Noncontiguous school attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) have a unique, relatively uncommon shape that assign two or more non-adjacent residential areas to the same school. Given their ability to shape school enrollments by taking advantage of residential sorting, noncontiguous AZBs have historically been linked to explicit efforts to both segregate…

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…

Background/Context: School segregation scholarship underlines that litigation challenging the segregation of Mexican American students in Texas schools stressed their legal racial identity as white. "The other white race strategy," as scholars call it, granted Mexican Americans the right to access resources designated for the country's…

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…

During U.S. school desegregation, education leaders played crucial roles that showcased their capacity to humanize their Black students. Their actions, we posit, reveal their level of racial literacy. Using oral history interviews and archival records, we examined school desegregation implementation through a racial literacy lens. We analyzed…

"Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) officially ended legal (de jure) segregation, but desegregation outcomes overall fell short of this nation's ideals of equality and justice. As a result, children of color suffer. The purpose of this study was as follows: 1) To measure school segregation by race and ethnicity in Texas, and 2) To…

Absent a nationwide plan for universal public prekindergarten, states and districts have taken various approaches to increasing access to school-based educational opportunities for their youngest learners. Though some of these programs have focused on making public prekindergarten available to all families, others have targeted families most in…

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…

Each year, the federal government provides billions of dollars in support for low-income families in their acquisition of housing. In this analysis, we examine how several of these subsidized housing programs, public housing and Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) financed housing, relate to patterns of school segregation for children. We use…

Studies show that historically underserved students are disproportionately assigned to less qualified and effective teachers, leading to a "teacher quality gap." Past analyses decompose this gap to determine whether inequitable access is driven by teacher and student sorting across and within schools. These sorting mechanisms have…

Sixty-five years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the federal and judicial role in school desegregation has declined. In a more difficult political and legal environment, it has fallen on school districts to develop and implement voluntary integration plans through diversity-minded student assignment…

"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…

The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "Data for Actionable Knowledge." Contents include: (1) Office for Civil Rights…

This report is the result of a year-long exploration of the effects of charter schools and the issues that surround them. Each of its eleven issues-based stories tells what the Network for Public Education (NPE) has learned not only from research, but also from talking with parents, community members, teachers, and school leaders around the nation…

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…