For the first time since 1968, local education authorities in Washington, D.C. embarked on a contentious process of engaging communities as part of a comprehensive revision of the city's student assignment and school boundary policies in 2013. Despite the potentially divisive nature of the issue, public deliberation went beyond re-drawing school…

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…

The University of Rochester and East High School in Rochester, New York, entered into a partnership in 2015, hoping to transform the school to prevent shut down by the state. Both partners were wary because of the district's failed attempts at reform and the history of similar partnerships elsewhere. A new state-level reform option allowed the…

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…

This study of a multi-district superintendency in rural Minnesota reveals how schools act as spaces where community boundaries expand as a result of partnership and collaboration. The project, informed by grounded theory, seeks to fill a key gap in understanding the experiences of school staff and community members in multi-district resource…

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…

This dissertation includes three essays on school choice. In Chapter 1 we consider the priority-based affirmative action policy in school choice. We weaken the responsiveness to affirmative action policy by requiring at least one minority student to be weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We find that under both the…

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…

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 county suffers from rural population decline, decreasing ADM, and is categorized as low performing, with only two of the six schools…

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…

The decision to close schools, reorganize, or consolidate districts is perhaps the most troubling and painful challenge a community can face (Flowers, 2010). The purpose of this study was to explore and provide a better understanding of the school district whole-grade sharing, reorganization, and/or consolidation phenomenon as seen through the…

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…