Racial Preferences for Schools: Evidence from an Experiment with White, Black, Latinx, and Asian Parents and Students

Abstract

Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents’ and students’ willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics potentially correlated with race, white and Asian families preferred white schools over black and Latinx schools, Latinx families preferred Latinx schools over black schools, and black families preferred black schools over white schools. Results, importantly, demonstrate that racial composition has larger effects on white and Latinx parents’ preferences compared with white and Latinx students and smaller effects on black parents compared with black students. To ensure results were not an artifact of experimental conditions, I validate findings using administrative data on New York City families’ actual school choices in 2013. Both analyses establish that families express heterogenous racialized school preferences.

Racialized Perceptions of Anticipated School Belonging

“…At the end of the survey, participants indicated their age, gender, race/ethnicity, language spoken at home, whether the student had failed a seventh-grade class, and their current school’s name. The Supplemental Appendix and Hailey (2021) include further details on survey methodology.…”

“…Charter, magnet, and other schools of choice are typically more segregated than their surrounding communities (Sohoni & Saporito, 2009). Furthermore, families are more likely to prefer and apply to, and children are more likely to attend, schools with larger proportions of students from their racial ingroup 1 (Billingham & Hunt, 2016; Denice & Gross, 2016; Hailey, 2021; Saporito & Lareau, 1999).…”

“…Other researchers challenge the assumption of colorblind preferences. They propose that families evaluate desired school characteristics, such as safety and fit , based on schools’ racial makeup, on their personal racial biases, and in response to racial stereotypes and discriminatory practices perpetuated in educational systems (Billingham & Hunt, 2016; Cooper, 2005; Cucchiara, 2013; Hailey, 2021; Holme, 2002; Posey-Maddox et al, 2021). Few quantitative studies on school choice explicitly measure both families’ perceptions and their racial biases, making it difficult to examine whether and how school racial composition influences families’ evaluations of prospective schools.…”

Segregation, Diversity, and Pathology: School Quality and Student Demographics in Gentrifying New York

“…In doing so, they recognize that advantaged families’ choices about where to send their children to school—and how to interact with the market-based policies that shape these decisions—may be simultaneously motivated by self-interest and influenced by discourses of school quality (Chaparro, 2021; Sattin-Bajaj & Roda, 2020). Educational choices, like the residential choices in which they are entwined, are often influenced by the racialized reputations of schools and neighborhoods (Evans, 2021; Hailey, 2021; Holme, 2002; Lareau & Goyette, 2014). As Wells (2018) argues, these reputations are both discursively constructed and demographically inflected:No matter how supportive neighbors in a mostly Black community are of each other or how phenomenal teachers in a school serving low-income students of color may be, these places and institutions—one usually nested within the other—are rarely, if ever, deemed to be highly reputable or even “good.” (Wells, 2018, p. 4)…”

“…In doing so, they recognize that advantaged families' choices about where to send their children to school-and how to interact with the market-based policies that shape these decisions-may be simultaneously motivated by self-interest and influenced by discourses of school quality (Chaparro, 2021;Sattin-Bajaj & Roda, 2020). Educational choices, like the residential choices in which they are entwined, are often influenced by the racialized reputations of schools and neighborhoods (Evans, 2021;Hailey, 2021;Holme, 2002;Lareau & Goyette, 2014). As Wells (2018) argues, these reputations are both discursively constructed and demographically inflected:…”