Extralocal Influence on Neighborhood School Enrollment in an Urban School Choice System

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Neighborhood Effects

Abstract

Open enrollment policies and opportunities have dramatically risen. Extant work emphasizes the mirco-level factors informing family decision-making around school enrollment, but there is a lack of understanding how these policies impact the linkages between schools and neighborhoods, which may have important implications for neighborhood social closure and citywide connectedness. This study helps fill this gap by investigating the association between open enrollment and educational and neighborhood inequality through the case of the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), a large urban district whose neighborhood-school link disruption is disproportionately distributed across the city. In this first half of a larger sequential mixed methods study, I use multivariate analyses to identify neighborhood and school characteristics that serve as predictive enrollment factors for out-of-catchment mobility and enrollment ties, or the connections formed between a catchment neighborhood and non-catchment schools. Early results find that neighborhood levels of disadvantage and violent crime, along with evaluative metrics and racialized perceptions of neighborhood schools, play important roles in encouraging local families to enroll in or opt out of their catchment school and determining how wide a net to cast in consideration of alternative school options. Then, in a novel contribution to the field, I explore this relationship between neighborhoods and schools through a neighborhood networks approach. I test whether the enrollment factors of proximate neighborhoods and schools influence a catchment neighborhood’s out-of-catchment mobility and the kinds of enrollment ties it forms. Generating, analyzing, and mapping enrollment ties and neighbor impacts on the number and strength of these ties will shed light on how neighborhoods and traditional public schools are differentially impacted by school choice. This study contributes to both the inequality and urban sociology literatures by emphasizing the catchment neighborhood as an actor in school choice policy implementation.

Author

• Lili Dodderidge, Cornell University