Examining School-level Fragmentation as a Contributor to Within-district Racial and Ethnic Segregation

Abstract

Racial/ethnic segregation, a prominent feature in most major city school systems, has more recently spread to suburban districts. Now that more of our nation’s children attend school in suburbs than in central cities, racial and ethnic proportions in suburban districts have shifted from a majority white student population to a more diverse student body. In districts adhering to a local-schools policy, district leaders typically respond to increases in enrollment by building new buildings, which results in redrawing attendance zones. By doing so, these leaders increase the overall fragmentation of their districts—constructing more and smaller catchment areas. Fragmentation occurring in a racially/ethnically diverse community marked by localized residential segregation increases the potential for greater ethnic/racial homogeneity within neighborhood schools, while raising the likelihood of greater racial/ethnic imbalance between schools. This study focuses on the question: within growing and racially/ethnically diverse school districts, does the geometric process of increasing attendance zone fragmentation have an independent effect on between-school segregation, unrelated to other factors, such as residential migration? Using GIS methodologies on a national database of elementary school attendance boundaries, projected school populations were produced by extracting the racial/ethnic characteristics of the school-aged population residing within each attendance zone from small-scale US Census data. In order to measure the effect that changing school boundaries could have on segregation, all projected school populations were extracted from the same census data into existing school zones, first for SY2009-10 and then for SY2015-16. In each district, between-school segregation was measured for each school year and the difference calculated. Residential clustering of the non-white population was also computed. Within-district racial imbalance was found to be highly correlated to rising fragmentation between whites and African Americans, while segregation between whites and Hispanics appeared unaffected by changing fragmentation levels. These differing results were attributed to variations in residential patterns for Hispanics and for African Americans in their respective relationship to whites. Previous studies on school segregation have failed to take into account the possible effect that increasing fragmentation may have on between-school segregation. As a result, some studies may have over-estimated the causal contributions of other segregative factors.