Residential Location And School Choice Responses To Desegregation

This article examines the residential location and school choice responses to the desegregation of large urban public school districts. The purpose of the authors’ study is to examine the unintended consequences of school desegregation, including the resorting of households within metropolitan statistical areas and shifts in rates of private school attendance. When written, author Baum-Snow, was a part of the Department of Economics at Brown University. Author Lutz, is from the Federal Reserve board’s Research Division. The researchers construct a dataset on the evolution over time of population and enrollment counts by race, school type, and detailed spatial location. They interpret the datasets using an empirical model, which exploits variation across MSAs in the timing of court-ordered school desegregation. …show more content…
There were four cross-sections of tract-level data from the decennial census assigned to school districts using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software were the building blocks used to construct the datasets that were used in their analysis. They examine the effects of desegregation on public school enrollment by race, private school enrollment by race, and population by race in central districts. In the decennial census they observed residential location in order to measure the desegregation, specifically by court-ordered desegregation plans. Their remaining data included information on school enrollment by school type and additional demographic information by race for those living in central school