Does Diversity Still Matter?Revisiting the Role of Racial and Socioeconomic Diversity in K-12 Education

Abstract

Despite efforts toward school integration following the historical U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, evidence shows that American schools have continued to see de-facto segregation along both racial and socioeconomic lines. This dissertation focuses on racial and socioeconomic diversity in the school context and strives to understand whether and how de-facto school segregation might shape educational inequality in the long run. In the first empirical chapter, I use survey data from the Monitoring the Future Study (MTF) to examine the influence of school socioeconomic context on students’ educational expectations. The results pointed to context-specific meanings of diversity. In particular, in low-SES schools, the positive association between diversity and educational expectation is more pronounced among students with less educated parents than among their peers with more educated parents. However, an opposite pattern was found in medium- and high-SES schools, where students’ relative socioeconomic disadvantage in school acts as a moderator that attenuates the association between diversity and expectations. Consequently, in more advantaged schools, socioeconomically disadvantaged students benefit less from socioeconomic diversity than their more affluent peers, while in less-advantaged schools they benefit more. This chapter thereby points to both the benefits and potential drawbacks of school socioeconomic integration policies and suggests that socioeconomically disadvantaged students might not always be the ones who benefit most from such policies. In the second empirical chapter, I revisited the relevance of school racial diversity by applying a quasi-experimental design. Using data from the 2010 U.S. census and Monitoring the Future (MTF), I examined whether school racial context might play a role in shaping students’ race-related values. The results showed that even after adjusting for selection bias with the use of a full matching technique, students who attend less racially diverse high schools are significantly more likely to hold pro-segregation school preferences. I argued that ongoing school segregation may have a self-perpetuating tendency—schools lacking racial diversity might themselves become the soil in which pro-segregation ideologies are reproduced. The last empirical chapter moves above school-level analysis and considers the variation in racial and socioeconomic diversity at the school-district level. Using data from the Common Core Data (CCD) and the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), I applied a longitudinal perspective to explore whether diversity trajectories differ across different school districts and examine the association between diversity trajectories and district-level test scores. The findings showed that predominantly-white school districts saw slight increase in racial diversity but remained the type of school districts with the lowest racial diversity. In comparison, mostly-nonwhite school districts saw noticeable decline in racial diversity, which was particularly driven by the decline in share of white students and increase in the proportion of low-income and Hispanic students. The results also suggested that school districts that underwent faster withdrawal of white students also tended to see decreases in district-level test scores over time. Taken together, this dissertation contributes to the literature on both diversity and educational equity by offering a more refined understanding of racial and socioeconomic diversity in schools and school districts, and their implications for educational stratification. Findings from these analyses are particularly relevant given the continued debates regarding the effectiveness of school integration efforts and can provide crucial insights for policy makers who aim to tackle ongoing challenges of school segregation.