Background: Recent work has documented declining public school racial/ethnic segregation, as students have become more evenly distributed across schools and districts since the turn of the century. However, we know little about how declines in school racial/ethnic segregation have affected students of different levels of economic resources. While…

Background: Despite accounting for 3% of the student population, multiracial students are the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the United States. Aligning with new federal guidelines, in 2008, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) revised its single-race reporting scheme for the Common Core of Data (CCD), permitting students to…

Background: Scholars have increasingly expressed concern about a new secessionist movement, grounded in a doctrine of localism and facilitated by permissive state policies regarding the formation of new school districts. Critics contend that school district secessions threaten to exacerbate patterns of segregation and inequality in schools.…

Scholars have often suggested that racial integration is inherently unstable--a transition point in the racial transformation of neighborhoods and schools. While much empirical attention has been paid to documenting changes in segregation in public school districts, in this study we provide initial evidence focusing on the stability of segregation…

"Gerrymandering" is known best as a tool to manipulate boundaries for voting districts, but school districts have long used the same tool to manipulate school boundaries. The author used geospatial techniques--mapping various kinds of demographic data onto school boundaries--to examine public school attendance zones and their effect on…

Background: While postwar suburban migration established suburbs as relatively affluent, homogeneous white enclaves distinct from the urban core, recent waves of suburbanization and exurbanization have been spurred largely by rapid growth in the nonwhite population. While these increases in suburban racial/ethnic diversity represent a significant…

Context: Scholars have increasingly raised concerns about the "fragmentation" or proliferation of metropolitan public school districts, citing the potential for fragmentation to facilitate racial/ethnic segregation by permitting individuals to sort more efficiently across district boundaries. In addition, scholars have expressed…

In this study, I employ geospatial techniques to assess the impact of school attendance zone "gerrymandering" on the racial/ethnic segregation of schools, using a large national sample of 15,290 attendance zones in 663 districts. I estimate the effect of gerrymandering on school diversity and school district segregation by comparing the…