School Choice, Neighborhood Income, and Educational Heterogeneity

• In Event: 350 - Section on Sociology of Education Paper Session. The Changing Educational Landscape

Abstract

School choice options are increasingly breaking the direct tie between residential location and school attendance. The educational consequences of this changing landscape for individuals and school districts have been the subject of much debate, but school assignment also has the potential to shape neighborhood interactions and social cohesion as geographic aggregations of individual choices shape the degree to which these school and community overlap. In this paper, I examine neighborhood-level distributions of school choice and quality using administrative data from Chicago. I find that disadvantaged neighborhoods students scatter among a larger number and type of high schools. This educational instability at the neighborhood level appears to have negative consequences for communities. Neighborhoods with more educational heterogeneity have higher crime rates than more homogeneous educational areas, controlling for neighborhood demographics and prior crime rates. At the individual level there is a trade-off for students. After controlling for eighth grade test scores, students who chose to attend a school other than their assigned school have higher 9th grade test scores. At the same time, students who come from educationally diverse neighborhoods perform worse those same tests than those from areas with more stable neighborhoods.

Author

• Julia Burdick-Will, Johns Hopkins University