Kendra Bischoff’s research while affiliated with Cornell University and other places

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Publications (16)


Local Economic Segregation and Opinions about Income Integration in Schools
  • Article

September 2023

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23 Reads

City & Community

Kendra Bischoff

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Emily Sandusky

Income-segregated contexts may limit residents’ exposure to income inequality, suppressing concerns about economic disparity and support for economic integration. In this article, we assess the relationship between residential income segregation and attitudes about the importance of income integration in schools to understand the link between local economic conditions and individuals’ attitudes about social equity. We test this relationship by measuring residential income segregation at two geographic scales—meso-level institutional segregation between school districts and micro-level neighborhood segregation between census tracts. We find a negative relationship between school district income segregation in individuals’ residential counties and beliefs about the importance of income integration in schools, but no relationship between more fine-grained neighborhood income segregation and these same beliefs. The results suggest that the degree to which residents problematize income-segregated school contexts is associated with the relative income homogeneity of the school districts where they live, which represent the salient political boundary for the administration of educational services. These findings contribute to broader knowledge about the varied pathways and spatial scales through which segregated environments may shape beliefs about social and economic inequality.



Identifying Progress Toward Ethnoracial Achievement Equity Across U.S. School Districts: A New Approach

April 2021

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30 Reads

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6 Citations

Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness

We draw on novel district-level test score data to describe novel approaches for measuring ethnoracial achievement gaps and assessing trends toward achievement equity from 2009 to 2016. Using SEDA data, we estimate gap trends for each grade over time in each district. We measure trends in both within-district gaps—comparing Black or Hispanic to White students in the same district—and national gaps—comparing a district’s Black or Hispanic students to White students nationally. Withindistrict ethnoracial gaps shrunk in one-third to two-thirds of districts, depending on subject and ethnoracial dyad. Across subjects and ethnoracial dyads, national gaps shrunk in more than half of districts, indicating that non-White students gained on White students nationally, but not in their own districts. Our findings add complexity to the achievement gap literature by (1) estimating gaps at the district level; (2) noting considerable variation in the magnitude of gap shrinkage across districts; (3) pointing to the importance of comparison group and imperfect correspondence of within-district and national gap trends in districts; and (4) identifying variation in gap trends across grades and subjects.


Figure 1: Average attendance zone-school racial imbalance by school attendance zone neighborhood type: 2000 and 2010.
School Choice, Neighborhood Change, and Racial Imbalance Between Public Elementary Schools and Surrounding Neighborhoods
  • Article
  • Full-text available

March 2020

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147 Reads

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20 Citations

Sociological Science

The expansion of school choice in recent years has potentially generated demographic imbalances between traditional public schools and their residential attendance zones. Demographic imbalances emerge from selective opting out, when families of certain racial and/or ethnic backgrounds disproportionately choose not to enroll in their neighborhood-based public schools. In this article, we use a unique data set of school attendance zones in 21 large U.S. school districts to show how changes in neighborhood conditions and school choice options influence race-specific enrollments in locally zoned public elementary schools from 2000 to 2010. We find that the presence of more school-choice options generates racial imbalances between public elementary schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, but this association differs by type of choice-based alternative. Private schools, on average, reduce the presence of non-Hispanic white students in locally zoned schools, whereas charter schools may reduce the presence of nonwhite students in locally zoned schools. Increases in neighborhood-school racial imbalances from 2000 to 2010 were concentrated in neighborhoods undergoing increases in socioeconomic status, suggesting that parents’ residential and school decisions are dynamic and sensitive to changing neighborhood conditions. Selective opting out has implications for racial integration in schools and the distribution of familial resources across educational contexts.

