School Desegregation and White Flight: An Investigation of Competing Models and Their Discrepant Findings

Farley, Reynolds; Richards, Toni; Wurdock, Clarence

doi:10.2307/2112408

Cited by 75 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Once a desegregation plan became institutionalized, it appeared to have an integrating effect, except for city school districts that were more than 35% black (see also Rivkin 1994). Farley, Richards, and Wurdock (1980) found that desegregation within a school district in a given year was significantly associated with a loss of whites in that year. Specifically, a district where the segregation level declined by 25 points on the index of dissimilarity could anticipate losing one-and-a-half to two times as many white students as it would if there were no desegregation.…”

Section: School Desegregation and White Flightmentioning

confidence: 99%

School Segregation in Metropolitan Regions, 1970–2000: The Impacts of Policy Choices on Public Education

Oakley

Stowell

2008

American Journal of Sociology

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It has been argued that the effects of the desegregation of public schools from the late 1960s onward were limited and short-lived, in part because of white flight from desegregating districts and in part because legal decisions in the 1990s released many districts from court orders. Data presented here for 1970-2000 show that small increases in segregation between districts were outweighed by larger declines within districts. Progress was interrupted but not reversed after 1990. Desegregation was not limited to districts and metropolitan regions where enforcement actions required it, and factors such as private schooling, district size, and inclusion of both city and suburban areas within district boundaries had stronger effects than individual court mandates.Few court decisions have affected American society as deeply as the mandate to desegregate public schools issued in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education. A common view in the 1950s was that "you can't force integration." The experience of the last 50 years provides a test of that view. How has school segregation changed during this period? Where has there been progress, and how has change been shaped by policy choices about how public education is organized in different parts of the country? This study provides an updated evaluation of how court orders and federal intervention affected segregation within school districts in the post-Brown period, arguing that a "regime of desegregation" was established in the period from 1970 to 2000, under which actual desegregation progress did not depend directly on mandates.Although most scholars have focused on the policies of individual school districts and on court decisions that have been implemented at the district level (e.g., Orfield and Monfort 1992), this study treats school segregation as a metropolis-wide phenomenon. A large share of overall segregation, possibly more than half, is attributable to racial disparities between districts (Rivkin 1994;Clotfelter 1999;Reardon, Yun, and Eitle 2000). Accounting for segregation between districts is critical for assessments of the effectiveness of desegregation policies, because desegregation cannot increase interracial contact if it motivates white families to abandon racially mixed school districts. Many analysts from the 1960s to the

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Section: School Desegregation and White Flightmentioning

confidence: 99%

School Segregation in Metropolitan Regions, 1970–2000: The Impacts of Policy Choices on Public Education

Oakley

Stowell

2008

American Journal of Sociology

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“…18 Districts were rarely released from court supervision over our sample period. 19 See, for example, Coleman et al (1975), Farley et al (1980, Welch and Light (1987), Rossell and Armor (1996), and Reber (2005). Other studies have used similar samples to study the effects of court-ordered desegregation on educational attainment (Guryan, 2004) and crime (Weiner et al, 2007), and the causes of resegregation (Lutz, 2005).…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Brown to busing

Cascio

Gordon

Lewis

et al. 2008

Journal of Urban Economics

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“…Although early results were mixed, most researchers found evidence of white flight (Andrews 2002;Carr and Zeigler 1990;Farley et al 1980;Giles 1978;Smock and Wilson 1991;Welch 1987;Wilson 1985). Most studies also found that while white enrollment rates declined in the year following implementation of desegregation plans, many white students returned to these districts in the following years (Smock and Wilson 1991;Wilson 1985) although there were some exceptions in the South (Andrews 2002).…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, these models do not control for unmeasured characteristics of school districts that may be associated with simultaneous declines in white enrollment and increases in minority composition. Farley et al (1980) instead recommend deviations models, which relate the deviation from a district's average annual change of white students to the district's deviation from its average annual change in segregation, thus taking into account ''secular'' trends. We took a similar approach by estimating fixed effects models, which specify a separate error term for each school, effectively controlling for the non-time-varying effects associated with each school (Greene 2003;Stata Corporation 2003):…”

Section: Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Immigration, ethnicity, and the loss of white students from California public schools, 1990–2000

Hook

Snyder

2007

Popul Res Policy Rev

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This article investigates whether and the extent to which “white flight” from Hispanic and Limited English Proficient (LEP) students has been occurring in California’s public schools and further, examines the level (school or district) on which “white flight” may operate. Using school-level administrative data from the California Department of Education from 1990 to 2000, we estimate exponential growth rate models of white enrollment with school-level fixed effects. The results shed light on the implications of immigration for school segregation in the United States. The analysis indicates that white enrollment declined in response to increases in the number of Spanish-speaking LEP and Hispanic students, and that “white flight” from LEP or Hispanic students occurred more at the district than the school level in the case of primary schools, and at the school level for secondary schools. In addition, schools with higher percentages of Spanish LEP students in the school than the district, and with higher percentages in the district relative to the county, experienced greater losses in white enrollments than other schools, thus suggesting that higher levels of segregation in the wider metropolitan area accelerate white flight. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007Hispanic children, Immigration, Low English Proficiency, School segregation, White flight,

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School Desegregation and White Flight: An Investigation of Competing Models and Their Discrepant Findings

Cited by 75 publications

References 15 publications

School Segregation in Metropolitan Regions, 1970–2000: The Impacts of Policy Choices on Public Education

School Segregation in Metropolitan Regions, 1970–2000: The Impacts of Policy Choices on Public Education

From Brown to busing

Immigration, ethnicity, and the loss of white students from California public schools, 1990–2000

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