Can Charter Schools Disrupt the Historic Link in Segregation Between Schools and Neighborhoods?

• In Event: 40861 - Section on Sociology of Population Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Racial and Ethnic Inequality and Health

Abstract

Using 1990-2020 data from the National Longitudinal School Database, this study examines whether and how charter schools affect the relationship between school neighborhoods and enrollments. While traditional public schools have generally been understood to reproduce patterns of race and space, the choice dimension of charters has the potential to uniquely disrupt this status quo in one of two ways: a) by exhibiting integrated enrollments in otherwise segregated neighborhoods or b) more troublingly, exhibiting segregated enrollments in otherwise diverse and integrated neighborhood contexts. To empirically address these issues, we provide a framework for understanding the range of possible school-neighborhood outcomes that exist for U.S. charter schools in terms of the racial compositions of the neighborhoods where they are situated (neighborhood segregation) and the student body they enroll (school segregation). Taken as a whole, our analyses will demonstrate the unique ways charter schools are heterogeneous in their relationship to—and effects upon—various forms of racial segregation.

Authors

• Samuel Hoon Kye, Washington University-St. Louis

• Maggie Wood, Washington University in St. Louis