Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In the U.S., most children enroll in public schools based on the school district jurisdiction and local neighborhood school catchment zone in which their family lives. As a result, neighborhood and school racial segregation patterns reinforce one another. Neighborhood schools’ compositions reflect segregated neighborhoods, and neighborhood segregation occurs in part as parents try to maximize local school options when choosing where to live.

While a deterministic link between residential address and school assignment is still common, it has become less frequent among the over 2,500 thousand school districts across the country that now fund charter schools. Most charter schools are unregulated by local zoning rules and therefore draw on students from many neighborhoods across a school district. And although charters are only attended by 1 in 20 public school students nationwide, their share has more than doubled since 2000, with no sign of slowing.

What happens when charter schools expand in a school district? By providing parents with more flexibility in both school and housing decisions, charters may lead to changes in school and residential segregation. We hypothesize that if school segregation is largely a “de facto” function of neighborhood segregation, then added enrollment flexibility could lead to more integrated schools as families can more freely access preferred alternatives outside of their segregated neighborhoods. Conversely, if school access is a driver of residential decision-making, charter schools may enable families to consider a wider range of neighborhoods—including those with more racial diversity, cheaper housing costs, or proximity to other amenities—that could lead to a decrease in residential segregation.

Our study investigates the effect of charter school enrollment growth on changes in neighborhood and school segregation between 2000 and 2010. We use school population counts from the National Center of Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data and residential population statistics from the 1990-2010 decennial censuses and the 2008-12 American Community Survey. To our knowledge, this is the first study to simultaneously explore the effect of charters on school and residential racial segregation in districts across the U.S.

With multilevel structural equation models, we show that charter presence substantially increases school segregation but modestly decreases residential segregation. We also show that residential segregation among households with children is more responsive to charter sector expansion than those without children. And although we test for white-Hispanic and white-Asian segregation effects, we find that only white-black segregation is affected by charters. Notably, our findings are substantiated with a falsification test predicting segregation using future charter enrollment growth.

Our results have two critical implications. First, the fact that we find divergent effects in residential and school segregation reveals that, in the absence of expanded non-neighborhood alternatives, many families choose where to live based on where their children will attend school. Second, although we show that charter school policy weakens the typical neighborhood-school segregation link, it does so by creating a pathway for increased segregative school sorting rather than by integrating both residential and school peer environments.