School Boards and Student Segregation

Abstract

for excellent research assistance. Remote access to the data for this study was generously provided by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC). All remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Politics in Forgotten Governments: The Partisan Composition of County Legislatures and County Fiscal Policies

“…Previous studies in the urban politics literature have also used the regression discontinuity design to examine the local incumbency advantage (de Benedictis-Kessner, 2018;Ferreira and Gyourko, 2009;Trounstine, 2011), the e↵ects of mayoral partisanship on policy(Ferreira and Gyourko, 2009;Gerber and Hopkins, 2011;de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw, 2016), black mayors on city policies(Hopkins and McCabe, 2012), and partisan selection in school boards on segregation(Macartney and Singleton, 2018).…”

Expertise and Independence on Governing Boards: Evidence from School Districts

“…3 For example, Meier and England (1984) examine the association between minority representation and outcomes, while Grissom (2010) studies the predictors of intraboard conflict. Macartney and Singleton (2017) present evidence from narrowly-decided school board contests that boards causally influence student assignment to schools, but do not examine school boards' effect on student learning. 4 Existing research shows that gains from local control in K-12 education varies by local context.…”

“…School boards also play a central role in allocating students to schools. Historically, this board responsibility is at the fore of school desegregation in the United States (Fraga et al, 2005;Reber, 2005;Cascio et al, 2008;Hanushek et al, 2009;Johnson, 2011) and remains important due to discretion over attendance zone boundaries (Macartney and Singleton, 2017;Monarrez, 2018). A somewhat overlooked related activity, however, is the availability of school choice in the district.…”

Incentives and the Supply of Effective Charter Schools

“…8 In adapting these methods to my setting, the paper fits into the growing empirical literature using these methods to analyze policy questions (Berry and Reiss 2007). Limited prior work has examined the determinants of charter school supply and location, such as 6 More recently, Ladd, Clotfelter, and Holbein (2017) show that apparent improvements in charter school performance in North Carolina may be driven primarily by positive student selection and Macartney and Singleton (2018) present evidence from North Carolina that suggests charters facilitate "white flight" from public schools. 7 Relatedly, targeted private school vouchers have been studied as a means of minimizing cream skimming due to peer-based externalities in education production (Nechyba 2000, Epple andRomano 2008).…”