College-educated White households have increasingly opted to live in central urban neighborhoods, transforming many parts of the urban core. While there is emerging evidence that schools may play a key part in this process, little is known about the extent of racial contract between children of gentrifier households and original residents. This…

Background: School choice models assume that parents and children have varied educational preferences and that catering to those preferences will result in superior educational experiences for all. Yet, we still know relatively little about how parents identify the best school "fit" for their children and families. This question is…

This "Equity by Design" research brief discusses the impact of COVID-19 on school segregation and integration in public schools. COVID-19 raised a lot of discussions already occurring around school choice, which connects to a larger conversation on the purpose of education and it being one of the most important public goods in American…

As large urban school districts increasingly turn to market-based reforms, arguing that they will improve school quality, better meet diverse student and family needs, and level the playing field for disadvantaged families, the distributional effects of those policies are still poorly understood. A growing literature on the bounded and embedded…

An important topic in the study of segregation are comparisons across space and time. This article extends current approaches in segregation measurement by presenting a five-term decomposition procedure that can be used to understand more clearly why segregation has changed or differs between two comparison points. Two of the five terms account…

Although school segregation in New York City (NYC) has received a great deal of attention for several decades, the vast majority of contemporary analyses, in the city and elsewhere, exclude private school students. This is mostly due to the fact that formal desegregation efforts have focused on public schools. Yet NYC's enormous private school…

Discussions of school integration often contrast the perceived deficits of segregated schools with the perceived strengths of schools with diverse student bodies. In this study, I examine the relationships that school community members infer between student demographics and school quality in diversifying areas of New York City. I use portraits of…

Alongside the immediate challenges of operating schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, over the past year, parents, students, and policymakers around the country have also debated equity and access to some of the country's most elite and segregated public schools. This qualitative case study examines how New York City activists conceptualized…

Eight years ago, in 2014, the Civil Rights Project issued a report that raised awareness about the dire state of segregation in New York State and, in particular, New York City schools. That report spurred substantial activism, primarily led by student groups, parents, teachers, and administrators, which has been influential in the current…

New York City public schools, serving nearly one million students, are some of the most segregated in the nation. The Bronx, one of the poorest school districts in New York City, serving students who are 83% Black or Hispanic, has been plagued by persistent racial disproportionalities. Top-down change efforts have consistently failed. Improvement…

New York City's Pre-K for All (PKA) is the nation's largest universal early childhood initiative, serving over 64,000 four-year-olds annually. Stemming from the program's choice architecture as well as the city's stark residential segregation, PKA programs are extremely segregated by child race/ethnicity. Our current study explores the complex…

This dissertation blends architectural history with disability studies to better understand the social construction of disability during childhood in the early twentieth century. Open-air schools and classes emerged as an educational experiment in the United States in 1904 and were abandoned by 1945. These spaces sought to improve the education of…

This paper explores the issue of social justice through the lens of equitable access to Advanced Placement courses in the City of New York High Schools, with focus on Advanced Placement Environmental Science. A critical component of the Advanced Placement Environmental Science course is the incorporation of environmental fieldwork. The National…

This article explores the history of school gardens in educational projects linked to four scholars at Teachers College (Bigelow, Dewey, Kilpatrick and Carney) during the early twentieth century. It concludes that gardening activities were designed primarily for urban children who lacked experience in farming. The role of gardening in experimental…

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…