NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Back to results
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
ERIC Number: EJ1034770
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Oct
Pages: 21
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0003-1224
EISSN: N/A
Decomposing School Resegregation: Social Closure, Racial Imbalance, and Racial Isolation
Fiel, Jeremy E.
American Sociological Review, v78 n5 p828-848 Oct 2013
Today's typical minority student attends school with fewer whites than his counterpart in 1970. This apparent resegregation of U.S. schools has sparked outrage and debate. Some blame a rollback of desegregation policies designed to distribute students more evenly among schools; others blame the changing racial composition of the student population. This study clarifies the link between distributive processes of segregation, population change, and school racial composition by framing school segregation as a mode of social closure. I use a novel decomposition approach to determine the relative contributions of distributive processes and compositional change in the apparent resegregation of schools from 1993 to 2010. For the most part, compositional changes are to blame for the declining presence of whites in minorities' schools. During this period, whites and minorities actually became more evenly distributed across schools, helping increase minority students' exposure to whites. Further decompositions reveal the continued success of district-level desegregation efforts, but the greatest barrier to progress appears to be the uneven distribution of students between school districts in the same area. These findings call for new research and new policies to address contemporary school segregation.
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://sagepub.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Institute of Education Sciences (ED); National Science Foundation
Authoring Institution: N/A
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305B090009; DGE-0718123
IES Cited: ED560723