The Racial Composition of Neighborhoods and Local Schools: The Role of Diversity, Inequality, and School Choice

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 675-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Bischoff ◽  
Laura Tach
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Spatial Data ◽  
School Attendance ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Racial Composition ◽  
Neighborhood Schools ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Opt Out ◽  
The Social

In an education system that draws students from residentially based attendance zones, schools are local institutions that reflect the racial composition of their surrounding communities. However, with opportunities to opt out of the zoned public school system, the social and economic contexts of neighborhoods may affect the demographic link between neighborhoods and their public neighborhood schools. Using spatial data on school attendance zones, we estimate the associations between the racial composition of elementary schools and their local neighborhoods, and we investigate how neighborhood factors shape the loose or tight demographic coupling of these parallel social contexts. The results show that greater social distance among residents within neighborhoods, as well as the availability of educational exit options, results in neighborhood public schools that are less reflective of their surrounding communities. In addition, we show that suburban schools are more demographically similar to their neighborhood attendance zones than are urban schools.

scholarly journals Choosing Schools in Changing Places: Examining School Enrollment in Gentrifying Neighborhoods

2020 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Candipan
Keyword(s):  
School Choice ◽  
School Enrollment ◽  
Neighborhood Schools ◽  
Enrollment Decisions ◽  
Neighborhood Factors ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Neighborhood School ◽  
Opt Out ◽  
Individual School ◽  
School Assignment

School choice expansion in recent decades has weakened the strong link between neighborhoods and schools created under a strict residence-based school assignment system, decoupling residential and school enrollment decisions for some families. Recent work suggests that the neighborhood-school link is weakening the most in neighborhoods experiencing gentrification. Using a novel combination of individual, school, and neighborhood data that link children to both assigned and enrolled schools, this study examines family, school, and neighborhood factors that shape whether parents enroll in the assigned local school. I find that parents are more likely to opt out of neighborhood schools in gentrifying neighborhoods compared with non-gentrifying neighborhoods when nearby choice options are available. Recent movers to gentrifying neighborhoods bypass local schools more compared with parents who have lived in the neighborhood longer. Results have implications for thinking about neighborhood-school linkages in an era of school choice and urban change.

Occupying Schools, Occupying Land

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tarlau
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Leadership Development ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Collective Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
Landless Workers Movement ◽  
Progressive Organizations

Contrary to the conventional belief that social movements cannot engage the state without becoming co-opted and demobilized, this study shows how movements can advance their struggles by strategically working with, in, through, and outside of state institutions. The success of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) in occupying land, winning land rights, and developing alternative economic enterprises for over a million landless workers has made it an inspiration for progressive organizations globally. The MST’s educational initiatives, which are less well known but equally as important, teach students about participatory democracy, collective work, agroecological farming, and other practices that support its socialist vision. This study details how MST activists have pressured municipalities, states, and the federal government to implement their educational proposal in public schools and universities, affecting hundreds of thousands of students. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, Occupying Schools, Occupying Land documents the potentials, constraints, failures, and contradictions of the MST’s educational struggle. A major lesson is that participating in the contentious co-governance of public education can help movements recruit new activists, diversify their membership, increase practical and technical knowledge, and garner political power. Activists are most effective when combining disruption, persuasion, negotiation, and co-governance into their tactical repertoires. Through expansive leadership development, the MST implemented its educational program in local schools, even under conservative governments. Such gains demonstrate the potential of schools as sites for activists to prefigure, enact, and develop the social and economic practices they hope to use in the future.

Strange Frame Fellows: The Evolution of Discursive Framing in the Opt-Out Testing Movement

2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Paquin Morel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Research Question ◽  
The Public ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Opt Out ◽  
Open Coding ◽  
Over Time

