Essays on the Role of Government in Shaping Racial Segregation in School and Work

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore Black-white segregation in public schools and in the workplace and the government’s role in perpetuating and mitigating said segregation. I argue that segregation is a social choice and, often through state action, the United States has created and maintained a bifurcated society in which Blacks and whites occupy separate social spaces. Despite the historical legacies of discriminatory government policies, I document contemporary instances in which government action has increased racial integration in public schools and in the workplace.

In Chapter 1, I highlight existing explanations of racial segregation in America’s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. I also provide a host of evidence regarding the consequences of racial segregation, much of which demonstrates that Blacks are segregated in ways that are distinctly disadvantageous for them.

In Chapter 2, I examine the impact of school boards on segregation through the drawing of school attendance zones. I use data from the School Area Boundary Survey for the 2013-14 school year coupled with fine-grained GIS census block shapefiles linked to data from the 2010 Decennial Census. Comparing enacted school attendance zones and generated counterfactuals which assign all students to the school in their district nearest to their home, I demonstrate that school boards affect the level of within-district school segregation. Despite expectations that school boards are incentivized to protect exclusive, predominantly white spaces, my findings suggest that school assignment policies are more frequently used as a voluntary measure to pursue greater racial integration. However, I also find that the costs of integration are borne much more by Black students than white students.

In Chapter 3, I measure the historical persistence of occupational segregation by race and education to uncover the degree to which differences in human capital explain the relegation of Black workers to roles with less compensation, authority, and mobility. I use data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. Decennial Censuses and the 2010 and 2019 1-year American Community Survey (ACS) accessed through the University of Minnesota Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). Even after controlling for differences in education, Black workers are in fundamentally different and lower quality occupations than similarly educated whites. Segregation has always been a feature of the American labor market; using a Monte Carlo simulation, I demonstrate that occupational segregation by race is significantly higher than we would expect under race-neutral conditions.

In Chapter 4, I examine the role of government as employer and make comparisons between occupational segregation in the public and private sectors over time. Using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. Decennial Censuses and the 2010 and 2019 5-year ACS, I find that Black and white employees of federal, state, and local governments have been substantially less segregated than workers in the private sector over the past four decades. While this finding holds for workers who are skilled through alternative routes (STARs) than a bachelor’s degree, public sector workers with a bachelor’s degree or more are as segregated or more segregated than similarly educated workers in the private sector. I also consider whether these differences emerge across all geographies. Among private sector workers, there is no difference in the level of occupational segregation in southern states versus those elsewhere. However, among public sector workers, the South is significantly less segregated than the rest of the country.