A persistent fear regarding school choice is that it will lead to more racially distinctive schools. A growing number of studies compares choosing households to non-choosing households, but few have examined the possibility that choosers sort themselves out based upon school preferences that are correlated with race and ethnicity. This report addresses this issue by analyzing the responses of 1,006 charter school households in Texas. It first examines the expressed preferences of choosing households, then compares expressed preferences with behavior. A comparison of the characteristics of the traditional public schools that choosers leave with the characteristics of the charter schools they choose indicates that race is a good predictor of the choices that choosing households make. Whites, African Americans, and Latinos transfer into charter schools where their groups comprise between 11 and 14 percentage points more of the student body than the traditional public schools they are leaving. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Using a sample of 628 white, black, and Hispanic voters in a large urban school district, we test a series of hypotheses about voting in a school bond election. We find that there is a core of similar results across racial/ethnic groups. All three groups show strong, directly measured, self‐interest effects. We also find some distinct group differences. Symbolic values played a limited role for white voters, but a stronger role for minorities. In addition, for white voters we find a substantial drop in support for the bond across age cohorts, but no such drop among black and Hispanic voters.

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Previous research indicates that the academic performance of minority students improves when school faculties include minority teachers. This research addresses this issue using data from some 540 school districts and 668 campuses in Texas. It finds that the greater the shortfall between the district0 campus percentage of minority teachers and the district0campus percentage of minority students, the lower the percentage of district0campus minority students passing the state achievement test. When controls are entered for the rate of increase in minority student percentage, this association disappears for Hispanic students but not for African-American students.Previous research into minority student achievement (Meier and Stewart, 1991; Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard, forthcoming) focuses on passive representationthe extent to which public bureaucracies reflect the ethnic and racial compositions of relevant populations. This research finds that outcomes favor minority citizens when passive representation is high (Hindera 1993;Seldon, Brudney, and Kellough 1998;Thielemann and Stewart 1996;Thompson 1976). Consistent with these findings, Meier and Stewart, and Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard have found a relationship between passive representation of minority students and student performance. That is, minority student achievement on standardized tests improves as the percentage of teachers who are minority group members increases (Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard forthcoming).A second important literature on minority student achievement grows out of the the Coleman Report (Coleman et al. 1966) and focuses on the social context of the schools. Much subsequent research has attempted to determine if minority students' academic performance improved with integration into predominantly white schools (Crain 1971;Jencks and Brown 1975;McDill, Stinchcombe, and Walker 1968). More recently, this discussion has come full circle. Several voices now argue that integration into white schools actually damages minority students (Cummins 1986;Dehyle 1995;Stanton-Salazar 1997) because their cultures are denigrated in majority-controlled schools.

Research on the public approval of American governors has focused almost exclusively on the impact of economic conditions on fluctuations in such approval. This article adds events variables to a model of gubernatorial public approval including the more commonly used economic variables, and tests this model in a time-series analysis in three states. The results suggest that the effect of political events is minimal and mixed. Furthermore, the analysis does not clearly support any general theory of gubernatorial approval. Instead, the factors that influence public support for governors seem to vary across time and state.