School diversity matches that of the communities from which the students are drawn

Fascinating just interpreting what is being conveyed.

Holy cow.

“Residential segregation alone explains more than 100 percent of school segregation in the U.S.” https://t.co/YnQPGK70T8

— Scott Imberman (@imbernomics) October 3, 2022

The original paper is here.  From the Abstract.

School segregation is determined by residential sorting, but also by policy choices such as the drawing of attendance boundaries and school siting. This paper develops a new approach to understanding the importance of each of these factors by calculating the distance-minimizing assignment of students to schools and asking whether actual assignments differ systematically by race. Using detailed census data with attendance boundary maps for nearly 1,600 school districts, I find that attendance boundaries create 5 percent more integration than a distance-minimizing baseline, and school siting plays almost no role. Residential segregation alone explains more than 100 percent of school segregation in the U.S. Some local governments act to mitigate school segregation, although their impact is small compared to residential choice.

I don't have access to the body of the paper.  Segregation is being used in a very technical sense, I think, basically the antonym of integration.  But in the vernacular, segregation harkens to legal and deliberate separation as well as to degree of racial mixing.  

The real question is not segregation (in the vernacular) but whether the racial composition of schools differs systemically from the communities they serve.  The focus on race (rather than class or religion) is also an issue.  I would argue that class ought to be prioritized over race but that's just me.  

The researcher is exploring whether setting school catchment areas (attendance boundaries) creates more or less segregation than if schools are spaced equidistantly from one another.  Presumably, setting attendance boundaries might make it easier to segregate schools than if you simply sited schools on an equal spacing basis.  That makes sense as a hypothesis though I assume there are two additional considerations that would need to be accounted for.

Setting attendance boundaries as a political process might make it easier to segregate (where there is some clear dominant preference) but it also might make it more difficult (where there is no such dominance or where ethnic changes occur within the established boundaries over time).  The second consideration is the impact that increasing density might have on school distribution and segregation.  Increasing density means more schools need to be closer to one another than before, causing a whole other dynamic.

What I think this research is saying is that:

The racial composition of schools reflects that of the neighborhoods they serve.  

The racial composition of schools can be changed by as much as five percent by using attendance boundaries rather distance minimizing boundaries

Against expectations, attendance boundaries appear to increase school diversity rather than decrease it.  

If this study reflects a reality, then school racial diversity matches community diversity and the only way to change the degree of school diversity is to change the degree of community diversity.  Government telling people where they ought to live based on their skin color is obviously anathema to most people and morally intolerable.  It is just another form of apartheid.  

Were this research to be replicated and sustained, what it really seems to do is call into question some of the shibboleths of the left.  Schools are not deliberately segregated to achieve a racial outcome.  The schools reflect people's free choices of where they wish to live.  

Another shibboleth popular among the left leaning public education policy circles is that high performing public schools (which tend on average to be whiter and more Asian) are high performing because they receive more funding.  Were that true, then an obvious solution would be to increase the number of black and hispanic students in the high performing schools in order to receive the benefit of that extra funding.

The extra funding myth has long been dismantled.  The link between school outcomes and funding is very weak (above a minimum).  In general, the public schools with the highest funding tend to be black and hispanic and to also have the worst results.

The willful segregation myth and the extra funding myth both made it easy and obvious what to do - mix the schools up based on race.  And it has never worked.  This research adds one more nail in that particular education public policy coffin.

At some point we will focus on culture and class, on goals and behaviors in order to achieve better school outcomes.  In the meantime, the Public Education leviathan is very slow to respond to evidence different from its ideological beliefs.