Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Role of School Context and Parenting on Racial Neighborhood Sorting

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Choosing where to live involves an array of potentially important factors, from housing size, quality and cost to various local neighborhood characteristics, amenities and municipal services. Prior research has shown that what matters most varies over individuals' lifetimes, and that families raising children are particularly attentive to local schooling conditions. This project applies these prior insights to understand neighborhood racial segregation in the post-Civil Rights era, analyzing how local school racial diversity and mandated school racial desegregation policies influence where white and black families choose to live and why they move.The project is designed as a statistical analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed a nationally representative sample of white and black families nearly every year from 1968-2011. Family residential location year-by-year is analyzed with a focus on how the residential choices of adults raising young and school-aged children differ from adults who do not have child caretaking responsibilities. A range of neighborhood-level demographic data from the U.S. Census is used to contextualize these decisions. In addition, the project uses geographic software to link housing location to educational context, including local school racial composition and district desegregation policy as well as per pupil expenditures, average class size, and, in more recent years, school-wide reading and math test proficiency levels. The project will evaluate the relative importance of school racial composition on the discrete housing choices of families with children weighed against the various non-racial factors that inform these decisions.