Understanding how and why rising racial and economic segregation impacts achievement gaps is critical to closing them. Analyzing data from every school district in the U.S., researchers sean reardon, Erin Fahle, Heewon Jang, and Ericka Weathers evaluate how growing racial segregation interacts with unequal economic opportunities and contributes to…

This study seeks to identify changes in neighborhood and school segregation during the age of rapidly expanding school choice. Prior to 1991, public-school choice was limited. While magnet schools existed and a number of interdistrict transfer programs were in place, few public-school students left their neighborhoods to receive an education.…

Background: Scholars have increasingly expressed concern about a new secessionist movement, grounded in a doctrine of localism and facilitated by permissive state policies regarding the formation of new school districts. Critics contend that school district secessions threaten to exacerbate patterns of segregation and inequality in schools.…

Each year, the federal government provides billions of dollars in support for low-income families in their acquisition of housing. In this analysis, we examine how several of these subsidized housing programs, public housing and Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) financed housing, relate to patterns of school segregation for children. We use…

A close look at segregated African American progressive high schools in the Southeast during the Jim Crow era offers insights into the "courageous willingness" of black educators to examine and modify their practices. This essay is part of the John Dewey Memorial Lecture series sponsored by the Daniel Tanner Foundation.

Decades of curriculum research have uncovered a persistent trend: white people are depicted as dominating the history of the United States, whereas communities of color and their experiences are omitted or misrepresented in social studies textbooks and curriculum standards. The message the resulting curriculum sends to children is that the United…

African Nova Scotians constitute the largest multigenerational Black Canadian community, with 400 years of presence in Atlantic Canada. Despite the end of "de jure" school segregation in 1954, African Nova Scotians' social and cultural capital were not incorporated in curricular and pedagogical practices. Using the theoretical framework…

In this article, we use administrative data from three cohorts of North Carolina public high school students to examine the effects of within-school segregation on the propensity of academically eligible black high school students to take advanced math courses. Our identification strategy takes advantage of cohort-to-cohort variation in the share…

Recent research has shown that a distinct variety of American Sign Language, known as Black ASL, developed in the segregated schools for deaf African Americans in the US South during the pre-civil rights era. Research has also shown that in some respects Black ASL is closer than most white varieties to the standard taught in ASL classes and found…

New York City's Pre-K for All (PKA) is the nation's largest universal early childhood initiative, serving over 64,000 four-year-olds annually. Stemming from the program's choice architecture as well as the city's stark residential segregation, PKA programs are extremely segregated by child race/ethnicity. Our current study explores the complex…

While the primary focus of ethical discussions involving school voucher programs has been on the relationship--and possible disconnect--between educational outcomes and profit motivations, recently this focus has shifted to the relationship between consumer sovereignty and racial segregation. A growing critique of private voucher and charter…

Research supports the notion that exposure to individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds has positive social and political benefits for a pluralistic society, and an expanding body of research attests to the positive consequences of school integration for academic outcomes. Yet schools remain highly segregated by race and class, in part because…

In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment…

A growing number of states have policies that positively address resource equity in school construction, distributing capital resources based on district wealth (although as addressed in this brief, these policies are not always implemented with actual funding), but almost no states require any consideration of diversity or segregation in their…

Diversity is core to what makes many cities vibrant, dynamic, adaptive and strong. Recently, Boston has gotten much more racially diverse, evolving from being only 20 percent people of color back in 1970 to 56 percent of color today. However, there's a way in which the rich tapestry of the city has eroded: Boston is rapidly losing families with…