When schools open: Student mobility and racial sorting across new charter schools in Kansas City, Missouri

ABSTRACT

Does opening new schools of choice in urban areas lead to increased racial isolation among students? We examine whether the availability of new charter schools in Kansas City, Missouri, shapes patterns of segregation using student-level data between 2012 and 2016. We find that White students are over-represented among those who switch into new charter schools, and that they enter schools with lower proportions of Black students and higher proportions of other White students. This suggests that the sorting of students into new charter schools led to slightly increased levels of racial segregation. But rather than a generalized phenomenon, this sorting appears to be due to two schools with particular characteristics. As cities look to attract more affluent and White families to their urban public schools by opening up new school options, we conclude by discussing how such policies might come at the expense of educational opportunities for lower-income, non-White residents.

Acknowledgments

We thank four anonymous reviewers and the editors for their helpful comments. We are grateful to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for their generous financial support of this project. The authors also thank Alice Opalka for her excellent research assistance; Brett Hembree, Noah Devine, and panelists and audience members at an annual meeting of the Association for Education Finance and Policy (Kansas City, Missouri, March 2019) for their comments on prior drafts; and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) for providing access to the data. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kauffman Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, or DESE. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. More recently, nonprofit organizations like Show Me KC Schools have aggregated data about charter schools in the city to allow for easier access to information (https://showmekcschools.org/schools/). Beginning in the 2019–2020 school year, Show Me KC Schools launched a universal online application and enrollment process for a substantial portion of the charter schools in the city (https://schoolappkc.schoolmint.net/).

2. Data based on authors’ calculations of the 2012–2016 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates. Given the focus of our study, we include census tracts on the Missouri-side of Kansas City. Predominantly White neighborhoods refer to census tracts where at least 75% of residents are White.

3. An additional three neighborhood schools opened in the 2014–2015 school year: Central Middle School, Hale Cook Elementary, and Northeast Middle School.

4. Based on 2010 census data, KC’s population, Black percentage, and Black-White diversity index (58.6, or 62nd out of 384 metropolitan areas) places it near cities like Cincinnati, Ohio; Columbus, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Memphis, Tennessee; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; in addition to larger cities like Houston, Texas; and Atlanta, Georgia (source: https://s4.ad.brown.edu/projects/diversity/Data/data.htm).

5. Two of the charter schools—Derrick Thomas College Prep and Hope Academy–Bennington Campus—had closed before the fall of 2015.

6. The total sample size of students who switch into new charter schools reported in Tables 3 and 4 (n = 4,019) is less than the total number of students we observe over the 5-year period who are enrolled in these schools (n = 5,350; see the “Data and methods” section) because, for this analysis, we need to observe a student’s previous school (often their school in the prior year) in addition to their current school. As a result, we do not include in our analyses here students who begin the observation period in one of the newly opened charter schools.

7. While we would prefer using a students’ residential address, that information is unavailable in our data. Further, we exclude students whose charter school selection in a given year is more than 20 miles from their current school. These are likely students who are making a residential move in addition to a change in schools. We experimented with different distance cutoffs for this restriction (e.g., 10, 40, and 50 miles) and the results were substantively similar. We also focus on students switching into charters schools and exclude those transferring into neighborhood public schools for a similar reason: the selection of a neighborhood school is more likely to coincide with or be necessitated by a residential move, which we cannot observe in our data. Our focus on charter school preferences follows the literature (see, e.g., Bifulco & Ladd, 2007).

8. These programmatic features are obtained from the Show Me KC Schools website, a resource for parents as they navigate their school options in the city (accessed here: https://showmekcschools.org/schools/). We also considered other specific programs (e.g., arts, culture, and language-based curricula), but these were not statistically significant predictors of the selection of a new charter school.

9. See the school’s “Core Values” on its website (http://www.crossroadsschoolskc.org/about/core_values), as well as Tach (2014) for a broader overview of the “diversity-by-design” policy initiative.

10. See the school’s mission and history on its website (https://academielafayette.org).

11. There are 17 schools within a two-mile radius of Academie Lafayette – Cherry, and 9 schools within a two-mile radius of Crossroads Academy. Results are substantively similar if we use smaller distances of 1 or 1.5 miles.

12. Neighborhood composition based on the percentage of school-aged residents (between 5 and 17 years old) who are White in nearby census tracts from the 2012–2016 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation [201808-5128].

Notes on contributors

Patrick Denice

Patrick Denice is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario. His research interests focus on non-normative and extended pathways to and through postsecondary education, the implications of workplace policies and institutions for workers’ wages, and how public school choice policies shape patterns of racial/ethnic segregation and stratification within and across schools. His recent work has been published in Social Science Research, Sociology of Education, and Demography. Denice has a PhD in sociology from the University of Washington.

Michael DeArmond

Michael DeArmond is a senior research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. His research looks at educational governance, bureaucratic reform, and policy implementation. His research has been published in academic journals, including Education Finance and Policy, Education Administration Quarterly, and Journal of Education Finance, as well as in edited volumes from the Brookings Institution Press, the Urban Institute Press, and Harvard Education Press. DeArmond has a PhD in Education and a MPA in Social Policy and Education, both from the University of Washington, and a BA in History from Brown University. Prior to working as an education researcher, he was a middle school history teacher.

Matthew Carr

Matthew Carr is the Strategy, Learning, and Evaluation Director at the Walton Family Foundation. In this role, he is responsible for ensuring the foundation Board and staff are provided with accurate, timely research and analysis to support strategic decision-making. Previously, Carr was the Director of Evaluation for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. He is the author of several articles, including ones in The Foundation Review, Non-Profit Quarterly, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Carr earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Public Administration from Kent State University, and a PhD in Public Policy from the University of Arkansas.