Racial Stratification and School Segregation in the Suburbs: Evidence from Los Angeles County

Abstract

Abstract Suburbanization helped fuel neighborhood and school segregation during the twentieth century, but many American suburbs have dramatically diversified since. How do White suburbanites respond? With residential mobility declining and educational choice increasing, White suburban families may emulate their core-city counterparts, leveraging school enrollment to buffer their children from disadvantaged minorities living nearby. Yet recent research suggests proximate nontraditional school options (e.g., magnet, charter, private) are a key ingredient facilitating this minority avoidance strategy, and they are scarce in the suburbs. I propose that strong racial preferences spur White suburban families living amongst Black and Latino children to enact them even in unfavorable circumstances: by sending children long distances to nonassigned schools. Logistic regressions employing Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey data on over 2,000 children linked to administrative data confirm this expectation. Spatial stratification research should supplement its longstanding focus on city-to-suburb residential flows and core-city educational flows out of traditional public schools with sharper scrutiny of suburban school sorting as a potential third path of segregation. This selection process may reveal racial preferences to be even stronger—and educational opportunity structures more malleable—than often assumed.