School Segregation, Educational Attainment and Crime: Evidence from the end of busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg

Abstract

We study the end of race-based busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools (CMS). In 2001, school boundaries in CMS were redrawn dramatically, and half of students received a new assignment. Using addresses measured prior to the policy change, we compare students in the same neighborhood that lived on opposite sides of a newly drawn boundary. We find that both white and minority students score lower on high school exams when they are assigned to schools with more minority students. We also find decreases in high school graduation and four-year college attendance for whites and large increases in crime for minority males. We conclude that the end of race-based busing widened racial inequality, despite efforts by CMS to mitigate the effect of segregation through compensatory resource allocation. JEL Codes: I20, I24.

Parental choice, neighbourhood segregation or cream skimming? An analysis of school segregation after a generalized choice reform

“…Segregation might imply negative effects on achievement for low-ability pupils through peer effects, but these may be offset by positive 'tracking' effects if it is more efficient to teach a homogenous group rather than a mixed group (Duflo et al 2011). That said, segregation might still have consequences for other outcomes: Billings et al (2014) show that re-segregation policies in the USA have increased youth crime, but that the negative effects on test scores were dampened by compensatory resource allocation.…”

The Consequences of Friendships: Evidence on the Effect of Social Relationships in School on Academic Achievement

“…To provide evidence that our use of across-cohort, within school variation is valid and uncontaminated by other unobservables, we conduct a series of balancing tests (following Bifulco et al 2011, Lavy and Schlosser 2011, Billings et al 2012) that estimate the associations between the cohort measures and individual-level exogenous attributes, such as age, health status, nativity status, etc. In Table 3, we regress cohort composition over maternal education, race and ethnicity on ten exogenous attributes of students, omitting the student themselves from 11 Although the focus on same-grade nominations may appear constricting, we note that over 80% of all nominations we capture in the data are for individuals in the same grade.…”

“…13 These balancing tests follow Billings, Deming and Rockoff (2012) reversing the regression relationship, as compared to Bifulco et al 2011 andLavy andSchlosser 2011, and placing the cohort composition on the left hand side so that a single F-test can be used to examine whether the set of exogenous attributes can systematically explain the within school by type variation associated with each cohort composition variable. Following Guryan et al (2009) the balancing test models also control for school level composition omitting the student's contribution in order to address the mechanical negative correlation between student's own attributes and cohort composition variables that omit the student.…”

Disruptive school peers and student outcomes

“…Lavy and Schlosser (2011) find positive effects of having a large fraction of girls in the classroom for both boys and girls. Other examples of this type of work are studies of the impact of school desegregation programs, where some studies find scattered and moderate effects of balancing the racial composition (Angrist and Lang, 2004;Hoxby and Weingarth, 2006), while others find substantial effects (Billings, Deming and Rockoff, 2014). …”