The Effect of Inter-School District Competition on Student Achievement: The Role of Long-Standing State Policies Prohibiting the Formation of New School Districts

2016 ◽  
pp. 139-152
Author(s):  
Katie Sherron ◽  
Lawrence W. Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Student Achievement ◽  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
State Policies ◽  
New School

Building Suburban Dreams: School District Secession and Mayoral Control in Suburban Utah

2015 ◽  
Vol 117 (9) ◽  
pp. 1-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward BuendÍA ◽  
Paul Humbert-Fisk
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Large City ◽  
Geographical Information ◽  
Mayoral Control ◽  
Suburban School Districts ◽  
Suburban School District ◽  
Suburban Cities

Background/Context Mayoral control of large city school districts has become the newest form of school district reorganization. Researchers have documented how real and perceived crises have propelled mayors in Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington DC, amongst others, to redefine the role of board governance by situating the operations of districts within mayoral governance portfolios. There is little research examining the role of suburban mayors in suburban school district secession movements. Demographic changes as well as tensions around funding and programs have prompted splits in suburban school districts within metropolitan regions that warrant study. Purpose This article examines the educational, demographic, and political dynamics that fueled the contest between suburban city mayors and school district leadership leading to the secession and fragmentation of the largest suburban school district in Utah. The authors sought to understand how this mayoral led secession activity interfaced with mayoral control activities in big cities. We also aimed to identify the parallels and departures that existed in the sources of tension in this case of suburban school district division and historic patterns of suburban political fragmentation, particularly, suburban cities’ creation of autonomous jurisdictions separating them legally and institutionally from urban school districts as a means of assuring clear racial divisions. Population/Participants The research participants included four mayors, two assistant mayors, four school district transition team members, six teachers as well as two school district administrators. Six focus groups comprised of four to six parents also participated. Research Design This study employed qualitative research methods as well as descriptive statistical data analysis. The researchers interviewed mayors as well as parent and community focus groups. Newspaper media pertaining to the events were collected and analyzed as triangulating data. The researchers also analyzed census data using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software. Findings/Results The authors found that rapid demographic and financial shifts in school districts shared by multiple suburban cities can catalyze mayors to organize and act aggressively to split existing school districts. Strong city mayors were a key force propelling the modification of district governance structures through heightening the prominence of city borders and local control, even when the threats were neighboring middle-class cities composed of white residents. Mayors moved the region's political and educational dynamics one step closer to a mayoral control governance structure. The political, demographic, and economic relationships underlying these scenarios positioned suburban school district administration with few options in which to respond. Conclusions/Recommendations The authors conclude that these practices of division and appropriation by cities and their leadership will only diminish democratic processes of school governance and exacerbate social-class and racial segregation across suburban school districts over time. The authors recommend that regionally based governance bodies be formed that help maintain a regional perspective to educational policy.

scholarly journals Mobility, Targeting, and Private-School Vouchers

2000 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J Nechyba
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Residential Mobility ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Private School ◽  
School Vouchers ◽  
School Voucher ◽  
The Impact

This paper uses general-equilibrium simulations to explore the role of residential mobility in shaping the impact of different private-school voucher policies. The simulations are derived from a three-district model of low-, middle-, and high-income school districts (calibrated to New York data) with housing stocks that vary within and across districts. In this model, it is demonstrated that school-district targeted vouchers are similar in their impact to nontargeted vouchers but vastly different from vouchers targeted to low-income households. Furthermore, strong migration effects are shown to significantly improve the likely equity consequences of voucher programs. (JEL I22, I28, H73)

The New School Segregation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika K. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
School Systems ◽  
Governance Structures ◽  
The South ◽  
New School ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
Decentralized Governance ◽  
Separate And Unequal ◽  
Boundary Lines

Cornell International Law Journal: Vol. 49 : No. 3 , Article 1 (2016).The South has a long and sordid history of resisting school desegregation. Yet after a long and vigorous legal fight, by the mid-1980s, schools in the South became among the most desegregated in the country. An important but often underappreciated tool that aided in the fight to desegregate schools in the South was the conventional and strategic use of school district boundary lines. Many school systems in the South deliberately eschewed drawing school district boundary lines around municipalities and instead drew them around counties. The resulting county-based system of school districts allowed for the introduction of school assignment plans that crossed racially and economically segregated municipal boundary lines.Some affluent and predominantly white suburban municipalities in the South are threatening to reverse this progress. They are doing so by seceding from racially diverse county based school districts and forming their own predominately white and middle-class school districts. The secessions are grounded in the race-neutral language of localism, or the preference for decentralized governance structures. However, localism in this context is threatening to do what Brown v. Board of Education outlawed: return schools to the days of separate and unequal with the imprimatur of state law.This Article is the first to examine Southern municipal school district secessions and the localism arguments that their supporters advance to justify them. It argues that localism is being used as a race-neutral proxy to create segregated school systems that are immune from legal challenge. It concludes by introducing a normative framework to evaluate the legitimacy of the localism justification for Southern school district secessions specifically and decentralized public education governance structures more broadly.

