Historically, de jure systemic racism in the United States and the California housing market resulted in a lack of Black family access to housing in affluent neighborhoods, generating a Black-White wealth and income gap still observed today. Even after eliminating much of this outright discrimination, these economic gaps caused de facto…

Automatic admissions policies (AAPs, "percent plans") redistribute college-going opportunities across segregated high schools to diversify college enrollments, increasing opportunities at predominantly minority high schools. If students "game" AAPs by attending schools with increased opportunities, AAPs could alter racial…

In "The Other American Dilemma," Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson examine the experiences of Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Hispanos/as in their schools and communities between 1912 and 1953. Drawing from the Mexican Archives located in Mexico City and by venturing outside of the Southwest, their examinations of specific…

Parents make choices about their children's education within a neoliberal, racist system. Measurable metrics are used to evaluate school quality within a competitive, market-based system, yet those indicators often do not align with parents' definitions of a good school, and they obscure the role of race. This paper examines how white, privileged…

An ongoing struggle for affordable housing in Southern California has led many predominately White, middle, and upper middle- class families to seek home ownership in divested urban communities. This phenomenon, known as gentrification, can benefit a community by increasing property values, but often comes at a cost to longstanding, Black and…

Mexican Americans have a long history in the struggle to end school segregation and achieve educational equality. Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson trace that history through a series of court cases that show how their fight for desegregation both intersects with and differs from the more well-known struggle of Black Americans. In some cases, Mexican…

The brief first presents new facts on the extraordinary segregation of Black and Latino students in the state's public schools. Second, it shows that those groups are doubly segregated by race and poverty at the most educationally unsuccessful schools. These children are, on average, from families with far lower income and wealth and with parents…

As a Mexican American school desegregation case, historians, legal scholars, and educational researchers have all explored "Mendez v. Westminster's" significance. Each discipline, with its own modes of analysis, has constructed a distinct interpretation of the 1940s California case. However, in focusing on different aspects of…

A narrative of racial progress abounds in U.S. history, making it difficult for teachers to present complex interpretations of racial/ethnic discrimination. Historical complexity challenges such simplistic notions of race/ethnicity and encourages critical thinking. Adding anti-essentialist historical content about Latinx communities is one way to…

This paper explores the way in which psychologists classified immigrant children as feebleminded through the use of intelligence testing and how state organisations consequently segregated them from public schools based on the scientific evidence. First, I show the way in which the psychologist Lewis Terman utilised intelligence testing to…

Despite the widespread popularity of both Dual Language Programs (DLP) and charter schools in California, little is known about the intersection of these two school models. In a quantitative study utilizing several statewide databases, researchers explored four questions related to DLP and charter schools: 1) How many Latina/x/o students attend…

This article explores how a curricular intervention that merges antiessentialist historical content and historical inquiry plays a role in how students complicate the narrative of racial progress. The 3-day curricular intervention centers on "Mendez v. Westminster," a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation. The content and…

Many students are enrolled in segregated school systems with unequal access to resources. In this report, we present a measure that can help policymakers identify the schools in their system that are contributing the most to segregation. How our measure differs from traditional metrics: Much research on segregation relies on an absolute measure of…

Prior research suggests that parents of Hispanics, English learners, and students living in poverty exercise school choice less frequently than other parents, which may be a factor in the resegregation of public schools. This quasi-experimental, causal-comparative design tests whether ethnicity, language dominance, or socioeconomic status of the…

"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…