Location, location, location: The spatial quality of urban school locale classifications in the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data.

Abstract

As part of its mission to monitor the condition of education in the U.S., the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) assigns a geographic locale indicator to each public school in the Common Core of Data (CCD)---the official administrative universe of public schools and school districts in the U.S. These locale indicators are used to help construct representative samples for other NCES surveys; they are used determine program eligibility; and educational researchers regularly use them to examine differences in educational conditions (e.g., City vs. Suburban vs. Rural). This investigation examines the adequacy of these official locale assignments for public schools in urban areas. I argue that the criteria and classifications used to assign geographic locales to urban public schools are technically, theoretically, and spatially inadequate. The results of this investigation are based on a review of educational and non-educational research, as well as a case study of locale assignments for 1,826 schools and 1,174,484 students in the Baltimore-Washington DC metropolitan area. The analysis incorporates demographic and geographic data from Census 2000, school administrative data from the NCES Common Core, and digital orthophotos of the metropolitan area to assess the adequacy of NCES school locale assignments. It relies on GIS technology to conduct a spatial comparison between the current CCD school locale model and an alternate model that corrects for key technical and theoretical shortcomings in the current CCD typology. Findings indicate that 10% of schools in the case study were inadequately assigned under the current official locale model. The primary reasons for these misassignments includes a failure to account for emerging edge cities, inadequate delineation of residential suburbs, and a failure to identify small and large towns within metropolitan areas. Inattention to these spatial issues has important implications for federal data collection efforts and for current and future research on urban education.