Study shows how school choice may sustain income segregation in U.S. classrooms

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Schools in the U.S. are often segregated by income, as well as race, a reality frequently attributed to residential segregation. Students assigned to K-12 schools based on where they live will, by extension, typically experience that same degree of segregation in their classrooms.

School choice offers the promise of breaking that connection, but a new University at Buffalo study suggests that it is unlikely to do so.

“What we see in this research is that the economic makeup of classrooms really affects parents’ preferences; specifically, parents tend to avoid classrooms populated by a large number of students from low-income families,” says Shelley Kimelberg, PhD, associate professor of sociology and criminology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, the paper’s corresponding author.

Findings from the experimental study, published in March in the journal Sociological Focus, suggest significant consequences as widespread school choice continues to take root, according to Kimelberg.

“We might assume that if a school is very high-performing, parents wouldn’t care about the income level of the students,” she says. “We found that is not necessarily true. Parents will still avoid academically strong schools if they have a high concentration of low-income students.

“Parents appear to be acting on biases against children from low-income families, and classrooms with higher proportions of those students.”

The neighborhood-to-school link is sometimes expressed as “housing policy is school policy.” It’s a phrase which suggests that one way to deal with inequality in schooling is to give low-income families more housing opportunities in communities with high-quality schools.

“The success of those policies, however, depends in part on whether families with more financial resources will continue to send their kids to schools as lower-income families move into them,” says Kimelberg. “Our study suggests that may not happen.”

School choice is a policy presented as a way for children in under-resourced schools to gain access to a better education. But studies show that economically advantaged families are often better able to and more likely to use school choice, making a bad problem worse.

“We see real limitations to school choice as a pathway to more equitable educational outcomes for students,” says Kimelberg.

For the study, Kimelberg and her UB colleagues, Shira Gabriel, PhD, professor of psychology, and Michael Poulin, PhD, associate professor of psychology, recruited families who had at least one child approaching school age.

After completing a demographic survey, the researchers presented participants with a series of slides showing a hypothetical classroom. Three characteristics were randomly varied on each slide: the percentage of students who qualified for a free lunch (a proxy for low-income); the classroom’s racial composition; and where the school ranked academically with other schools in the same district. Participants stated how much they preferred each classroom for their child.

“Parents disliked low-income classrooms regardless of the race of the kids or their academic performance,” says Kimelberg. “We found consistent bias against classrooms with a majority of low-income kids.”

In a real-world setting, Kimelberg notes, parents would not be presented with the information the researchers provided for each of the hypothetical classrooms in the study, but the same information is typically available. Online research can provide things like the racial composition of a district, the income distribution and the percentage of kids who qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, and how a school performs academically.

“This is another way the promise of school choice gets muddy in practice because we know that more advantaged parents have greater access to this information,” she says. “In certain communities, such as those that are gentrifying or highly unequal, this notion that we’re going to easily be able to sustain mixed-income schools is questionable.”