@EdWorkingPaper{ai24-1012,
title = "The Implications of Digital School Quality Information for Neighborhood and School Segregation: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Los Angeles",
author = "Jared N. Schachner, Ann Owens, Gary D. Painter",
institution = "Annenberg Institute at Brown University",
number = "1012",
year = "2024",
month = "August",
URL = "http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai24-1012",
abstract = {A digital information explosion has transformed citiesÕ 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 informationÐ school quality dataÐ and neighborhood and school segregation are rarely drawn. To clarify these dynamics, we leverage an exogenous digital information shock, in which the Los Angeles TimesÕ website revealed measures of a particularly important school quality proxyÐ schoolsÕ value-added effectivenessÐ 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 sortingÑparticularly for Latino and Asian studentsÑ 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-ˆ-vis specific types of information and operating through mechanisms beyond residential segregation.},
}