scholarly journals Racial Segregation in the Southern Schools, School Districts, and Counties Where Districts Have Seceded

AERA Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 233285841986015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Taylor ◽  
Erica Frankenberg ◽  
Genevieve Siegel-Hawley
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Residential Segregation ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
School Students ◽  
New School ◽  
Public School Students ◽  
History Of

The establishment of new school districts in predominantly White municipalities in the South is restructuring school and housing segregation in impacted countywide school systems. This article compares the contribution of school district boundaries to school and residential segregation in the Southern counties that experienced secession since 2000. Merging together several data sets, including Common Core of Data, census data, and shapefiles at multiple geographic scales, we measure segregation of public school students and the entire population over time. We show that school district secession is restructuring school segregation in the counties where secession is occurring, with segregation increasingly occurring because students attend different school districts. Additionally, in the most recent year of analysis, residents were increasingly stratified by race in different school districts. Segregation patterns differ substantially, however, depending on the history of secession in the county.

Big Bulls in the Local Herd

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-75
Author(s):  
Natalie G. Adams ◽  
James H. Adams
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Health Education ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Local School ◽  
Department Of Health ◽  
The Many ◽  
Segregated Schooling ◽  
Local Herd

This chapter examines the role of superintendents in local school desegregation efforts, focusing particularly on the stories of Julian Prince, Clyde Muse, Tom Dulin, and Harold Kelly, who between them led seven school districts through school desegregation. Their stories demonstrate the many challenges school leaders faced in trying to mitigate the daily operations of school desegregation. Even after the Alexander v. Holmes ruling in October 1969, which called for an immediate end to segregated schooling, many superintendents with their school boards continued to wage a fierce battle with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare over their desegregation plans. Ultimately, regardless of how they went about desegregating their schools, the superintendent as the educational leader of his school district was expected to direct and lead his school through the turmoil of school desegregation.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

Sustainability Certification and Green Public Procurement: Ideals and Outcomes in a New Jersey School District

2021 ◽  
pp. 097340822110125
Author(s):  
Cluny Mendez ◽  
Christopher L. Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
New Jersey ◽  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Public Procurement ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Green Public Procurement ◽  
The Subject

The implementation of sustainability and green public procurement (GPP) initiatives in school districts has been the subject of some debate; questions over definitions and programme goals have led to inconsistency and concerns about programme achievements. The legitimacy of programmes rests not only with the announcement of policy by officials, but with adherence to policy and staff buy-in. This study examines barriers districts face, and makes recommendations based upon district experience on ways to successfully implement sustainability and GPP initiatives. A review of the literature on GPP and legitimacy in the execution of public functions within the education domain begins the study. Major components relative to best practices for GPP programmes are studied through the review of GPP-related documents from a school district in New Jersey considered as an exemplar of such programmes. Analysis of an interview with the district’s representatives suggests that, despite the normative approval such programmes receive, and widespread understanding of the rationale for pursuing such initiatives, there remain critical failings in implementation of these programmes, stemming from education, resourcing of initiatives and prioritization of green procurement in relation to other district priorities. The study concludes with lessons learned from this case, which is important given its positioning within New Jersey as an exemplar and recommendations for future research where work in this area is needed.

scholarly journals Mitigating Childhood Food Insecurity during COVID-19: A Qualitative Study of how School Districts in California’s San Joaquin Valley Responded to Growing Needs

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Ashley H. Jowell ◽  
Janine S. Bruce ◽  
Gabriela V. Escobar ◽  
Valeria M. Ordonez ◽  
Christina A. Hecht ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Food Insecurity ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Distribution Systems ◽  
Community Organizations ◽  
San Joaquin Valley ◽  
School Meal ◽  
Fresh Foods

Abstract Objectives: To explore best practices and challenges in providing school meals during COVID-19 in a low-income, predominantly Latino, urban-rural region. Design: Semi structured interviews with school district stakeholders and focus groups with parents were conducted to explore school meal provision during COVID-19 from June to August 2020. Data was coded and themes were identified to guide analysis. Community organizations were involved in all aspects of study design, recruitment, data collection, and analysis. Setting: Six school districts in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Participants: School district stakeholders (n=11) included food service directors, school superintendents, and community partners (e.g., funders, food co-operative). Focus groups (n=6) were comprised of parents (n=29) of children participating in school meal programs. Results: COVID-19-related challenges for districts included developing safe meal distribution systems, boosting low participation, covering COVID-19-related costs, and staying informed of policy changes. Barriers for families included transportation difficulties, safety concerns, and a lack of fresh foods. Innovative strategies to address obstacles included pandemic-EBT, bus-stop delivery, community pick-up locations, batched meals, and leveraging partner resources. Conclusions: A focus on fresher, more appealing meals and greater communication between school officials and parents could boost participation. Districts that leveraged external partnerships were better equipped to provide meals during pandemic conditions. In addition, policies increasing access to fresh foods and capitalizing on USDA waivers could boost school meal participation. Finally, partnering with community organizations and acting upon parent feedback could improve school meal systems, and in combination with pandemic-EBT, address childhood food insecurity.

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