Background/context In recent years, opposition to accountability policies and associated testing has manifested in widespread boycotts of annual tests—mobilized as the “opt-out movement.” A central challenge facing any movement is the need to recruit and mobilize participants. Key to this process is framing—a discursive tactic in which activists present social issues as problems that require collective action to solve. Such framing often relies on compatible political and ideological commitments among activists and potential recruits. Yet the opt-out movement has successfully mobilized widespread boycotts in diverse communities. How have participants in the movement framed issues relating to testing and accountability? Purpose/objective/research question/focus of study I explore the discursive tactics of participants in the opt-out movement by analyzing how they frame issues related to testing and accountability over time. I ask two research questions: (1) What frames did participants in opt-out-aligned social media groups use to convince others that standardized accountability tests are a problem and build support for the movement? (2) To what extent and how did the deployment of frames change over time? Research design I conducted a mixed-methods study combining qualitative content analysis to identify frames and computational analysis to describe their co-deployment over time. Data collection and analysis I compiled a text corpus of posts to opt-out-aligned social media pages from 2010–2014. I analyzed posts using open coding to identify frames used by participants in online communities. Frames were categorized by their orientation—the general way in which they framed the problem of testing and accountability. I then analyzed the co-deployment of frames using network analysis and hierarchical clustering. Conclusions/recommendations The longitudinal analysis of frames reveals key differences in the frames used by participants. While more politically oriented frames—those characterizing testing as a social issue affecting the public schools at large—were common in early stages of the movement, less overtly political frames—those characterizing testing as an individual issue affecting children and local schools or a technical issue—became more prominent over time. Over time, socially oriented frames became decoupled from other frames, showing independent patterns of deployment. This suggests that the movement may have benefited from de-emphasizing politically oriented frames, but that it lacked an overarching shared narrative, which has the potential to limit how it might affect accountability policies and testing.

scholarly journals School Choice In Rural Georgia: An Empirical Analysis

1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 526-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Keeler ◽  
Warren Kriesel
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Private Education ◽  
Private School ◽  
School Quality ◽  
School Attendance ◽  
School Administrators ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
National Level ◽  
Indicator Variable

AbstractPrevious empirical studies of school choice have been at the national level, or have focussed on northeastern states. We estimate the demand for private education in rural Georgia, using proportion of private school attendance as an indicator variable. We find that income, tuition, race and school quality are important choice determinants. The results provide useful information for rural school administrators, and suggest that a tuition tax credit would have to be substantial to cause a significant exodus from public schools.

Who Favors Magnets and Who Favors Charters? Political Ideology, Social Purpose Politics, and School Choice in the Upper South

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422110332
Author(s):  
Virginia Riel ◽  
Roslyn Arlin Mickelson ◽  
Stephen Samuel Smith
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Older Individuals ◽  
Neighborhood Schools ◽  
Upper South

School choice is an increasingly important feature of the US educational landscape. Numerous studies examine whether a particular form of school choice promotes student achievement or whether a type of school choice discourages or encourages diversity by race, ethnicity, and ability. Studies also examine attitudes toward school choice, but these studies are typically limited to the views of parents, teachers, and administrators rather than public attitudes. We contribute to this literature by studying public opinion about magnet and charter schools in five southern school districts. Using a new and unique dataset, we examine if social background characteristics, political ideology, and attitudes toward the role of public schooling, neighborhood schools, and school diversity influence citizen opinion regarding magnets and charters. We find that more educated, higher income, and older individuals do not support charters, while conservatives and Republicans do. Whites are less likely to favor magnets than other races, while the more educated are more likely to favor them. Those who believe public schools should operate for the common good support magnets, as do those who favor diverse schools. However, those who favor neighborhood schools support both charters and magnets. We interpret our findings within the context of case studies of the respective locations and suggest that public opinion studies motivate public policies regarding educational choice.

Optimizing for Distributional Goals in School Choice Problems

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (8) ◽  
pp. 3657-3676
Author(s):  
Aaron L. Bodoh-Creed
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Optimization Problems ◽  
Incentive Compatibility ◽  
Neighborhood Schools ◽  
Boston Public Schools ◽  
Incentive Compatible ◽  
The Status ◽  
Student Welfare

I investigate three goals of school choice: welfare, encouraging neighborhood schools, and diversity. I use optimization problems to find the best stable and incentive compatible match for any combination of these objectives. These problems assume there is a continuum of students and school seats, which allows me to describe the incentive compatibility conditions in a tractable form. I prove that the set of stable matchings is generically continuous in the distribution of students and the school capacities, which implies that the characterization of the possible stable matches in the continuum model approximates the set of stable matches in a matching market with a large, but finite, number of students. I then apply my framework to data from Boston Public Schools. If the mechanism conditions on demographics, the improvement (relative to the status quo) in student welfare is equivalent to moving 291 students (out of 3,479) to schools one rank higher in their preference lists. In contrast, if the mechanism does not condition on demographics, the welfare improvement is equivalent to moving only 25.1 students to schools one rank higher. Improvements in the distributional goals can be made (e.g., increasing enrollment in neighborhood schools by 50%) without reducing welfare or diversity. This paper was accepted by Gabriel Weintraub, revenue management and market analytics.

