Preferences, Proximity, and Controlled Choice: Examining Families’ School Choices and Enrollment Decisions in Louisville, Kentucky

Abstract

This study provides evidence studying one diverse, countywide district’s integration efforts utilizing school choice and parental preferences. The findings illustrate substantial differences about the way in which the district’s student assignment policy affects students. In particular, this choice-based integration policy with a weak geographic preference still advantages those who choose their nearest schools as well as white students and those living in more advantaged areas. Examining differences in families’ school preferences, whether students are assigned to their preferred school, and whether and where students enroll in schools illustrates how an integration-focused assignment policy can still result in segregation and inequality. Yet, by illustrating the many influences on family preferences beyond proximity, it also suggests the opportunity for using assignment policy to overcome persistent neighborhood segregation.

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge Jefferson County (Kentucky) Public Schools for providing data that I analyze here and support from WT Grant Foundation Grant No. 184309. Stephen Kotok provided helpful research assistance.

Notes

1 Although I use the terminology about “student choices,” given the age of the students, it is most likely parents who are making the choices about schooling preferences.

2 I also specified analyses to see if there were differences by the top three choices of school.

3 Because the data do not have individual characteristics for all students who chose not to enroll in 2014, this analysis is only conducted for 2011.

4 The fifth school had a small number of students for which this school was designated the closest.

5 This does not include students who were requesting magnet school or program assignments, which had some differences in application and assignment policies.

6 This reports the results of kindergarteners and first graders together because the plan applied to both. If results for kindergarteners or first graders diverge, I note that in the text. Models are also substantively similar for one of first three choices, though I only report results for first choice.

7 The coefficient for FRL students was not statistically significant when considering first graders for first-choice school.

8 Approximately 1,000 students either were not assigned to a school—possibly because they missed the application deadline or due to special educational needs—or did not enroll in the district.

9 Such findings build upon research about families' charter-school choices schools beyond those that are closest and in which school racial composition is influential (Frankenberg, Kotok, Schafft, & Mann, 2017). Most charter schools, however, do not necessarily intend to create integrated schools the way JCPS’s use of choice is designed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erica Frankenberg

Erica Frankenberg is an associate professor of education and demography and director of the Center for Education and Civil Rights at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on racial desegregation and inequality in K–12 schools with an emphasis on segregation in suburban areas, school choice and racial stratification, politics of school diversity, and the connections between school segregation and other metropolitan policies. She has published five books, including Educational Delusions? Why Choice Can Deepen Inequality and How to Make It Fair (from University of California Press, with Gary Orfield), and more than 50 articles in a range of professional journals. She received her doctorate from Harvard University and worked with the Civil Rights Project at Harvard and UCLA.