On a hot July day in 1854, 24-year-old schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings, accompanied by a friend, attempted to board a horse-drawn trolley to attend Sunday church services in Lower Manhattan. The Irish conductor refused, telling Jennings, who was African American, to await a horsecar for "her people." When Jennings resisted, the…

The article focuses on the school-based support that youths who are heading households get from public schools in South Africa. It is based on the study that was conducted focusing on the extent to which schools support youths who head households. The study adopted the qualitative research methodological approach where three methods were used to…

Educators in inner-city schools face many challenges in meeting the needs of students. Examples of such issues that are specific to urban public schools include poverty, ethnic segregation, broad-spectrum discrimination, poor policies, low student performance, inexperienced teaching staff, and low expectations of students. The general problem is…

"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…

Schools in the United States continue to be segregated by race and socioeconomic status, almost 70 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that aimed to desegregate schools. Segregation exists in three ways in K-12 schools: (1) Across districts. This is the case in about two-thirds of segregation in metropolitan areas; (2)…

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…

In this article, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley illuminates the challenges and opportunities posed by demographic change in suburban school systems. As expanding student populations stretch the enrollment capacities of existing schools in suburban communities, new schools are built and attendance lines are redrawn. This redistricting process can be used…

This article extends previous work on family structure and children's education by conceptualizing migration as a distinct form of family disruption that reduces parental input but brings substantial economic benefits through remittances. It examines the multiple and countervailing effects of migration on schooling in the context of substantial…

We examine whether student enrollment in nonneighborhood schools changes levels of racial segregation in public schools across urban school districts by comparing the racial composition of schools and their corresponding attendance area. This comparison was made possible by using geographic information systems (GIS) to link maps of elementary,…

This study captures the impact of school choice decisions by comparing the racial composition of the district schools students exited to the charter schools they entered. Charter school catchment areas are operationalized using a statewide student-level database to track school attendance patterns of individual students over 4 years. Charter…