Housing, land use, and zoning policies are often siloed in such a way that they are considered and addressed separately from school segregation and students' opportunities to learn. But these policy areas can interact in powerful ways. This policy brief attempts to break down those siloes. Drawing on multiple bodies of literature, it explores what…

School attendance zone boundary (AZB) data remain relatively underdocumented and understudied within the field of education, despite their critical implications for educational (in)equity. AZBs shape student outcomes and residential sorting patterns both by determining the public schools a student is assigned to and by signaling neighborhood…

Growing global debates surrounding parental school choice underscore the relevance of school place allocation. While there is much research on school choice, the enactment of such allocation policy is rarely analysed. Responding to this research gap, this article investigates how local politicians in Berlin put public primary school place…

The report examines two communities in New York City's suburban Westchester County--Scarsdale and Port Chester--and the ways in which restrictive zoning impedes educational opportunities. The first part of this report examines how Scarsdale and Port Chester differ in their demographic makeups, home prices, and in the educational opportunities that…

While suburban schools across the country have become increasingly racially and economically diverse in recent decades, many remain highly segregated. School attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) play a critical role in shaping these patterns of within-district segregation. AZBs are especially important in suburban areas with growing and diversifying…

In the Houston Independent School District (HISD), how far a student lives from their zoned school determines their access to school transportation. Per district policy, students must live at least 2 miles from their zoned school to be eligible for district-provided school transportation. The Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC) examined…

This report examines the ways in which zoning laws affect housing and schooling opportunities in the Buffalo region. It begins with an examination of two communities--the Martin Luther King Park neighborhood in Buffalo and the suburban Village of East Aurora. In addition to the two Buffalo communities where discriminatory zoning has caused extreme…

This article traces the spatial history of New York City's geographic school subdistrict boundaries throughout the 20th century, exploring the historical relationship between race, space, and schooling in New York City and beyond. It seeks to both make the case for studying the spatial history of within-district education boundaries and put the…

Until the last quarter of the 20th century racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but is…

This article examines how school and non-school policies interact to reinforce or disrupt school segregation in the context of suburban communities and how these systems are maintained by structural and institutional mechanisms. Methodologically, we use a case study approach to delve deeply into the interpretation and implementation of school…

Segregation on the basis of race or ethnicity is one of the most enduring and pervasive inequities in US public education. School segregation is determined not only by residential sorting and families' preferences but by local policy choices such as the drawing of school attendance boundaries. This report examines the role of individual school…

Many policymakers agree that housing and land use reform is a top priority, particularly in New York State, in order to moderate housing prices. But an often-overlooked point is that such reform is also important in order to promote equal educational opportunity. This report proceeds in five parts. The first part takes a deep dive into how two…

The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents' perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school…

School rezoning, or redistricting, is the process by which school boards draw and redraw school attendance boundaries. These boundaries are key drivers of racial and economic school segregation but can also work to ameliorate it. Using a critical orientation to narrative policy analysis, this study examined the cultural politics of race and…

The current study explored the experiences and activities of school resource officers (SROs) in an urban school district. Twenty-eight SROs completed a survey assessing their roles in schools and a focus group explored how the SROs build relationships with students and the types of student concerns they help resolve. Themes from the focus group…