In this ethnographic study, Alexandra Freidus investigates the dilemmas of whiteness that challenge a youth-led campaign for school integration in New York City. Analyzing field observations, interviews, and internal documents, she illustrates the ways whiteness shaped young people's identities as allies and activists, contributed to an…

Criminal activity is seasonal, peaking in the summer and declining through the winter. We provide the first evidence that arrests of children and reported crimes involving children follow a different pattern: peaking during the school year and declining in the summer. We use a regression discontinuity design surrounding the exact start and end…

In the fall of 2021, an engaged group of NYU graduate students assembled to discuss Angie Thomas' YA novel "The Hate U Give." The class was composed of one Black student among a group of white students. On the night the group discussed "The Hate U Give," the freedom of discourse broke down significantly. The white students…

New York City offers an example of the national trend to expand dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs, yet only a small proportion of multilingual learners are enrolled in these programs in city schools. Our examination of new DLBE programs in three city schools builds on research about the "gentrification" of DLBE.…

Although school segregation in New York City (NYC) has received a great deal of attention for several decades, the vast majority of contemporary analyses, in the city and elsewhere, exclude private school students. This is mostly due to the fact that formal desegregation efforts have focused on public schools. Yet NYC's enormous private school…

In large urban districts, schools enrolling more white students tend to have higher performance ratings. We use an instrumental variables strategy leveraging centralized school assignment to explore this relationship. Estimates from Denver and New York City suggest the correlation between school performance ratings and white enrollment shares…

Coronavirus disease 2019 exacerbated health inequities in Bronx Communities. This study explored vaccine hesitancy among a random sample of faculty and students from Hebert Lehman College. Findings suggest faculty are largely vaccinated (87%), while 59% of students are unvaccinated. Significant gaps in information were found related to safety and…

We provide novel evidence on the broader impacts of school choice systems by quantifying disparities in peer continuity from middle to high school in New York City. We find that Black and Hispanic students and those in high-poverty neighborhoods attend high school with a much smaller fraction of their middle school or neighborhood peers than their…

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 large urban districts, schools enrolling more white students tend to have higher school performance ratings. We use an instrumental variables strategy leveraging centralized school assignment to identify the drivers of the correlation between racial make-up and ratings. Estimates from Denver and New York City suggest the relationship between…

Families indicate that fit and safety are priorities in school selections. It is not clear, however, whether school racial composition shapes families' perceptions of anticipated school belonging. Using a survey experiment with students and parents actively choosing NYC schools, I find that families expressed racialized judgments of belonging.…

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 this dissertation, I empirically investigate the changes in the market structure after new entrants, and how these changes affect the welfare of market participants. In Chapter 1, using records for public and charter schools in New York City, I empirically show that public schools adjusted after charter schools entered the neighborhood. I…

School security measures have become commonplace in recent years. Still, little quantitative research has examined how this trend shapes students' perceptions of school. This study examines how students' exposure to school security relates to their sense of school connectedness, with particular attention to the difference between white and…

New York City's universal prekindergarten (pre-K) program, which increased full-day enrollment from 19,000 to almost 70,000 children, is ambitious in both scale and implementation speed. We provide new evidence on the distribution of pre-K quality in New York City by student race/ethnicity, and investigate the extent to which observed differences…