School Segregation, Educational Attainment and Crime Evidence from the end of busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg

By Stephen B. Billings, David J. Deming, Jonah E. Rockoff. 2014

284 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the impact of the end of race-based busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools ("CMS") on academic achievement, educational attainment, and young adult crime. In 2001, CMS was prohibited from using race in assigning students to schools. School boundaries were redrawn dramatically to reflect the surrounding neighborhoods, and half of its students received a new assignment. Using addresses measured prior to the policy change, we compare students in the same neighborhood that lived on opposite sides of a newly drawn boundary. We find that both white and minority students score lower on high school exams when they are assigned to schools with more minority students. We also find decreases in high school graduation and four-year college attendance for whites, and large increases in crime for minority males. The impacts on achievement and attainment are smaller in younger cohorts, while the impact on crime remains large and persistent for at least nine years after the re-zoning. We show that compensatory resource allocation policies in CMS likely played an important role in mitigating the impact of segregation on achievement and attainment, but had no impact on crime. We conclude that the end of busing widened racial inequality, despite efforts by CMS to mitigate the impact of increases in segregation.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4cf816b04af04f0d2bb799257eae0101300e501d

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Citations in the corpus

The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes (2019, unknown): “Several studies show that school segregation negatively impacts academic test scores and other educational outcomes (Guryan, 2004; Lutz, 2011; Billings et al., 2014).”
The Long-Term Consequences of Teacher Discretion in Grading of High-Stakes Tests (2016, background): “More generally, we contribute to the literature that documents long-term impacts of a range of school policies, including school desegregation (Billings et al., 2014); school choice (Ahlin, 2003; Sandström and Bergström, 2005; Björklund et al.”