scholarly journals Neighbourhood change and the neighbourhood-school gap

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (15) ◽  
pp. 3308-3333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Candipan

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.

2020 ◽  
Vol 101 (5) ◽  
pp. 40-43
Author(s):  
Michael B. Shaffer ◽  
Bridget Dincher

Following Brown v. Board of Education, schools known as “segregation academies” that were created for the purpose of allowing White students to be educated without contact with Black students proliferated in the southern United States. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited such segregation, these schools remained in existence for decades. In this case study, Michael Shaffer and Bridget Dincher contend that the Choice Scholarship Program in Indiana, a school voucher program, re-creates the segregation academies. Data demonstrate that while White student percentages have climbed since the inception of the program, Black student percentages have declined sharply, creating a large number of schools that meet the definition of a segregated school. And because these schools are private, despite receiving government funds through the voucher program, students do not receive the same federal protections from discrimination that they do in traditional public schools.


2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (8-9) ◽  
pp. 1203-1223
Author(s):  
Jane Beese ◽  
Jennifer Martin

The privatization of public funds for education through school choice programs has fueled the expansion of virtual online charter schools. This redirection of funds contributes to the idea that virtual school success is comparable or even superior to the performance of traditional public schools. The schools most adversely affected are the schools with the highest need, those serving children living in poverty and already underserved minority student populations: urban public schools. The purpose of this article is to investigate the performance of virtual schools and the redistribution of public monies from public to online community schools in Ohio.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 675-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Bischoff ◽  
Laura Tach

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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Robert Maranto ◽  
Alexandra Vasile

For decades, scholars and politicians have debated the likely impacts of school choice. Yet few have studied the nation's largest state-level charter school market, Arizona, whose 20-year-old charter sector accounts for about 17% of Arizona public school enrollment. This article summarizes the extant literature on this market, some 23 studies, supplemented with original fieldwork to derive tentative lessons for social scientists and policymakers. While the charter sector seems to have promoted innovation, teacher and parent empowerment, and modest improvement in traditional public schools, findings regarding student learning and segregation are less clear.


Author(s):  
Belinda M. Cambre

Publicly funded alternatives to traditional public schools have taken place in the form of charter schools and, most recently, cyber charter schools. Cyber charter schools are fully online K-12 public schools and they “look” like traditional schools since students learn traditional subjects and are still subject to the same public accountability measures as their traditional brick and mortar counterparts. This chapter examines cyber charter schools in practice and summarizes the most controversial issues surrounding this form of school choice. Issues such as the legality of cyber charters under state charter laws; the allocation of per pupil funding; the use of for-profit companies in school management; ensuring access to cyber charters; and fulfilling state mandates top the list of salient issues with respect to cyber charter schools.


2002 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Goldhaber ◽  
Eric Eide

In this article, Dan Goldhaber and Eric Eide consider what we do and do not know about the impact of school choice, focusing particularly on the potential impact of choice on minority students in urban school settings. They observe that many argue that school choice is a necessary component of any educational reform designed to improve educational outcomes for students. While public pressure has yielded a tremendous expansion of choice options, Goldhaber and Eide contend that the empirical evidence on the academic effects of school choice reforms is mixed. They propose that relatively little evidence exists that these schools are having a clear-cut positive or negative impact on the achievement of either the students who attend them or those who remain in traditional public schools. They conclude that the mixed evidence on choice suggests that choice in and of itself is unlikely to be the solution that revolutionizes urban school systems.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-399
Author(s):  
Huriya Jabbar ◽  
Andrene Castro ◽  
Emily Germain

Informal and institutional barriers may limit teacher movement between charter schools and traditional public schools (TPSs). However, we know little about how teachers choose schools in areas with a robust charter school sector. This study uses qualitative data from 123 teachers to examine teachers’ job decisions in three cities with varying charter densities: San Antonio, Detroit, and New Orleans. Our findings illuminate different types of segmentation and factors that facilitate and limit mobility between sectors. We find that structural policies within each sector can create barriers to mobility across charter schools and TPSs and that teachers’ ideological beliefs and values serve as informal, personal barriers that reinforce divides between sectors. This study offers implications for policy in districts with school choice.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Berends ◽  
R. Joseph Waddington

School choice researchers are often limited to comparing one type of choice with another (e.g., charter schools vs. traditional public schools). One area researchers have not examined is the effects of different school types within the same urban region. We fill this gap by analyzing longitudinal data for students (grades 3–8) in Indianapolis, using student fixed effects models to estimate the impacts of students switching from a traditional public school to a charter, magnet, Catholic, or other private school. We find that students experience no differences in their achievement gains after transferring from a traditional public school to a charter school. However, students switching to magnet schools experience modest annual losses of −0.09 standard deviation (SD) in mathematics and −0.11 SD in English Language Arts. Students switching to Catholic schools also experience annual losses of −0.18 SD in mathematics. These findings are robust to a series of alternative model specifications. Additionally, we find some variability in the mean school type impacts by students’ race/ethnicity, English language learner status, and number of years enrolled in a choice school. We discuss our results in the context of the variability of choice school effects across an entire urban area, something future research needs to examine.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Frankenberg ◽  
Genevieve Siegel-Hawley ◽  
Jia Wang

The political popularity of charter schools is unmistakable. This article explores the relationship between charter schools and segregation across the country, in 40 states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen metropolitan areas with large enrollments of charter school students in 2007-08. The descriptive analysis of the charter school enrollment is aimed at understanding the enrollment and characteristics of charter school students and the extent to which charter school students are segregated, including how charter school segregation compare to students in traditional public schools.  This article examines these questions at different levels, aggregating school-level enrollment to explore patterns among metropolitan areas, states, and the nation using three national datasets.  Our findings suggest that charters currently isolate students by race and class. This analysis of recent data finds that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation.  In some regions, white students are over-represented in charter schools while in other charter schools, minority students have little exposure to white students.  Data about the extent to which charter schools serve low-income and English learner students is incomplete, but suggest that a substantial share of charter schools may not enroll such students. As charters represent an increasing share of our public schools, they influence the level of segregation experienced by all of our nation’s school children. After two decades, the promise of charter schools to use choice to foster integration and equality in American education has not yet been realized.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Michael Bonds ◽  
Marie Gina Sandy

<p align="center"><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>‘White flight’ has largely come to mean exit from or avoidance of racially mixed public schools in urban neighborhoods. But the ‘new’ white flight is complicated by the fact that more whites who are often more affluent remain or relocate to desirable urban areas that are close to jobs and attractive city amenities. This paper describes how white flight can now happen without housing relocation with support from state-wide and municipal school choice policies resulting in the further re-segregation of regional schools. Using the Milwaukee Public School system’s Open Enrollment program as a case study, the authors demonstrate that this seemingly politically neutral school choice program supports the new white flight, enabling the children of white families to attend – and subsidize – the region’s suburban schools with declining enrollment, while further undermining the financial base of urban public schools. This study confirms earlier research indicating white students comprise the majority of participants in Open Enrollment programs, but with more non-white students participating in the Milwaukee program in the last five years. Extensive qualitative analysis of historical documents served as the primary research method for this study. Implications for other regions are discussed.</p>


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