Variation in the 100 largest U.S. school districts’ approaches to school choice and student assignment policies

• In Event: Student assignment, school choice, and diversity in contemporary American public school districts

Abstract

School assignment policies shape who has access to which schools. While a growing body of research examines whether school choice exacerbates or ameliorates between-school segregation, comparatively little is known about how assignment policies vary systematically across large urban districts, and which specific features of those policies are most strongly associated with segregation outcomes.

In this paper, we introduce a novel dataset capturing school assignment policies across the 100 largest U.S. school districts by enrollment, manually assembled through systematic review of district and state agency websites. The dataset documents a range of policy dimensions including the availability of choice options (charter schools, magnet schools), structural constraints on exercising choice (transportation provision, community considerations, state policy context within which districts operate), how boundary decisions are made, as well as background information about the structural and political conditions under which districts design and implement student assignment policies. Preparation of this extensive policy landscape dataset has been completed, and the dataset is currently being prepared to be publicly release as a data tool via the Urban Institute.

By merging this district policy database to data from the Common Core of Data and racial/ethnic segregation metric data from Stanford’s Education Opportunity Project, we aim to facilitate an in-depth exploration of the relationship between different aspects of choice policy and segregation levels across a district’s schools. Our exploratory analysis uses multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to make sense of how segregation level clusters around degree of choice offered to families, constraints around making those choices, and whether there is equity in the boundary decision-making process.

Our preliminary analyses highlight important ways in which school districts school assignment policies vary, each of which associates with the degree of racial/ethnic segregation among the district’s schools: (1) The degree of school choice available to students living in the district, (2) the amount of geographic or other constraints district policies place on students’ school choice sets, and (3) the degree to which districts highlight diversity considerations as motivations for the choice policies described in (1) & (2.) Our preliminary findings indicate that levels of racial/ethnic school segregation are lower in districts in which school choice is limited. However, we find evidence to suggest that some districts attempt to use choice policies as a mechanism to address high levels of school segregation. In particular, we find that districts with high levels of school segregation often publicize school diversity as a principle motivating school assignment policies. As we refine these analyses, we aim to create a typology of district-level school assignment policies and a framework for thinking about the links between student assignment policies and school segregation.

Author

• James S Carter, Urban Institute
  Presenting Author