Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools: Residential Segregation and the Search for a Good School

Chapter 3. Declining Significance of Race?

64   Chapter 3   Declining Significance of Race? Salvatore Saporito and Caroline Hanley A s we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, race remains a powerful social category that shapes patterns of residence and educational opportunity in the United States. This volume examines the relationship between patterns of residential and educational choice, seeking to problematize the concept of choice by asking how it reproduces social inequalities by race and class. As Paul Jargowsky demonstrates in chapter 4 of this volume, residential segregation by race and by class are mutually reinforcing, with racial segregation playing a key role in shaping patterns of economic segregation. Jargowsky shows that black-white residential segregation declined between 1990 and 2000—thereby demonstrating that the most recent declines in black-white residential segregation are consistent with the steady decadal declines that scholars have observed between 1970 and 2010 (Iceland 2009; Logan and Stults 2011). Still, black-white residential segregation remains high in most metropolitan areas and their core cities, and residential segregation drives racial inequality in public schools. This chapter approaches the relationship between residential and educational segregation by race from a different perspective by focusing on the relationship between community racial composition and white private school choice. Previous research shows that white families are more likely to leave public schools as the proportion of black children in their community increases (Saporito 2003, 2009). The correlation between community racial composition and the school choices of white children has been directly linked with racial segregation in public schools (Saporito and Sohoni 2007). Yet, no studies have examined these patterns historically, over the entire post–civil rights period, and across a nationally representative sample of places. Developing a historical perspective describing the relationship between community racial composition and school choice is important because it directs attention to the Declining Significance of Race?    65 shifting social context that shapes the actions of individuals, including school choice. As Kimberly Goyette discusses in chapter 1 of this volume , changes in the legal framework supporting racial integration and in the control and financing of education are institutional factors that may inform both the decision to send one’s children to a private school, and the consequences of that decision for those families and their wider communities. We examine the changing relationship between community racial composition and private school enrolment among white families from 1970 to 2010 using decennial U.S. Census data to evaluate the relative magnitude of household- and community-level factors that are correlated with private school enrollment—and, critically, whether these factors have changed between 1970 and 2010. We find that race remains a relatively important factor in predicting private school enrollment compared with other predictors such as a community’s poverty rate or the social and economic characteristics of a child’s family. Thus, compared with other predictors of private school enrollment, race still remains a relatively important factor shaping white parents’ decisions to enroll their children in private schools. Residential and School Segregation A large body of literature seeks to unpack the causes of black-white residential segregation and public school segregation, as well as the relationship between the two. As Goyette discusses in chapter 1, blackwhite residential segregation declined substantially between 1980 and 2000 but remains high in absolute terms. Black-white school segregation, meanwhile, declined in the 1970s and 1980s but increased dramatically in the 1990s.Although residential segregation is a key dynamic contributing to public school segregation, school segregation is both greater in magnitude and more persistent than residential segregation. Private schools and public school choice programs are alternative processes contributing to public school segregation. As Maria Krysan, Kyle Crowder, and Michael Bader discuss in chapter 2 of this volume, multiple potential mechanisms may contribute to residential segregation and, by extension, public school segregation. Krysan, Crowder, and Bader outline the Big Three explanations—economics, discrimination, and preferences—as well as interactions among the Big Three, information asymmetries, and differences in community knowledge and life course experiences. Following a preponderance of the sociological evidence, we adopt a preferences-based perspective and, specifically, use the concept of out-group aversion to inform our analysis and derive expectations. This perspective holds that preferences perpetuate segregation as members of sociohistorically advantaged groups try to maintain 66    Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools those advantages by avoiding social spaces occupied by disadvantaged groups. In the U.S. context, white Americans maintain segregation by avoiding neighborhoods and schools...