Structured Choice: School Segregation at the Intersection of Policy and Preferences

March 2023

This paper conceptualizes segregation as a phenomenon that emerges from the intersection of public policy and individual decision-making. Contemporary scholarship on complex decision-making describes a two-step process—1) Editing and 2) Selection— and has emphasized the individual decision-maker’s agency in both steps. We build on this work by exploring, both theoretically and empirically, how policy can structure the choices individuals face at each step. We conduct this exploration within the empirical context of enrollment decisions among families in the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), which used a controlled school choice system to help achieve diversity aims. We first investigate the schooling choice sets that WCPSS constructed for families and then examine families’ schooling selections. We find that families were offered choice sets containing schools varying racial compositions, but that the racial makeup of schools in families’ choice set systematically varied by schooling type and student race/ethnicity. We further show that a majority of families enrolled in their district-assigned default school, with Black and Hispanic families more likely than white or Asian families to attend this option. Finally, we demonstrate that white or Asian families enroll in their default school at lower rates as the share of Black students increases.

Education level

K-12 Education

Topics

School Choice