School Attendance of Migrant Children in Beijing, China: A Multivariate Analysis

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fei Guo
Keyword(s):  
School Attendance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Migrant Children ◽  
Urban Migration ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Beijing China

Recent trends in rural to urban migration in China indicate that more migrants are moving to the cities with their families, including young children. Without an urban household registration or hukou, migrant children do not have access to local schools in the cities, raising many concerns about the children's well-being. Using data from the 1997 Migrant Census in Beijing, this study sought to describe the social and demographic characteristics of migrant children in Beijing, to examine the patterns of school attendance of migrant children and to determine the factors affecting their school attendance. The study found that 88 percent of migrant children in Beijing were attending school. Migrant children whose parents had higher education, were non-agricultural hukou holders and those who had longer residence in Beijing had higher rates of school attendance. The study found some differences on the children's school attendance when the characteristics of migrant fathers and migrant mothers were examined separately.

scholarly journals Neighbourhood change and the neighbourhood-school gap

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (15) ◽  
pp. 3308-3333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Candipan
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
White Students ◽  
Racial Composition ◽  
Socioeconomic Change ◽  
Traditional Public Schools ◽  
The Us ◽  
Neighbourhood Change ◽  
Surrounding Areas ◽  
Over Time

Few studies examine how school and neighbourhood composition in the US correspond over time, particularly in a context of neighbourhood change. As neighbourhoods diversify along racial and economic lines, do public schools also diversify or grow increasingly dissimilar from their surrounding areas? Drawing on novel data linking neighbourhoods and schools in the US in 2000 and 2010, I document: how racial composition corresponds over time between traditional public schools and the neighbourhoods they serve; how the compositional gap changes when greater school choice is available; and how the compositional gap varies between neighbourhoods experiencing various trajectories of socioeconomic change. I find an increasing mismatch in the white composition of public schools and their surrounding neighbourhoods, specifically that schools enrol fewer white students than the composition of the neighbourhood. The compositional mismatch grows the most in neighbourhoods experiencing socioeconomic ascent, particularly as the number of nearby non-neighbourhood schools increases.

scholarly journals Two Models of Teacher Accountability: Toward an Explanation for the Disappointing Results of Some Market-Based School Reforms

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (10) ◽  
pp. 1365-1395
Author(s):  
Lenahan O’Connell ◽  
Juita-Elena (Wie) Yusuf
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
School Reform ◽  
School Reforms ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Full Explanation ◽  
Teacher Work ◽  
Applied Social Science ◽  
And Performance

Accountability is a pivotal concern of applied social science. This article asserts that in many situations a full explanation of the sources of accountability requires the application of concepts from sociology and management science, in addition to those from the market-based approaches inspired by economics. The article describes the market-based approach to accountability exemplified by agency theory, applies it to school reform and derives several predictions about the likely success of market-based approaches to school reform, and documents the lack of evidence supporting the contention that programs for school choice will markedly improve teacher work effort and performance (as measured by student test scores). The social actor approach, rooted in sociological and management theories, is introduced and used to describe the pressures and norms operating in the public schools that foster accountability even in the absence of competition between schools for students. The article concludes with some implications for practice and research on public sector accountability.

Are evangelical Christians abandoning public schools?

2021 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
Marilyn Anderson Rhames
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Evangelical Christians ◽  
The Public ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Transgender Students ◽  
Parental Opinion ◽  
Religious Bias ◽  
Using Data

Conventional wisdom suggests that evangelical Christians, often among the most vocal advocates of school choice efforts in the U.S., are promoting choice out of a sense of frustration with public schools and perceived bias against religion. Research by Marilyn Anderson Rhames, however, suggests that evangelicals are no more concerned about religious bias in their local schools than other Americans. Using data from the 2019 PDK poll into the public’s attitudes toward the public schools, Rhames analyzed responses to questions about pressure to “fit in” or conform; religious bias; bias against gay, lesbian and/or transgender students; and the perceived risks of improper civics, Bible, and comparative religion instruction. In most cases, evangelical responses were not significantly different from those of other parents. In some case, racial identity and ideology were stronger drivers of parental opinion.

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