School desegregation policies aim to redistribute educational resources and opportunities more equitably, but they have not always done so. Evidence indicates that political factors, including resistance from White parents and legal constraints, have undermined desegregation policies' potential to fulfill their aims. Yet, a few studies suggest…

The authors argue that from the perspective of distributive justice, school district fragmentation--meaning both the existing reality of hyper-proliferated school districts and the practice of further breaking larger districts into smaller ones--produces three distinct injustices. First, it undermines racial solidarity and the bonds of community.…

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,…

This is the executive summary for the full report, "Crossing the Line: Segregation and Resource Inequality between America's School Districts." School funding debates in the United States tend to center on how much money school districts should receive, and through what policies and formulas. But they almost never focus on the district…

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 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…

Background: Scholars have increasingly expressed concern about a new secessionist movement, grounded in a doctrine of localism and facilitated by permissive state policies regarding the formation of new school districts. Critics contend that school district secessions threaten to exacerbate patterns of segregation and inequality in schools.…

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…

Public schools have long been considered a public good in America. But that ideal is far removed from the lives of millions of schoolchildren. Public school district doors are not always open to every student in a community. Instead, geographic boundaries of school districts mostly determine who is eligible to attend district schools -- limiting…

Despite decades of critiques and scores of innovations designed to abolish or weaken it, the school district remains a central institution of the American educational system. Yet, although the district remains the primary agent of local democratic control and serves as the main unit for educational decisions, relatively little attention has been…

In this article, I discuss the promise of geospatial techniques for education policy research and how increased attention to the historical context of spatial data can enhance that work. While scholarship utilizing geographic information systems has added considerable breadth to our understanding of education policy, recent geospatial studies in…

In this qualitative case study, we explore the political impulses behind suburban secession from the 2013 Memphis-Shelby County merger, the largest school district consolidation in recent history. Decades removed from the Civil Rights Movement, during a period of stark inequality, colorblind law and policymaking, and a diminished understanding of…

Although the school mapping restructure (SMR) program in rural China mainly aims to improve the efficiency of education, this paper aims to show that the principle of educational equity should be given more attention, as evidence suggests that some children lose the opportunity to learn at a local village and rural families have different…

Educational policy makers continue to promote non-instructional service consolidation as one method to reduce operating costs through "economies of scale". Unfortunately, there is essentially no empirical evidence on the size or source of cost savings associated with such measures. Using panel data from 2004-2010, this mixed methods…

As the number of charter schools has grown nationally, there is increasing discussion of the consolidation of such schools into charter districts in which all schools would be charter schools from which parents would have the freedom to choose the school that they wished their student to attend. A major question is how such a charter school…