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Nora Gordon
University of California, San Diego
School choice and "excess" school segregation: Does policy explain which districts have schools more segregated than neighborhoods?
FINAL REPORT:
Any study of school segregation faces a broad analytical challenge: that a given level of measured school segregation should be interpreted differently depending on the underlying level of residential segregation stemming from residential decisions that are not induced by catchment boundaries or by the availability of alternatives to neighborhood public schools, including charters, magnets, or private schools. Most research on school segregation fails to account for the level of residential segregation that is the starting point for school districts as they implement policy, and the failure of traditional measures of school segregation to account for residential sorting could cause substantial errors in inference relevant for policy analysis and design.
I define a measure of excess segregation: school segregation beyond that which we would expect if all students were to attend public schools geographically close to their homes, taking residential location as fixed. Specifically, this is the difference between observed school dissimilarity and that predicted by assigning all children to their geographically closest age-appropriate public (neighborhood or charter) school. I calculate this measure for a sample of 204 U.S. school districts, largely defined to include the largest districts. Rank correlation coefficients show that excess and school segregation are positively but not perfectly correlated. The additional data and computational burden of calculating excess segregation may be worthwhile in some cases, however, as I show that the magnitude and significance of the correlation between court-ordered desegregation plans and school segregation levels depends on whether the segregation measure controls for residential sorting. These results are suggestive but must be considered alongside the major caveat to this approach: in equilibrium, the residential segregation captured within the excess measure is generated from sorting in response to catchment areas and desegregation plans themselves.
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