Elly Field, Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University

Title: Understanding the ‘Package Deal’: Disentangling Parents’ Intertwined Preferences for Schools and Neighborhoods

Abstract: My research takes as a starting point the education policies that link schools and neighborhoods by assigning students to schools based on where they live. These policies, in effect, build segregated schools from segregated neighborhoods. Qualitative work has documented that parents often account for this link when deciding where to live, citing a desire to find the “package deal” of a good neighborhood with a good local school. Yet, in studying how race shapes parents’ preferences, past experimental research has only examined these contexts in isolation. Using an original stated-choice experiment, I propose and test two theoretical frameworks for how the package deal influences parents’ joint preferences for schools and neighborhoods. I find that the package deal means that parents’ preferences for neighborhoods are shaped by the characteristics of the local schools and that their preferences for schools are shaped by the surrounding neighborhood. Further, I find that White and Latino parents seek out racially isolated schools and neighborhoods together. For White families, this means that when considering a majority non-White neighborhood, the package deal remains unappealing even when the school is predominantly White. In contrast,Black parents prefer to avoid being a racial minority in both their schools and neighborhoods but are satisfied when just one context is majority Black. I discuss the implications of these intertwined, interactive preferences for research on racial segregation and inequality, in particular how individual preferences shape racial segregation and how the link between schools and neighborhoods affects segregation dynamics.

No ITP seminar meeting for Thanksgiving recess