The Kids on the Bus: The Academic Consequences of Diversity‐Driven School Reassignments

Abstract

Many public school diversity efforts rely on reassigning students from one school to another. While opponents of such efforts articulate concerns about the consequences of reassignments for students’ educational experiences, little evidence exists regarding these effects, particularly in contemporary policy contexts. Using an event study design, we leverage data from an innovative socioeconomic school desegregation plan to estimate the effects of reassignment on reassigned students’ achievement, attendance, and exposure to exclusionary discipline. Between 2000 and 2010, North Carolina's Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) reassigned approximately 25 percent of students with the goal of creating socioeconomically diverse schools. Although WCPSS's controlled school choice policy provided opportunities for reassigned students to opt out of their newly reassigned schools, our analysis indicates that reassigned students typically attended their newly reassigned schools. We find that reassignment modestly boosts reassigned students’ math achievement, reduces reassigned students’ rate of suspension, and has no offsetting negative consequences on other outcomes. Exploratory analyses suggest that the effects of reassignment do not meaningfully vary by student characteristics or school choice decisions. The results suggest that carefully designed school assignment policies can improve school diversity without imposing academic or disciplinary costs on reassigned students.

My School District Isn’t Segregated: Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Information on Parental Preferences Regarding School Segregation

“…However, only approximately 4 percent of U.S. public school students are enrolled in such a district (Reardon and Rhodes 2011). 5 Although relatively uncommon, recent research shows that SES-based assignment plans can have positive effects on reassigned students’ academic and disciplinary outcomes (Domina et al 2021). Still, parents may prefer lower levels of segregation in the abstract while simultaneously holding concerns about what it might mean for their own children’s educational opportunities.…”

“… 5. SES-based assignment plans are typically designed to offset rising levels of economic segregation rather than to achieve socioeconomic integration (i.e., districts where high- and low-income students have demographically similar schoolmates). For this reason, they are seen as a weaker intervention compared to prior decades of court-ordered desegregation and tend to be more legally precarious (Domina et al 2021; Kahlenberg 2011; Reardon and Rhodes 2011). A strength of these programs, however, is that Americans tend to be more amenable to SES-based plans to reduce segregation compared to analogous race-based policies (Carlson and Bell 2021).…”

School and residential segregation in the reproduction of urban segregation: A case study in Buenos Aires

“…Studies also argue that the 'neighbourhood effect' impacts educational outcomes and schools' composition (Nieuwenhuis and Hooimeijer 2016), so diverse schools would be expected in diverse neighbourhood contexts. On the other hand, there is a debate on the effects of school segregation on educational results (see Domina et al, 2021;Reardon and Owens, 2014;Wodtke and Parbst, 2017). However, diverse schools are generally considered to allow the formation of heterogeneous networks, which promote social cohesion, social equality, and upward mobility (Mickelson, 2018;Owens, 2020).…”

New Schools and New Classmates: The Disruption and Peer Group Effects of School Reassignment

“…We estimate null effects, on average, on test-score and attendance outcomes with relatively precise zeros. Domina et al (2021) examine the effects of being selected for reassignment in Wake County between 2000 and 2010 in an event study framework. Despite only partially overlapping analytic windows and different identification strategies, our estimates of the average effect of being reassigned to a different school are comparable to theirs.…”