Do Irregularly Shaped School Attendance Zones Contribute to Racial Segregation or Integration?

Abstract

This research investigates if and how much the shapes of school attendance zones contribute to racial segregation in schools. We find that the typical school attendance zone is relatively compact and resembles a square-like shape. Compact zones typically draw children from local residential areas, and since local areas are often racially homogeneous, this suggests that high levels of racial segregation in the largest school districts are largely structured by existing residential segregation. Still, this study finds that the United States contains some attendance zones with highly irregular shapes—some of which are as irregular as the most irregular Congressional District. Although relatively rare, attendance zones that are highly irregular in shape almost always contain racially diverse student populations. This racial diversity contributes to racial integration within school districts. These findings contradict recent theoretical and empirical scholarship arguing that irregularly shaped zones contribute to racial segregation in schools. Our findings suggest that most racial segregation in school attendance zones is driven by large-scale segregation across residential areas rather than a widespread practice among school districts to exacerbate racial segregation by delineating irregularly shaped attendance zones.

Irregularly-shaped school attendance zones and racial integration

“…Prior literature (Saporito and Van Riper 2016) shows that attendance zones are about one standard deviation less irregularly-shaped than U.S. Congressional Districts. Since some Congressional Districts are notoriously irregular, this does not necessarily mean that the typical attendance zone in the typical school district is compact.…”

“…It is also possible that "gerrymandered" school attendance zones are associated with racial integration-a contention I make in this paper. The logic of this claim is straightforward: since people of the same race tend to cluster together in residential areas, irregularly-shaped zones that sprawl hither and yon have the potential to draw children from distant "black," "brown," and "white" residential areas (Saporito and Van Riper 2016).…”

Geospatial Analysis: A New Window Into Educational Equity, Access, and Opportunity

“…GIS researchers have examined the shape of school districts in relation to internal and contiguous community demographics. Saporito (2017) and Saporito and Van Riper (2016) investigated the extent to which the shapes of school attendance zones were associated with racial segregation in schools. To make their determination, they tested the “irregularity” of school district shapes across the United States using GIS compactness measures .…”

“…In their analysis of SABINS data, Saporito and Van Riper (2016) reported that most U.S. school districts are compactly shaped or square-like. Such shapes tend to mimic the racial homogeneity of the surrounding area, without much variation.…”

A Map Is More Than Just a Graph: Geospatial Educational Research and the Importance of Historical Context

“…Scholars who found that irregularly shaped boundaries alleviate racial and income segregation in schools make different assumptions about what an ideal compact shape looks like and, as a result, what measure can best assess irregularity. For example, Saporito and Van Riper (2016) combined three measures of irregularity: concavity, the Polsby-Popper index, and the convex hull index. With concavity, the ideal compact shape is any perfectly convex shape, such as a circle, rectangle, or triangle (Chambers & Miller, 2010).…”