Desegregation Busing and the Market for Private Schools

• In Event: Causes and Effects of School Stratification by Income and Race

Abstract

Schools must be local to their student populations, creating an inherent link between residential segregation and segregation in public schools. This de facto segregation complicated school desegregation efforts and motivates my empirical strategy. Early desegregation efforts focused on the elimination of de jure school segregation, which was unable to address racially sorted school districts due to underlying residential segregation. Cities with higher levels of residential segregation should be more insulated from early school desegregation efforts but should experience more intense school desegregation from the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (Swann) decision, which allowed busing across school districts to achieve racial balance. Leveraging novel variation in the intensity of school desegregation from Swann stemming from two place-based policies that affect the level of underlying residential segregation, I find that Swann was associated with a 30% increase in private school enrollment with a nearly proportional increase in the number of surviving private schools. With universal school choice exploding nationally with little to no regulation about private schools' admissions criterion, it is as important as ever to understand how private school enrollment may thwart integration efforts.

Author

• Gabriel Joseph Olivier, Tulane University
  Presenting Author