Suburbanizing Gentrification: How Policy Environments and Demographics Shape School Segregation

• In Event: Racial inequality in housing market processes

Abstract

School segregation remains a durable and defining feature of American public education. Decades of research has shown that concentrating students in high-poverty schools is the primary mechanism through which racial segregation widens academic achievement gaps from the earliest grades through middle school, and that this pattern has persisted across more than three decades of demographic change (Reardon et al., 2024; Fahle et al., 2020; Orfield & Lee, 2006). Yet the neighborhood-level forces shaping school segregation are themselves shifting, as gentrification—long studied in urban cores—has extended into metropolitan suburbs, raising new and largely unanswered questions about how demographic transformations in suburban neighborhoods are reshaping the schools that serve them.

Existing urban research has produced mixed evidence on the link between gentrification and school demographic changes. When higher-income gentrifiers move into historically underserved neighborhoods, residential composition may diversify even as school segregation deepens, driven in large part by the tendency of higher-socioeconomic-status families to bypass residentially assigned schools in favor of charter, magnet, or private options (Candipan, 2020). Yet gentrification does not uniformly entrench segregation- in some settings, particularly where non-traditional school options are less abundant, gentrifying areas have exhibited measurable reductions in racial and economic isolation in traditional public schools (Mordechay & Ayscue, 2020). This variability points to a central but underexamined question—whether and how local characteristics, including larger school choice policy contexts, the socioeconomic profile of in-moving residents, and the pre-existing composition of suburban school districts, mediate or moderate the gentrification-school segregation relationship. Critically, these dynamics have received almost no systematic attention in suburban contexts, even as trends in both gentrification and school segregation have increasingly extended beyond the urban core and into suburban communities (Jang, 2024).

This study addresses that gap by examining the association between suburban gentrification and school segregation, with particular attention to the role of local-level characteristics in shaping the direction and magnitude of this relationship. Drawing on nationally representative data linked across neighborhood, school, district levels, we analyze how suburban gentrification is associated with changes in the racial and socioeconomic composition of nearby schools, and whether those associations vary as a function of local and state school policy environments, district socioeconomic structures, and patterns of residential and educational sorting. Preliminary findings suggest that the consequences of suburban gentrification for school segregation are highly context dependent. The association between neighborhood upgrading and school compositional change is moderated by local policy and socioeconomic conditions, with school choice availability, district demographic starting points, and the income profile of in-movers- each shaping whether gentrification is associated with increased or decreased school segregation. These results extend frameworks developed in urban settings to suburban contexts, carrying direct implications for policymakers seeking to leverage or counteract neighborhood change as a tool for promoting educational

Authors

• Hyojung Lee, Seoul National University
  Presenting Author

• kfir mordechay, Pepperdine University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Hyunwoo Yu, Seoul National University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author