Is School Segregation a Problem? And if so, Says Who?

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

Abstract

More than seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, racial and economic school segregation persists and is intensifying across many U.S. metropolitan areas. A large body of research documents segregation's harmful consequences and examines how parents navigate school choice, yet a critical meso-level gap remains: we know relatively little about how the policy actors and organizations embedded in decentralized U.S. schooling understand, frame, and respond to contemporary segregation. This gap is especially acute in Northern metropolitan contexts, where the Milliken v. Bradley framing of "de facto" segregation continues to shape whether officials perceive segregation as a problem within their scope at all.  Drawing on inhabited institutionalism, this qualitative study asks: (1) How is the policy problem of school segregation defined and managed by policy actors? (2) How do policy actors engage with the policy aim of school desegregation? We hypothesize a "Rashomon effect" in which actors across different organizational contexts perceive the same problem differently, often placing responsibility for it outside their professional purview, and we expect the enduring North and South narrative to further constrain perceived agency.  The study centers on a large Northeastern metropolitan area with a contentious desegregation history and persistent segregation. We have mapped the regional policy landscape into a three-tier framework: Core Agencies with direct authority over school assignment and equity policies, such as the central urban school district and the state education agency; Secondary Agencies influencing segregation through housing, civil rights enforcement, and regional programs, such as local housing authorities and municipal planning departments; and Peripheral Agencies with indirect but potentially important influence, such as regional transit authorities and state civil rights divisions.  We will conduct in-depth, semi-structured interviews in pairs with up to 50 policy actors, beginning with approximately 35 respondents across Core and Secondary agencies and iteratively recruiting up to 15 additional Secondary and Peripheral actors as initial analysis surfaces theories of change and attributions of responsibility. Following an abductive analysis approach, we will use a two-stage coding process, moving from open inductive and deductive codes to focused coding that tests analytical connections between how actors frame segregation and the sense of agency or responsibility that emerges from those framings. By centering meso-level policy actors rather than parents or courts, this study illuminates why well-intentioned desegregation policies so often diffuse across organizational boundaries and stall in practice, identifies institutional leverage points for more effective cross-sector action, and challenges the durable narrative that Northern segregation lies beyond the scope of public administration.

Authors

• Joseph L. Boselovic, College of William and Mary
  Presenting Author

• Etai Mizrav, Northeastern University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author