When Home is Where the School is: Understanding Residential Attainment of School Quality

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 2: Teaching and Administrative Practice

Abstract

Traditionally, American families have been expected to enroll their children in local neighborhood schools. Thus, sociologists have suggested that wealthier parents buy homes in particular catchment areas as a means of enrolling their children in high-performing, well-resourced local schools, thereby perpetuating an intergenerational transmission of neighborhood and school inequality. This type of opportunity hoarding has been documented in small-scale qualitative data (see, for example, Holme 2002, Lareau 2014), but its prevalence remains unclear. In this paper, I expand our understanding of this phenomenon – which I term residential attainment of school quality – using nationally representative data of K-12 students in the United States provided by the National Household Educational Survey (NHES). This paper examines trends in the use of school quality in residential decision-making from 2003 to 2016, and explores the relationship between environmental context, family demographics, and school characteristics. I find that environmental context is most strongly associated with parents reporting schools as the driving factor in their residential decision-making, with residency in predominantly white neighborhoods driving the residential attainment of school enrollment. Moreover, after accounting for race/ethnicity, regional and neighborhood context, and household income, parental educational attainment remains strongly associated with the residential attainment of schools. These findings have important implications for both how and where educational and residential opportunity hoarding are evolving in the context of school choice.

Author

• Kiara Millay Nerenberg, Johns Hopkins University