due to the local determination of AZBs and a previous absence of centralized data sources, there is a lack of generalizable knowledge about patterns and effects of AZB changes over time. In this dissertation research, I use a novel dataset, the Longitudinal School Attendance Boundary Survey, to quantitatively and geospatially describe how elementary school AZBs changed in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area between 2000 and 2020, and how those changes relate to patterns of racial segregation and educational inequality.

Author

• Sarah Asson, Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author