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While suburban schools across the country have become increasingly racially and economically diverse in recent decades, many remain highly segregated. School attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) play a critical role in shaping these patterns of within-district segregation. AZBs are especially important in suburban areas with growing and diversifying student populations. Using novel, longitudinal AZB data dating back to 1990, authors Sarah Asson, Erica Frankenberg, Christopher Fowler, and Ruth Krebs Buck studied the relationship between AZBs and segregation over time in three large suburban districts. They found AZB changes have not yet been realized as a force for desegregation. To do so will require more explicit action prioritizing racial and economic diversity.
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The Persistence of Segregation in the 21st Century
This article address whether, in the fifty years since the Kerner Commission and the Fair Housing Act, the US has made progress in reducing racial segregation. As a point of departure, I critique a recent report that claimed to document the “end of the segregated century.” I argue that while black-white segregation has declined, this report measured segregation in a way that overstated the extent of the changes. Further, I argue that looking at racial segregation in isolation ignores other demographic changes that have acted to magnify the impact of racial segregation. For example, economic segregation has been increasing in recent decades and interacts with racial segregation to produce high-poverty ghettos. Another change is the geographic restructuring of metropolitan areas, so that segregation is now increasingly organized by municipalities rather than by neighborhoods, with implications for access to publicly-funded amenities such as quality schooling. Finally, I show that there is a life-cycle aspect of segregation, so that children enrolled in school are more segregated than adults, which undercuts the impact of the small declines in segregation that have occurred. I conclude that racial segregation needs to be understood in terms of a broader set of factors that, operating together, limit spatial access to opportunity.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1636520
- PAR ID:
- 10078649
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Law & inequality
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0737-089X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 207-230
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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