Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Following the termination of court-ordered integration plans, schools were commonly integrated by explicitly factoring race into admissions decisions. This paper provides the first evaluation of how a federal mandate to remove racial considerations from a school district's admissions practices impacts the educational landscape and student outcomes. Understanding the impact of mandated race-blind admissions is particularly important in light of the subsequent Supreme Court rulings in the 2000s, which prevent schools from factoring race into admissions decisions.

To accomplish this, I study a unique reform where a large, urban school district was forced to adopt a race-blind lottery system to fill seats in its oversubscribed magnet schools. The district had previously integrated its schools by conducting separate admissions lotteries for black and non-black students to offset the predominantly black applicant pools. Using randomized offers to magnet schools, I estimate that the returns to magnet attendance fall by 50% under race-blind lotteries for black students.

To explore the mechanisms of these losses, I show that the switch to race-blind lotteries dramatically segregated subsequent magnet school cohorts and that the drastic change in peer racial composition led to substantial changes to the educational landscape. To do so, I exploit the fact that magnet schools did not segregate uniformly across the district. Because a racially integrated magnet with a predominantly black applicant pool would have experienced a larger shift in racial composition after the race-blind policy than a similar school with a racially balanced applicant pool, I use the difference between the proportion of black students receiving lottery offers and the proportion of black students in the applicant pool under race-conscious lotteries to predict exogenous increases in magnet school segregation.

I find that the more segregated schools spent less per-pupil, enrolled students with lower average baseline achievement and employed lower value-added teachers due to sorting. I also find that segregation is further exacerbated by "white flight" as white students transfer out of the district after attending more segregated schools. Ultimately, the mandated segregation decreases student standardized test scores and four-year college attendance.

This article highlights how school policies interact with race to determine socioeconomic inequities early in life—fitting with the theme of the conference.