Heterogeneous Impacts of School Desegregation Policies: The Case of Barcelona’s Shock Plan

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Integration Efforts in School Choice Systems (Table 12)

Abstract

Outside the US, school segregation has only recently become a concern in many education systems (Bonal & Bellei, 2019). Amidst the increasing problematization of school segregation, educational authorities have adopted policy initiatives aimed at reducing it, mainly through the implementation or redesign of controlled choice systems and targeted vouchers or funding (Bakker et al., 2011; Dupriez et al., 2018; Zancajo et al., 2023). However, evidence on the impact of these policies, despite being limited, indicates null or moderate effects in achieving a more balanced distribution of students (Danhier & Friant, 2019; Grenet et al., 2023; Honey & Carrasco, 2023), with heterogeneous effects depending on local context characteristics (Kutscher et al., 2023).

In 2018, Barcelona’s Local Education Authority launched the Shock Plan Against School Segregation (SP), an innovative and pioneering policy initiative in the Spanish context to promote a more balanced allocation of disadvantaged students across schools. The SP integrates four main policy instruments: 1) a new system to identify low SES students, 2) preassigned school seats, 3) school admission quotas, and 4) targeted funding for socially disadvantaged students. Barcelona, as the second-largest city in Spain, offers a particularly relevant case for evaluating the effectiveness of desegregation policies in marketized environments due to its significant role of private subsidized supply (54% of total enrollment in primary and secondary education) and extensive school choice options available to families (Bonal et al., 2021).

This paper aims to estimate the impact of the SP on the distribution of socially disadvantaged students among schools in Barcelona. Additionally, it seeks to identify how the SP’s impact varies among student groups and different areas of the city. Although how the SP was implemented precludes a natural experiment research design, a quasi-experimental approach has been applied, utilizing Interrupted Time Series (ITS) analysis (McDowall et al., 2019) to estimate the causal impact of the SP on school segregation. The analysis draws on administrative data from 2011 to 2024 to explore the evolution of school segregation before and after the adoption of the SP.

Findings indicate that the impact of the SP is relatively limited and varies significantly across student groups, education levels, and public and private subsidized schooling sectors. Overall, the SP has been more effective in reducing the school segregation of migrant students than that of socially disadvantaged students, with impacts varying significantly across different city areas. The differential geographical impacts of the SP are influenced by factors such as the level of residential segregation, the concentration of socially disadvantaged students, the diversity of school supply (proportion of enrollment in public and private subsidized schools), and the percentage of resident children enrolled in local schools, among others. The analysis shows that areas with lower levels of school segregation and social stratification between private subsidized and public schools before the SP's implementation have experienced the most pronounced impacts. The paper concludes by discussing the various factors and mechanisms that explain these differential impacts, thereby contributing to the debate about the opportunities and limits of desegregation policies in urban education markets.

Authors

• Adrian Zancajo, Autonomous University of Barcelona

• Sheila Gonzalez, University of Barcelona

• Edgar Quilabert, Autonomous University of Barcelona