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…

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…

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…

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…

As educators across the country make a valiant effort to meet the needs of their students in response to the coronavirus crisis, the educational impacts of disparities in family resources and school funding are apparent. The crisis also reminds us of the many roles that schools play beyond academics. When students eventually return to school, will…

Over the past half century, law and policy have helped cement tremendous inequities into the structure of our cities. District boundary lines separating multiple, unequal school systems within a single metropolitan (metro) area play a central role in structuring racial and economic isolation. Using data from the National Center for Education…

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…

This report was prepared as part of the Morris Project, an ongoing study of New Jersey's Morris School District (MSD) and its potential to serve as a model for diversifying elementary and secondary schools. The district has achieved impressive, if incomplete, success at attracting and maintaining a diverse student population and offering them the…

This case study explored the socioeconomic integration outcomes of a central North Carolina Public School District's recent elementary level redistricting process. The district's student assignment policy seeks to balance schools in part by the socioeconomic status of students. Previous redistricting efforts used free and reduced price lunch…

Community control under a metropolitan structure will encourage suburban citizens who have fled the cities to reexamine the urban crisis and, one hopes, to realize that the future of urban areas must be the concern of all citizens, not only those who remain in central cities. (Author)

Presents an implicit enumeration algorithm for redrawing school attendance boundaries in order to meet integration requirements. The basis of the approach is the division of the city into smaller areas or zones corresponding to neighborhoods. (Author)

Concludes that splinter districts may not be carved from larger districts in the process of abolishing a dual system when the ultimate effect would be to hinder the desegregation process in the larger district. The prohibition is not, however, permanent. (Author/IRT)

To the now-expansive literature on the causes and consequences of segregation in schooling and of inequality in educational opportunity in the United States, the author would like to add a call for more attention to the politics of school districting--that is, to how and why districts are created, in the service of whose interests, and with what…