School Opportunity Hoarding? Racial Segregation and Access to High Growth Schools.

Area of Science:

• Educational Policy
• Sociology of Education
• Quantitative Sociology

Background:

• School segregation may lead to unequal educational opportunities, with minority students often in lower-quality schools.
• Existing research has not sufficiently linked segregation to school quality measures based on student achievement growth.
• Achievement growth offers a more direct measure of learning opportunities than static achievement levels.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the distribution of a growth-based measure of school quality in California's public elementary schools.
• To quantify disparities in access to high-growth schools using standard inequality indices.
• To decompose these disparities across geographic and organizational scales to test the school opportunity hoarding hypothesis.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a dataset of public elementary schools in California.
• Applied standard inequality indices to a growth-based measure of school quality.
• Decomposed inequality in exposure to school growth by geographic and organizational scales.

Main Results:

• Found mixed support for the school opportunity hoarding hypothesis.
• Observed small advantages for White and Asian students in accessing high-growth schools.
• Determined that the majority of inequality in exposure to school growth occurs within racial groups.

Conclusions:

• Growth-based disparities in school quality are predominantly local, unlike disparities in absolute achievement.
• Most inequality in learning opportunities, measured by achievement growth, is concentrated within racial groups.
• Emphasized the importance of within-district policies to address school-based inequalities in educational opportunities.