Frankenberg, Fowler, Asson, & Krebs Buck (2023), <em>Russell Sage Foundation Journal of Social Sciences</em>
We analyze the relationship between residential populations, school attendance zone boundaries (AZBs), and school enrollments in two large, countywide suburban districts, Fairfax County, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, from 1990 to 2010. A steep decline in white, school-age children and an increase in black, Hispanic, and Asian children in both neighborhoods and the schools that serve them suggests that white households reluctant to send their children to diversifying schools are exiting (or never entering) these districts entirely rather than sorting within them. AZB changes, often due to the opening of new schools, affect a large portion of both districts, but boundary changes are associated with only a small portion of increased segregation observed in both schools and neighborhoods between 1990 and 2010. Our findings speak to the complex, multidirectional relationships between demographic trends and AZBs in diversifying, growing suburbs.
Asson et al. (2023). <em>Education Finance and Policy</em>
School attendance zone boundary (AZB) data remain relatively underdocumented and understudied within the field of education, despite their critical implications for educational (in)equity. AZBs shape student outcomes and residential sorting patterns both by determining the public schools a student is assigned to and by signaling neighborhood characteristics to prospective homebuyers. The limited access, regulation, and review of AZB data to date has left a gap in the knowledge base, having the potential to leave intact (and exacerbate) patterns of segregation that maintain inequities in educational opportunity. Lack of data also limits our ability to know whether and when AZBs may mitigate segregation. In this brief, we examine a novel data collection effort of current and historical AZB data—the Longitudinal School Attendance Boundary System—to explore the contextual and political factors associated with data access and data quality. We aim to show how factors that hinder access to quality AZB data affect the study of educational equity, and we advocate for more comprehensive, top–down governmental efforts to create, maintain, and collect these data.
Asson & Frankenberg (2022) <em>South Carolina Law Review</em>
White families' resistance to school desegregation in Mobile County, Alabama, has existed since Brown v. Board of Education and has adapted since the era of court-ordered desegregation. That resistance remains present to this day. Mobile County Public School System (MCPSS), once a countywide school district, was under court order from the time Birdie Mae Davis v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County was filed in 1963 until the district was declared unitary in 1997. Beginning in 1963, when one MCPSS school was among the first in the state to be desegregated, there was staunch resistance to school desegregation by both White families and school leaders largely permitted by the district court judges overseeing the case which persisted through the duration of the case. Levels of racial and economic segregation in the county's schools remained high even as the district was released from court oversight, as the district court judge responded to changing federal jurisprudence. Within the post-unitary context, school district secession has emerged in Mobile County as a new, seemingly race neutral but essentially race-evasive mechanism to maintain segregation. Since 2006, three municipalities within the county have formed their own independent school systems. Though stakeholders relied on largely race-evasive language to argue in favor of secession, their arguments mirror those arguments historically used to resist court-ordered desegregation, and the effects of the splits are clearly racialized and perpetuate patterns of segregation. The maintenance of segregation over the past several decades undermines goals of integration and social cohesion necessary for a functioning multiracial democracy.