Socioeconomic Segregation and School Choice in American Public Schools

Abstract

We examine the effect of the expansion of charter schools on socioeconomic segregation in American public education. Using a district-level panel data set from 1998 to 2015, we describe and model changes in within-district segregation of low-income students, proxied by free-lunch eligibility (FLE). We show that the segregation of FLE students from non-FLE students increased by about 15% in large school districts and find that charter school penetration and growth played a role in increasing socioeconomic segregation within districts. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in charter enrollment rates increases the dissimilarity index in a district by 6% of a standard deviation. Although this impact is modest, we do find that segregation is more pervasive in the charter sector. So, continued growth of charter schools could exacerbate socioeconomic segregation.

Democracy, neoliberalism, and school choice: A comparative analysis of India and the United States

“…Figure 1 illustrates the coding protocol and logic model utilized to discern and develop the thematic findings of this preliminary study. From these data collected and analyzed over two consecutive years, stories emerged that revealed very strong correlations among notions of democracy, market solutions for education, school privatization, and school choice in both countries, and these findings align with studies that present market solutions for education on a global scale as increasingly normative (Ball, 2012;Lee, 2018;Marcotte & Dalane, 2019).…”

“…Charter schools became popular in the 1990s, and these schools are funded by tax dollars. They manage enrollment through lotteries and other gatekeeping measures such as test scores (Jason, 2017;Malkus, 2016;Marcotte & Dalane, 2019). While proponents of charter schools-such as Secretary of Education Betty DeVos-have suggested that these schools are quality alternatives to failing open-access public schools (United States Department of Education [USDOE], 2019), critics have emphasized that charter schools function as private schools due to their selective enrollment policies and, thus, promote structural social inequality (Apple, 2005;Lawrence, 2005).…”

“…State charter school policies are administered by the individual states, and thus vary significantly from state to state. This makes it difficult to find consistent data on the overall role that charter schools play as educational alternatives to open-access public schools (Jason, 2017;Lee, 2018;Marcotte & Dalane, 2019). The most controversial change in the charter-school scene has been the recent approval of for-profit charter schools in many states, often operated and administered as Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) (Lee, 2018).…”

“…School choice is a central concern in neoliberal discourse (Apple, 2005;Marcotte & Dalane, 2019), and this analysis questioned whether school choice is equitable or democratic. The decision to focus on India and the United States was precisely because of their similarities as large and diverse democracies with vast discrepancies of socio-economic equitability.…”

Assessing the educational performance of different Brazilian school cycles using data science methods

“…Most studies apply traditional methods that have important limitations (e.g., the impossibility of including many descriptors in the models without loss of efficiency, the difficulty in dealing with a wide range of data). In general, the most studied factors are those with the greatest impact on academic performance: (i) socioeconomic situation of the family [5,9,16]; (ii) human capital of student´s parents [17]; (iii) grade repetition rate [18] and (iv) student's personality [19,20].…”