School segregation today primarily affects the educational opportunities given to Black and Hispanic students in America. However, school attendance zones are changeable. With work, we can make our school systems more equitable.

Most children in the American public school system go to schools based on school attendance zones. Many people think of this zones as factual and unchangeable lines, when in fact, these zones are determined by administrative boundaries that not only can be changed but were drawn in the past in ways that intentionally segregate students by race.

Meet Quinn and Vera. They are both in fifth grade, but attend different elementary schools.

We’re going to follow them along in a day at school.

Quinn is greeted by the assistant principal as he arrives at school in the morning.

Vera chats with her friend as she heads in. A security guard watches students arrive.

Quinn starts his day with a math class. He was moved into an advanced math class this year and enjoys it.

Vera also has math. Her teacher is absent again - this is the 9th day this year - so the substitute gives them a quiz.

Quinn's math teacher has been teaching at his school for many years and is good at making the subject enjoyable and challenging.

Vera finished her quiz quickly and is now doodling as the others in class finish up their quiz. She's good at math, but is a bit bored in this class. Her school doesn't have an advanced math program for her grade.

After lunch Quinn stops by the nurse’s office. One of the nurses gives him a replacement rubber band for his braces.

Vera scraped her elbow during recess and wants to get it cleaned up, but their school only has one nurse and she is currently busy with another student. After a while, Vera gets patched up.

At the end of the day, Quinn and Vera are picked up by their parents and head home.

As they walk home, you may be wondering...
Why did Vera and Quinn have such different experiences at school?

Quinn had a full staff and teachers to support him and advanced track classes to meet his needs.

Vera faced more bumps in her day, with absent teachers and overworked staff members. Her performance in her classes exceeds her peers but there aren’t advanced track classes for her.

Vera and Quinn arrive home.

It turns out that they’re neighbors. They live right across the street from each other.

But they’re separated by an invisible line.

A school administrative boundary.

Why did Quinn and Vera have such different days at school?

Although Vera and Quinn are fictional characters, their different experiences at school are based on the statistical differences in neighboring schools across the United States.

The invisible line that separates Quinn and Vera is called a “school administrative boundary”. These boundaries designate which parts of a neighborhood are assigned to attend certain school. So, even though Quinn and Vera are in the same school district, they attend schools with different educational opportunities. These opportunities can either help set these students up for success or give them more hurdles to overcome, and this inequity can have lasting ramifications on higher education and factors like expected earning later in life.

A study by the Urban Institute in 2021, investigates these school administrative boundaries more closely. They found that often these boundaries are not arbitrary, as many may assume, but in fact often divide up neighborhoods based on their racial makeup.

Not all school zones segregate children, but many do.

Some of the boundaries are more unequal than others and some are carefully drawn to designate the areas with a higher population of Black and Hispanic students to one school, and the area with a higher population of White students to another school.

Diving deeper reveals that these boundaries can, and often do, reinforce racist “Redlining” policies that trace back to the 1930’s.

Researchers at the Urban Institute calculated the overlapping land area of these redlining areas with current school neighborhood assignments. This data reveals that many school neighborhoods that are now assigned to communities with more Black and Hispanic students tended to overlap with land that was once categorized as “Declining” or “Hazardous”. Meanwhile, nearby schools who now have a higher share of white students, tend to overlap with land areas that were once categorized as “Best” or “Desirable”.

The racist policies of the 1930’s are mirrored in today’s school neighborhoods.

As we saw with Quinn and Vera, a student’s school assignment can affect the quality of school they are assigned to. Some schools have better teachers, more staff, and more opportunities for students to be enrolled in gifted programs or advanced track courses.

These higher quality schools are disproportionately allotted to predominantly White communities. While nearby schools with newer and less trained teachers, fewer staff, and fewer advanced classes are more often allotted to areas with a higher share of Black and Hispanic students.

Schools with a higher share of White students perform, on average, 142% better on standardized tests than their neighboring schools. Given the stark differences in quality of teachers and staff, and the increased disciplining of Black and Hispanic students, it's not surprising that they aren't excelling at state exams.

Segregated schools exist across the United States. As part of their study, the Urban Institute labeled some boundaries between schools as "unequal". Broadly this criteria meant that the specific pair of schools had one side with a 25% higher share of Black or Hispanic students enrolled at the school, near the boundary, or within the neighborhood boundary. The full dataset from the Urban Institute had over 140,000 pairs of schools. Almost 2,500 of those had "unequal" boundaries, spanning across more than 600 school districts.

It's important to note, that just because a state has fewer "unequal" boundaries does not mean that it's providing better opportunities for Black and Hispanic students. In some regions this low number is due to low racial diversity overall.

Almost 100 years after "Redlining" policies were put in place, their repercussions are still evident across society and affect everything from home loans to air quality. And while it's important to dismantle all of those systems in favor of more equitable ones, it's hard to know where to start. Although school administrative boundaries may seem fixed, that's not the case. Many come up for review on an almost yearly basic. Communities have the opportunity to de-segregate their school zones and provide more equitable access to students of all races.

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