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1. Attendance zones in the suburbs

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00317217231156224  

   Asson, Sarah; Frankenberg, Erica; Fowler, Christopher S.; Buck, Ruth Krebs (February 2023, Phi Delta Kappan)

   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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2. Disparate Impacts: Balancing the Need for Safe Schools With Racial Equity in Discipline

   https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732219864707  

   Johnson, Odis; Jabbari, Jason; Williams, Maya; Marcucci, Olivia (October 2019, Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences)

   Policy responses to gun violence within K-12 school systems have not stopped the increasing frequency of their occurrence, but have instead increased racial and ethnic disparities in multiple forms of discipline. The crisis prevention policies that follow school shootings tend to exacerbate racial and ethnic discipline disparities (a) within schools as practitioners enact policies with discretion and bias, (b) between schools where policy is complicated by racial segregation, and (c) indirectly where academic consequences accrue to those who are not disciplined but attend schools with elevated school rates of discipline. Among the most promising policy alternatives to punitive disciplinary policy is restorative justice. 

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3. The Persistence of Segregation in the 21st Century

   Jargowsky, Paul A. (January 2018, Law & inequality)

   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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4. From residence to movement: The nature of racial segregation in everyday urban mobility

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020978965  

   Candipan, Jennifer; Phillips, Nolan Edward; Sampson, Robert J; Small, Mario (February 2021, Urban Studies)

   null (Ed.)

   While research on racial segregation in cities has grown rapidly over the last several decades, its foundation remains the analysis of the neighbourhoods where people reside. However, contact between racial groups depends not merely on where people live, but also on where they travel over the course of everyday activities. To capture this reality, we propose a new measure of racial segregation – the segregated mobility index (SMI) – that captures the extent to which neighbourhoods of given racial compositions are connected to other types of neighbourhoods in equal measure. Based on hundreds of millions of geotagged tweets sent by over 375,000 Twitter users in the 50 largest US cities, we show that the SMI captures a distinct element of racial segregation, one that is related to, but not solely a function of, residential segregation. A city’s racial composition also matters; minority group threat, especially in cities with large Black populations and a troubled legacy of racial conflict, appears to depress movement across neighbourhoods in ways that produce previously undocumented forms of racial segregation. Our index, which could be constructed using other data sources, expands the possibilities for studying dynamic forms of racial segregation including their effects and shifts over time. 

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5. Black adolescents’ motivation to resist the false dichotomy between mathematics achievement and racial identity

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-024-00219-9  

   Wilson, Melody; Matthews, Jamaal Sharif (December 2024, npj Science of Learning)

   Abstract This study investigates the racial-mathematical identity profiles of Black American adolescents. Survey data were collected in five schools across one U.S. urban school district at two time points (spring 2018 [n = 197] and spring 2019 [n = 210]). Based on extant research regarding psychological response patterns to racialized school stress, we investigated the existence of an identity negotiation pattern in which students were motivated to resist negative stereotypes about Black people by achieving well in mathematics. We conducted a latent profile analysis combining students’ self-beliefs across five indicators: racial centrality, racial public regard, mathematics attainment value, mathematics mastery experiences, and resistance motivation. Three distinct racial-mathematical identity profiles emerged: (1) Mathematics Devalued/Ambivalent, (2) Moderately Math Attained, and (3) Resistors. We found associations between profile membership and students’ gender, negative math emotions, and their receipt of cultural and critical mathematics instruction. We also found an association between the identity profiles and school type (academically selective “magnet” schools vs. open-enrollment neighborhood schools), but not in the direction that might be assumed. Moreover, we found that certain school environment factors (i.e., racial stereotyping and cultural and critical mathematics instruction) were significantly different in racially diverse magnet schools than in the neighborhood schools. Overall, our data reveal the existence of a highly motivated Resistor profile among Black students, that is predicted by cultural and critical mathematics instruction but underrepresented within this district’s selective magnet schools. 

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