School Segregation and Native Flight. Evidence from School Catchment Area Borders.

Abstract

Ethnic or racial segregation in schools and neighborhoods remains a persistent reality in most major cities in Western countries. Although extensively theorized, determining the exact mechanisms that produce such patterns has proven difficult. In this article, we investigate one of the potential causes of ethnic segregation in schools; native flight motivated by parents’ school preferences. Both observational and experimental evidence suggests that native or White parents have a strong preference for racially or ethnically homogeneous schools. If this is the case, this may strongly contribute to school segregation. In contexts where school enrollment is determined primarily by geographic proximity to schools, such preferences may prompt White or native parents to move away from schools with high racial or ethnic minority shares among students, thus contributing to both residential and school segregation. Drawing on extremely detailed, population-wide, geo-coded register data on families and school catchment areas for elementary schools in Oslo, the capital of Norway, we investigate whether native parents move away from schools with higher shares students with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. We employ a Geographic Regression Discontinuity (GRD) design by exploiting the fact that within neighborhoods, the characteristics of schools differ discontinuously along school catchment area borders. The results indicate that native origin families systematically move away from schools with high shares of students with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. This process likely contributes to both school segregation and residential segregation.

Ethnic segregation and native out-migration in Copenhagen

“…Another related explanation is that some parents may hold preferences for schools with a low concentration of ethnic minority pupils (Nielsen and Andersen, 2019), such that native parents of young children move selectively to avoid schools with high minority concentrations. Wessel and Nordvik (2019) suggested that this may be the case in Norway, and other recent studies support this notion (Bjerre- Nielsen and Gandil, 2020;Kauppinen et al, 2020;Rogne et al, 2021). Our analysis of parents and nonparents also clearly supports such an argument.…”

“…A recent study from Denmark (Bjerre- Nielsen and Gandil, 2020) has shown that many parents respond to the socioeconomic and ethnic composition of their local school, and the redrawing of attendance boundaries, either by relocating or by enrolling their child in a private or a different public school. Similar studies from Norway (Rogne et al, 2021) and Finland (Kauppinen et al, 2020) have also shown that schools are an important factor in parents' moving decisions.…”

It's not all about the peers: Reintroducing school context to the school segregation literature

“…As enrollment to upper secondary school is based on GPA and not local catchment areas, the role of neigborhood segregation is not discussed here but is addressed for instance by Bernelius and Vilkama (2019), by Boterman (2019), and by Oberti and Savina (2019). See also Rogne et al (2021) for a study on the causal relationship between school-and neighborhood segregation in Norway. 3.…”