The Changing Relationship between School and Residential Segregation

• In Event: 40217 - Education and Inequality

Abstract

Scholars and policymakers point to neighborhood segregation as a key driver of school segregation, while educational leaders often claim that their efforts to address school segregation are thwarted by broader institutions like housing, economic inequality, and households’ residential preferences. Surprisingly little empirical research has documented the relationship between neighborhood and school segregation. This relationship has likely changed over time and may vary across places, given that school choice has become more prevalent, the legal landscape of mandatory desegregation orders has waxed and waned, and demographic trends around aging and birth rates alter the link between who lives in a neighborhood and who attends a school. In this article, we draw on new estimates of school and neighborhood segregation from the Segregation Tracking Project to explore the reciprocal influences of neighborhood and school segregation on one another from 1991 to 2022. We examine how segregation in these two contexts corresponds over time, across places, across levels of geography, and among different racial/ethnic and economic groups. We then examine factors that account for the coupling or decoupling of residential and school segregation, including the expansion of charter schools and expiration of court-ordered desegregation.

Authors

• Ann Owens, University of California, Los Angeles

• Sean F. Reardon, Stanford University