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Ann Owens
The Implications of Digital School Quality Information for Neighborhood and School Segregation: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Los Angeles
A digital information explosion has transformed cities’ residential and educational markets in ways that are still being uncovered. Although urban stratification scholars have increasingly scrutinized whether emerging digital platforms disrupt or reproduce longstanding segregation patterns, direct links between one theoretically important form of digital information– school quality data– and neighborhood and school segregation are rarely drawn. To clarify these dynamics, we leverage an exogenous digital information shock, in which the Los Angeles Times’ website revealed measures of a particularly important school quality proxy– schools’ value-added effectiveness– for nearly all elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Results suggest that although the information shock had no detectable effects on residential sorting or neighborhood racial segregation, it did exert modest effects on school sorting—particularly for Latino and Asian students— albeit not in ways that materially diminished school racial segregation because the racial compositions of high- and low value-added schools were broadly similar both before and after the information shock. We conclude that the urban stratification implications of digital information may be more nuanced than often appreciated, with effects shaped by racial heterogeneity in both constraints and preferences vis-à-vis specific types of information and operating through mechanisms beyond residential segregation.
Intersecting Inequalities: Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Differences in Math Achievement and School Contexts in California
Past research extensively documents inequalities in educational opportunity and achievement by students’ race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status (SES). Less scholarship focuses on how race/ethnicity and SES interact and jointly contribute to educational inequalities. We advance this burgeoning line of scholarship by charting math achievement trajectories and school socioeconomic composition by both student race/ethnicity and SES in California from 2014-15 through 2017-18. Linked administrative data allow us to operationalize student SES more richly than point-in-time free meal eligibility, a measure commonly used in education research. We find evidence of considerable racial/ethnic disparities in math achievement and school socioeconomic composition among same-SES students. White and Asian students score substantially higher on math achievement tests and attend higher-SES schools than same-SES Hispanic and Black students. Achievement and contextual inequalities are related: differential exposure to school SES by student race/ethnicity is associated with within-SES racial/ethnic achievement disparities. Our findings show that SES does not translate into the same contextual or achievement advantages for students of all racial/ethnic groups, demonstrating the importance of jointly considering student race/ethnicity and SES in future research and policy development.
Growing up Homeless: Student Homelessness and Educational Outcomes in Los Angeles
Homelessness is rising among public school students in large cities across the US. Using nine years of student-level administrative data, we examine how homelessness affects students’ mathematics and attendance outcomes within the Los Angeles Unified School District, including the differential effects of homelessness based on duration and timing of their homeless experiences. Results using inverse probability of treatment weighting find that homeless students score 0.13 SD lower on math assessments and miss 5.8 additional days of school than students who never experience homeless. Results suggest that current homelessness has larger negative impacts on math achievement and attendance than former homelessness, and that transitory homelessness has larger negative impacts than persistent homelessness on the same outcomes.