White Families With Children Are Major Contributors to School Segregation

A new study by sociologists at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles finds that White families with children tended to seek out neighborhoods where their children would attend public school that are predominantly White. Researchers examined Census data from 100 metropolitan areas in 2000 and 2010. They found that neighborhood racial segregation had declined but the decline was slower for families with children.

The study reports that only 9 percent of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District are White. But the average White child in Los Angeles lived in a neighborhood that was 46 percent White.

Ann Owens, an assistant professor of sociology and author of the study, said that “White parents may be avoiding school districts where Black and Latino children live because they use racial composition as a proxy for quality of a school and neighborhood. As long as neighborhoods are demarcated by school district boundaries limiting enrollment options, parents will take these boundaries into account when making residential choices, which may contribute to segregation between White and minority children.”

The study, “Racial Residential Segregation of School-Age Children and Adults: The Role of Schooling as a Segregating Force,” was published in the Journal of Social Sciences of the Russell Sage Foundation. It may be downloaded by clicking here.

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1 COMMENT

  1. Whites may be seeking White or at least less dark neighborhoods because they have a silly prejudice about being murdered, robbed, beaten, raped or otherwise tortured by Blacks or Hispanics or existing in hell holes. It appears that the study did not look into that issue very much.
    If this situation bothers you, especially as it pertains to the so-called “public” schools, which are the tenth plank of the Communist Manifesto, you should work to abolish compulsory, tax funded government controlled education.

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