Racial Stratification and School Segregation in the Suburbs: Evidence from Los Angeles County

Abstract

Suburbanization helped fuel neighborhood and school segregation during the twentieth century, but many American suburbs have dramatically diversified since. How do White suburbanites respond? With residential mobility declining and educational choice increasing, White suburban families may emulate their core-city counterparts, leveraging school enrollment to buffer their children from disadvantaged minorities living nearby. Yet recent research suggests proximate nontraditional school options (e.g., magnet, charter, private) are a key ingredient facilitating this minority avoidance strategy, and they are scarce in the suburbs. I propose that strong racial preferences spur White suburban families living amongst Black and Latino children to enact them even in unfavorable circumstances: by sending children long distances to nonassigned schools. Logistic regressions employing Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey data on over 2,000 children linked to administrative data confirm this expectation. Spatial stratification research should supplement its longstanding focus on city-to-suburb residential flows and core-city educational flows out of traditional public schools with sharper scrutiny of suburban school sorting as a potential third path of segregation. This selection process may reveal racial preferences to be even stronger—and educational opportunity structures more malleable—than often assumed.

Redrawing Attendance Boundaries to Promote Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Elementary Schools

“…There is, however, high variance across districts: The ratio in the district where choice is most prevalent is 67%; in the least-prevalent district, it is less than 1%. In 26 out of 84 districts, White students are more likely to attend choice programs than non-White students, suggesting that different public school choice contexts may foster different choice patterns among families from different demographic backgrounds (Bischoff & Tach, 2020; Schachner, 2022).…”

“…Our procedures are limited because of our inability to estimate the precise number of elementary-age students in each block who attend their zoned elementary school given that some may attend charter, private, or within-district options with open enrollment (e.g., magnet programs). Even though certain demographic groups disproportionately may exercise school choice in different settings (Bischoff & Tach, 2020; Rich et al, 2021; Schachner, 2022), because our estimates are based on ground truth school enrollments by demographic group, this differential uptake of school choice is likely to bias our block-level estimates only if families who are part of the same demographic group and assigned to the same school have different rates of school choice uptake that are correlated with the block in which they live. It is not immediately obvious why this might happen, but there are certainly possible explanations (e.g., a particular block might house a popular charter or other alternative school option).…”

High school science fair: School location trends in student participation and experience

“…These findings are consistent with the observation in the education literature that socioeconomic resources are key factors in educational achievement [ 32 , 42 , 43 ]. Although segregation across districts and communities continues [ 44 – 46 ], it also has become clear that economic and other resources of individual schools within a single school district can be just as unbalanced and segregated as across districts [ 47 – 49 ]. Without future research to learn more about the SEF students’ socioeconomic situation, we cannot generalize the findings regarding SEF experience in relationship to school location.…”

Separate and unequal options: Neighborhood educational access in the era of school choice

“…Many studies have revealed, for instance, that White families tend to equate racial composition with school quality (Billingham and Hunt 2016;Goyette, Farrie, and Freely 2012;Saporito and Lareau 1999) and that they prioritize school racial composition over test scores and instructional resources when making school selections (Schachner 2022;Schneider et al 2002). In some cases, White families voice a desire for a small amount of racial diversity-but not too much (Evans 2021).…”