This article provides a review of prior empirical work exploring whether and to what extent school district racial composition affects the costs associated with providing equal educational opportunity to achieve a common set of outcomes. This prior work mainly involves education cost function modeling, on several specific states and in an earlier…

New York City's school system is among the most diverse and segregated in the United States. Using difference-in-differences and placebo tests, we evaluate two desegregation policies in two geographic districts in New York City, District 3 and District 15. Both districts attempted to lower economic segregation within their district while…

School assignment in Boston and New York City came to national attention in the 1970s as courts across the country tried to integrate schools. Today, district-wide choice allows Boston and New York students to enroll far from home, perhaps enhancing integration. Urban school transportation is increasingly costly, however, and has unclear…

The Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD) avoided federal oversight to comply with the desegregation ruling for nearly 30 years after "Brown v. Board of Education" by establishing a neighborhood concept for school attendance boundaries. "Jenkins v. Missouri" ended in 1995 with a U.S. Supreme Court decision to…

The ethnic and racial makeup of the United States has changed during the last several decades. Scholars have qualitatively shown how these changes affect school districts but have not identified their scale. We examine residential demographic change using a novel dataset derived from a geographic technique that leverages satellite imagery with…

In cities across the United States, affluent White newcomers are moving into historically Black neighborhoods, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for public schools. In many cases, the newcomers either avoid their local schools or use their political power to push aside families who have lived in the neighborhood for years. But there's…

School assignment in Boston and New York City came to national attention in the 1970s as courts across the country tried to integrate schools. Today, district-wide choice allows Boston and New York students to enroll far from home. Although 1970s desegregation efforts likely benefited minority students, urban school transportation is increasingly…

In this autoethnographic article, I describe the ways in which I have used and adapted Descriptive Inquiry and the descriptive processes to further understand and support the needs of marginalized populations across three settings: a bilingual special education classroom in an urban school district, a research study with Spanish-dominant mothers,…

This is the policy brief for the discussion paper, "Still Worth the Trip? School Busing Effects in Boston and New York." While choice systems offer students in segregated neighborhoods access to schools that may be more integrated and of higher quality, does busing lead to improved academic performance as measured by higher test scores…

In "A Single Garment", Genevieve Siegel-Hawley explores the leadership, policies, and practices that support contemporary school integration. Drawing on a wide range of sources, as well as her own experience as a parent, former student, and teacher, Siegel-Hawley provides a richly layered account of four Richmond, Virginia schools, each…

Following the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans public schools underwent a variety of changes including a mass influx of charter schools as well as a demographic shift in the racial composition of the district. Using school-level data from the Louisiana Department of Education, this study examines the extent that New Orleans public schools…

Two separate school districts--a city one and a county one--operated independently in Durham, North Carolina, until the early 1990s. The two districts merged relatively late compared to other North Carolina cities, such as Raleigh and Charlotte. In Durham, residents in both the county and city systems vehemently opposed the merger until the county…

Since the first charter school law passed in Minnesota in 1991, over 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing the publicly funded, privately managed, and semiautonomous schools of choice. Ever since the first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992, the battle for fair funding has raged across the land. On the one hand,…

New York City is the nation's largest school system. Once again racial integration of schools in New York has become a hot button issue. It appears that much work needs to be done before enacted changes to middle school admissions policies in two city districts can refer to the present time period as the dawn of a new age of racial justice. Mayor…

This study investigated the efficacy of race-neutral student assignment policies following the 2007 Supreme Court decision in "Parents Involved". Highlighting one urban school district--Chicago Public Schools--we examined differences in racial composition at their elite, "selective enrollment" high schools before and after…