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

Abstract

The market theory motivating school choice policy assumes that empowering families with greater enrollment flexibility will make access to educational opportunity less dependent on residential location and, ultimately, more equitable. This perspective downplays how much families are constrained by the options they can practically access as well as their tendencies to prioritize racial composition over quality. Using administrative student records from Michigan—where school choice is widespread—we ground market optimism in social reality. Our discrete choice model and counterfactual decomposition reveals that where families live and the school options accessible to them account for 83% of Black-White school segregation and 94% of the Black-White gap in peer academic environment. By parsing how much neighborhood educational access and family enrollment decisions each contribute to these macro-level outcomes, this study reveals the continued salience of residential segregation underpinning public schools and clarifies why the proposed benefit of market empowerment rings hollow.