We analyze the relationship between residential populations, school attendance zone boundaries (AZBs), and school enrollments in two large, countywide suburban districts, Fairfax County, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, from 1990 to 2010. A steep decline in white, school-age children and an increase in black, Hispanic, and Asian children…

U.S. public schools provide substantially different educational opportunities to students--even within school districts, where attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) shape most children's access to schools. The (re)drawing of AZBs is therefore a highly consequential policy decision. In this paper, I study how AZB changes in the Washington, D.C.…

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…

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to examine the prevalence and growth of segregation in K-12 public schools. This report examined the extent of (1) racial, ethnic, and economic divisions in K-12 public schools; and (2) district secession and any resulting student demographic shifts. To determine the extent of divisions along…

School district decentralization typically shifts authority and resources from central office administrators at the district level to leaders at the school level. Although decentralization reforms have been prevalent in urban educational contexts for decades, they often yield poor results for low-income, minoritized communities. In this article,…

Most U.S. school districts draw "attendance boundaries" to define catchment areas that assign students to schools near their homes, often recapitulating neighborhood demographic segregation in schools. Focusing on elementary schools, we ask: How much might we reduce school segregation by redrawing attendance boundaries? Combining parent…

When unified status was granted to numerous school districts, school boards developed redistricting plans to implement neighborhood schools. Social justice advocates decried these plans as they reversed over 40 years of progress, as many of these efforts resulted in resegregating schools homogenously grouped by race and wealth. Using piecewise and…

School district boundaries define more than just the area where a certain group of children attends a given set of schools. They also determine the taxing jurisdiction that supports those schools with local property taxes. Big differences in property value can lead to large funding gaps, even between neighboring districts. These disparities in…

School segregation is one of the most enduring inequities in US public education, reinforcing racial and ethnic gaps in academic and socioeconomic outcomes. School boundaries, whether between districts or between schools within a district, often help perpetuate school segregation in otherwise racially and ethnically diverse cities and…

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…

Purpose: This study investigated how superintendents lead the process of within-district racial and socioeconomic integration. Design/methodology/approach: The researchers used Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology to analyze interviews with superintendents, documents and videos from four school districts in suburban, southeastern…

School rezoning, or redistricting, is the process by which school boards draw and redraw school attendance boundaries. These boundaries are key drivers of racial and economic school segregation but can also work to ameliorate it. Using a critical orientation to narrative policy analysis, this study examined the cultural politics of race and…

Leaders of education policy continue to decentralize school districts, particularly in predominately large urban districts, despite mixed results from this reform. In this article, we seek to explain how decentralization came to fruition through the policymaking process in one of the largest and most diverse districts in the United States that…

This study explored the impact of rural school district consolidation in eastern North Carolina. Wilkins County is a low-income, low-performing county with an average daily membership (ADM) of 1,501 students. This case study reviews the process of consolidation one year after the 2017-2018 consolidation in terms of academic, financial, and…

Sixty-five years after the "Brown v. Board" decision, American schools are re-segregated and re-segregating. The mechanisms of this re-segregation are legal action, voluntary moves towards unitary status, unintended consequences of integration-oriented strategies, and an increasing trend towards the fracturing, or splintering of school…