Student assignment, school choice, and diversity in contemporary American public school districts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Public school systems in the United States once assigned students to schools primarily based on their neighborhood of residence; a practice that induced a high degree of correlation between neighborhood demographics and school demographics across the nation. Over the last several decades, however, both court-mandated school desegregation efforts and the school choice policy movement have disrupted school assignment policies and practices in public school districts across the United States. 

Today, the policy mechanisms that govern school assignment and school choice vary considerably across districts and states. While many U.S. public school districts remain under judicial desegregation orders, others avoided school desegregation litigation, and still others have been declared “unitary” and relieved of judicial scrutiny. Furthermore, even among districts under desegregation orders, the nature of judicially mandated remedies varies considerably. Similar variation exists among districts with regards to school choice. While many districts offer extensive inter- and intra-district school choice as well as a range of charter and non-public school options offered via diverse policy mechanisms, others offer limited public school choice.  

This panel explores the web of district- and state-level policies that shape how students enroll in K-12 schools and these policies' consequences for school diversity. The panel’s first paper characterizes the contemporary school assignment landscape, using data gathered from the nation’s 100 largest public school districts. The panel's second paper explores the implementation of a statewide policy that faciliated school choice and enrollments across districts and that policy's implications for the distribution of students across schools and districts. The panel's third paper investigates the consequences of school magnetization -- one of the oldest and most widely implemented policy tools for facilitating intra-district choice and encouraging school desegregation -- on school segregation. Finally, the panel's fourth paper provides new data on the ways policy actors in the process of undertaking ambitious school assignment policy reforms, these papers provide important new insights into the ways policy actors think about school assignment and the value of school diversity.

Policy Area

• Education

Chair

• Deven Carlson, University of Oklahoma

Discussant

• Pooya Almasi, Morgan State University

Organizer

• Thurston Domina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Individual Presentations

• Variation in the 100 largest U.S. school districts’ approaches to school choice and student assignment policies - Presenting Author: James S Carter, Urban Institute

• The Effect of Magnetization: Magnet schools and school demographic change - Presenting Author: Vitaly Radsky, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Is School Segregation a Problem? And if so, Says Who? - Presenting Author: Joseph L. Boselovic, College of William and Mary; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Etai Mizrav, Northeastern University

• Districts in Demand: Administrative Decision-Making and Student Mobility Under Kansas’s Open Enrollment Policy - Presenting Author: Travis Miller, University of Kansas; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Bryan Mann, University of Kansas; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Sophie O’Connor; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Morgan Ashley Murakami, University of Kansas