Housing, land use, and zoning policies are often siloed in such a way that they are considered and addressed separately from school segregation and students' opportunities to learn. But these policy areas can interact in powerful ways. This policy brief attempts to break down those siloes. Drawing on multiple bodies of literature, it explores what…

School attendance zone boundary (AZB) data remain relatively underdocumented and understudied within the field of education, despite their critical implications for educational (in)equity. AZBs shape student outcomes and residential sorting patterns both by determining the public schools a student is assigned to and by signaling neighborhood…

The report examines two communities in New York City's suburban Westchester County--Scarsdale and Port Chester--and the ways in which restrictive zoning impedes educational opportunities. The first part of this report examines how Scarsdale and Port Chester differ in their demographic makeups, home prices, and in the educational opportunities that…

This report examines the ways in which zoning laws affect housing and schooling opportunities in the Buffalo region. It begins with an examination of two communities--the Martin Luther King Park neighborhood in Buffalo and the suburban Village of East Aurora. In addition to the two Buffalo communities where discriminatory zoning has caused extreme…

Segregation on the basis of race or ethnicity is one of the most enduring and pervasive inequities in US public education. School segregation is determined not only by residential sorting and families' preferences but by local policy choices such as the drawing of school attendance boundaries. This report examines the role of individual school…

Many school districts consider family preferences in allocating students to schools. In theory, this approach provides traditionally disadvantaged families greater access to high-quality schools by weakening the link between residential location and school assignment. We leverage data on the school choices made by over 233,000 New York City…

Many policymakers agree that housing and land use reform is a top priority, particularly in New York State, in order to moderate housing prices. But an often-overlooked point is that such reform is also important in order to promote equal educational opportunity. This report proceeds in five parts. The first part takes a deep dive into how two…

The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents' perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school…

A robust body of geographic education policy research has been amassing over the past 25 years, as researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds have recognized the value of examining education phenomena from a spatial perspective. In this chapter, I synthesize 42 studies that examine education issues using a geographic information…

School desegregation and equitable access to educational opportunity takes alignment in the housing and education sectors. Racist housing policies and practices have systematically limited access to opportunity for generations of people of color, profoundly affecting their wealth, and perpetuating racial disparities in opportunity and well-being…

At a time when voters are keenly focused on the cost of living, housing affordability has become a hot political issue in many parts of the country, including New York State. Policymakers, grappling with what they can do to make housing more affordable, are actively seeking to reform longstanding local exclusionary zoning laws, policies that…

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…

The enduring condition of racial and ethnic segregation in schools and housing in metropolitan Hartford, Connecticut, is rooted in historical and contemporary racial discrimination and in practices and policies that exacted disparate harm on Black and Latinx people. School segregation both reflects and reinforces segregation in housing that was…

We indicate the size of family background effects in Sweden, Finland, and Estonia--countries that differ in both the rhetoric and extensiveness of the system-level school choice policies. Family background effect is defined as the dependence of student achievement on family background characteristics, such as parental education, income, and social…

Background: This article examines the contemporary implications of the "Milliken v. Bradley" (1974) decision for educational inequality between school districts in U.S. metropolitan areas. We focus upon four metropolitan areas that were highly segregated in the 1970s but which met different fates in court: We first examine Detroit and…