By Tomas Monarrez and Carina Chien, Housing Matters, October 20, 2021
In the US, family preferences and local policy choices preserve school segregation by race. This report examines the role of local school attendance boundary policies in perpetuating racial segregation in schools.
The authors created a spatial dataset representing all metropolitan areas in the US by combining more than 65,000 school attendance boundaries from the 2019–20 school year and school performance, census data, and outcome data from a range of sources including the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data, the Stanford Education Data Archive, and the Civil Rights Data Collection from US Department of Education. The researchers used this dataset to identify pairs of neighboring public schools with vastly different shares of Black and Latinx students.
They found 2,373 “highly racially unequal” school boundary lines across almost every US metropolitan area - about 6 percent of public schools in the sample. The researchers analyzed the connection between racially unequal school districts and students’ outcomes, access to resources, and educational experiences, including staffing, program offerings, and student discipline rates. They also explored the link between the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s (HOLC’s) redlining map and school attendance boundaries created in the 1930s, where neighborhoods with a grade of A or B were desirable and those with a grade of C or D were considered declining or hazardous.
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