The Process of Neighborhood and School Re-Segregation: The Sociology of Reputation

• In Event: 3503 - Educational Inequality and Segregation: New Findings

Abstract

We have found in our research on both suburban and urban contexts that when demographics are changing in local communities – becoming more Black, Latinx and/or Asian in the suburbs or more White and affluent in gentrification zones of the cities – that changing perceptions of “good” and “bad” housing markets and schools map onto a racial hierarchy with Whiteness at the top and Blackness at the bottom. Asians and Latinx – in that order – fall in between on a scale of most to least valuable neighbors and classmates. In other words, property values and school reputations correlate with the race of the people associated with those neighborhoods and schools even when the main tangible criteria of “quality” of housing, neighborhood and schools are held constant (see Wells, 2018).
This social construction of community and school “reputation” are racialized in a manner that assures that the process of segregation will repeat itself. To better understand the social context of these local school evaluations and choices, we drew on both the existing body of research about neighborhood and school choice as it relates to race and status and a fairly obscure theory -- the sociology of reputation -- which argues at its most basic level that the status of an organization or institution is correlated with the status of the people associated with it. We then draw our research in both suburban and urban demographically changing neighborhoods to highlight of the sociology of reputation theoretical framework, which helps us see how the “common sense” or reputational understanding of the quality of schools is correlated with race and class of the students who enroll, even after controlling for several “objective” indicators of school quality (see also Sikkink and Emerson, 2008).

Authors

• Amy Stuart Wells, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Lauren Fox, Teachers College, Columbia University