New Research: Literacy outcomes in segregated schools

I’m excited to feature new guest authors on the blog, with a new study that supports a fundamental pillar of school integration advocacy: segregated schools are bad for student learning. Specifically, the authors re-analyzed all studies, from the last 25 years, that compare English language arts/reading outcomes with school composition (race and SES). They went…

Suburban Segregation: A tale of two rezonings

I’m excited to feature a post from Dian Mawene, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who recently published new research about a school rezoning effort in a diversifying Wisconsin suburb. Coauthored with Aydin Bal, the piece explores overlapping forms of segregation at the neighborhood, school district and school levels, all of which is…

New Project & Data Request: Attendance zone boundary changes

A new project out of Penn State University – co-led by Erica Frankenberg (professor of education and director of the Center for Education and Civil Rights, home of this blog) and Chris Fowler (professor of geography) – aims to collect longitudinal data on school attendance zone boundaries from school districts across the country. The researchers…

New Research: School resegregation in Boston

A new report puts concrete (and indeed shocking) numbers on something we know anecdotally: White families with kids leave the city (in this case, Boston) when their kids get to be school-aged. Released last month, Kids Today from Boston Indicators looks at how these (and other) troubling trends have contributed to increased segregation in Boston’s…

SD Research Summary: Racial disparities in school discipline

I’m excited to feature a new collaborating author on the SD Notebook – Jeremy Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State and a colleague on the voluntary integration research team led by Erica Frankenberg. Racial disparity in school discipline is a national problem that is especially troubling when it comes to exclusionary school discipline…

Preschool Segregation, part 2: “Segregation at an Early Age” 2019 update

I’m thrilled to announce the release of “Segregation at an Early Age – the 2019 Update,” co-written with Erica Frankenberg and published by Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights. In part 1 of this post, I summarized three very recent studies of preschool segregation, part of a flurry of activity on this topic.…

SD Research Roundup: Secession, voluntary integration and school spending, part 2

Recent research has examined contemporary school segregation in a variety of forms, including segregation of students in early childhood education, the relationship between school segregation and residential segregation, and segregation that clusters low-income students in under-resourced schools. In part 1 of this post, I linked to a few of these studies before focusing in more…

SD Research Roundup: Secession, voluntary integration and school spending, part 1

In just the past few months, there’s been a number of new studies looking at various aspects of contemporary school segregation. Before I dive into the articles featured in this post, here’s just a few examples of segregation-related research from September and October:   The Urban Institute found that segregation in early childhood education is worse…