Neighborhood, Segregation, and School Choice

Over the past few decades, school choice has been a widely debated issue around the globe, following the development of pluralism, liberty, and democracy. In many countries, school choice systems were preceded by residence-based school assignment systems, creating a strong connection between a neighborhood and its schools’ demographic compositions. However, schools often remain highly segregated. School segregation is thus seen as a major problem and is supposedly driven by three main factors: residential segregation, parental school choice, and schools’ selection of pupils. This paper aims to shed light on what research should be focusing on as regards school choice and residential segregation with the following two research questions: What are the links between neighborhood and school choice in the literature? How are neighborhood and school choice connected to school segregation in the literature? Two main findings emerged: (1) the neighborhood-based social networks that parents developed had limited their school choices and (2) neighborhood segregation is one of the most important factors that contributes to school segregation and is related to multi-ethnic and socioeconomic contexts.

The opportunity structure of segregation: School choice and school segregation in Sweden

It is a matter of debate whether free school choice should lead to higher or lower levels of school segregation. We investigate how school choice opportunities affect school segregation utilizing geocoded Swedish population register data with information on 13 cohorts of ninth graders. We find that local school choice opportunities strongly affect the sorting of students across schools based on the parents’ country of birth and level of education. An increase in the number of local schools leads to higher levels of local segregation net of stable area characteristics, and time-varying controls for population structure and local residential segregation. In particular, the local presence of private voucher schools pushes school segregation upwards. The segregating impact of school choice opportunities is notably stronger in ‘native’ areas with high portions of highly educated parents, and in areas with low residential segregation. Our results point to the importance of embedding individual actors in relevant opportunity structures for understanding segregation processes.

Ethnic desegregation and ‘resegregation’ in northern English schools

This article discusses findings on inter- and intra-ethnic friendship choices among Pakistani, Bangladeshi and white students within three schools characterised by varying ethnic composition and levels of diversity. Although many participants perceived ethnically diverse schools positively, students commonly described the majority of their friends and, in particular, close friends, as belonging to the same ethnic group. Pakistani and Bangladeshi students, although often homogenised as South Asian within academic studies on school segregation, were far more conscious of their own and the others’ cultural distinction than discussed by literature on ethnic minority – and in particular – Muslim youth. The findings demonstrate how presenting ethnic minority concentrations as self-segregated or resegregated can mask the everyday realities of students, who navigate racism, whether subtle or explicit, and find safe and accepting spaces to express their ethnic identities. Through using students’ own accounts of negotiating such challenges, this article adds to our understanding of young peoples’ experiences of multi-ethnic school settings.

From Catchment Areas to Parental Choice: Education Policy Reforms and Their Effects on School Segregation

Parents’ selective school choices play a key role in exacerbating school segregation across the globe. As a result, numerous studies have investigated parents’ choice practices, while less attention has been paid to the role of the institutional context itself. Taking the introduction of free primary school choice in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, as an example, in this article, I seek to provide insights into the motivations behind the policy reform and its subsequent effects. The article illustrates how the new admission system changes not only the roles, motivations, and strategies of parents, but also those of primary schools. Consequently, the abolition of primary school catchment areas led neither to more equality in choice nor to a responsible competition between primary schools. Instead, it reinforces social divisions and symbolic differences between primary schools.

Segregation, Inequalities and Discrimination

The aim of this paper is to show that school segregation not only has an impact on school achievement, but also on more qualitative issues such as the perception of inequalities and the feeling of discrimination. I propose an explanation for why the feeling of being trapped in segregated, ‘disreputable’ public schools, a feeling which is shared among people from disadvantaged and immigrant backgrounds, as well as parts of the lower-middle class, has a deep impact on social cohesion. We will see how this encourages working-class people to think more in terms of discrimination (segregation as the result of an intentional process) rather than in terms of inequality, calling into question public schools’ capacity for guaranteeing equal opportunity. This is another way of analyzing how people facing an unequal context perceive injustice.

Segregate, Discriminate, Signal: A Model for Understanding Policy Drivers of Educational Inequality

Decades after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling banned mandatory race-based separation of students to different schools, school segregation, and inequality in the United States are rapidly increasing. In this research synthesis, I propose a model for explaining how segregation and inequality are formed in urban and suburban school systems and exacerbated even in the absence of formal segregation policy. The model describes segregation as a component in a triangle of discriminatory education policy processes: segregation, discrimination, and signaling. Connecting these three seemingly distinct policy practices could provide a better explanation for the growing inequality in the U.S. school system.

The Education That Is Their Due

Chapter 2 identifies a distinct uptick in northern Black support for separate schools. The rise of scientific racism fueled anti-Black discrimination that accelerated alongside the first Great Migration and the Great Depression. Hostile whites segregated classrooms and buildings in defiance of state law as Black populations increased. At the same time, there is compelling evidence from New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan that Black families either passively accepted or actively requested separate classrooms and schools in order to access Black teachers. Many Black northerners believed separate schools would offer a higher quality education and more of the teaching and administrative jobs that sustained the Black middle class. Still, this position was far from universal, and many northern Black communities energetically resisted school segregation. A growing number of Black intellectuals and civil rights activists vehemently objected to any form of state-sponsored segregation and campaigned actively for school integration.