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The Segregation of Opportunity: Social and Financial Resources in the Educational Contexts of Lower- and Higher-Income Children, 1990–2014

September 2019

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94 Reads

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46 Citations

Demography

This article provides a rich longitudinal portrait of the financial and social resources available in the school districts of high- and low-income students in the United States from 1990 to 2014. Combining multiple publicly available data sources for most school districts in the United States, we document levels and gaps in school district financial resources—total per-pupil expenditures—and social resources—local rates of adult educational attainment, family structure, and adult unemployment—available to the average public school student at a variety of income levels over time. In addition to using eligibility for the National School Lunch Program as a blunt measure of student income, we estimate resource inequalities between income deciles to analyze resource gaps between affluent and poor children. We then examine the relationship between income segregation and resource gaps between the school districts of high- and low-income children. In previous work, the social context of schooling has been a theoretical but unmeasured mechanism through which income segregation may operate to create unequal opportunities for children. Our results show large and, in some cases, growing social resource gaps in the districts of high- and low-income students nationally and provide evidence that these gaps are exacerbated by income segregation. Conversely, per-pupil funding became more compensatory between high- and low-income students’ school districts over this period, especially in highly segregated states. However, there are early signs of reversal in this trend. The results provide evidence that school finance reforms have been somewhat effective in reducing the consequences of income segregation on funding inequities, while inequalities in the social context of schooling continue to grow.


Has Income Segregation Really Increased? Bias and Bias Correction in Sample-Based Segregation Estimates

October 2018

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47 Reads

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103 Citations

Demography

Several recent studies have concluded that residential segregation by income in the United States has increased in the decades since 1970, including a significant increase after 2000. Income segregation measures, however, are biased upward when based on sample data. This is a potential concern because the sampling rate of the American Community Survey (ACS)—from which post-2000 income segregation estimates are constructed—was lower than that of the earlier decennial censuses. Thus, the apparent increase in income segregation post-2000 may simply reflect larger upward bias in the estimates from the ACS, and the estimated trend may therefore be inaccurate. In this study, we first derive formulas describing the approximate sampling bias in two measures of segregation. Next, using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that the bias-corrected estimators eliminate virtually all of the bias in segregation estimates in most cases of practical interest, although the correction fails to eliminate bias in some cases when the population is unevenly distributed among geographic units and the average within-unit samples are very small. We then use the bias-corrected estimators to produce unbiased estimates of the trends in income segregation over the last four decades in large U.S. metropolitan areas. Using these corrected estimates, we replicate the central analyses in four prior studies on income segregation. We find that the primary conclusions from these studies remain unchanged, although the true increase in income segregation among families after 2000 was only half as large as that reported in earlier work. Despite this revision, our replications confirm that income segregation has increased sharply in recent decades among families with children and that income inequality is a strong and consistent predictor of income segregation.


The Racial Composition of Neighborhoods and Local Schools: The Role of Diversity, Inequality, and School Choice: THE COMPOSITION OF NEIGHBORHOODS AND LOCAL SCHOOLS

September 2018

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134 Reads

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48 Citations

City & Community

In an education system that draws students from residentially based attendance zones, schools are local institutions that reflect the racial composition of their surrounding communities. However, with opportunities to opt out of the zoned public school system, the social and economic contexts of neighborhoods may affect the demographic link between neighborhoods and their public neighborhood schools. Using spatial data on school attendance zones, we estimate the associations between the racial composition of elementary schools and their local neighborhoods, and we investigate how neighborhood factors shape the loose or tight demographic coupling of these parallel social contexts. The results show that greater social distance among residents within neighborhoods, as well as the availability of educational exit options, results in neighborhood public schools that are less reflective of their surrounding communities. In addition, we show that suburban schools are more demographically similar to their neighborhood attendance zones than are urban schools.



The civic effects of schools: Theory and empirics

January 2016

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62 Reads

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20 Citations

Theory and Research in Education

In concert with policy trends, theory and research on the ways in which school context affects student outcomes have focused almost exclusively on academic achievement in recent years. Given the fundamental role that schools should play in civic education, and the potential for schools to affect civic equality, more empirical and theoretical research is warranted to help predict and explain how schools affect civic outcomes. The author outlines the ways in which schools act as civic institutions and analyzes how theories of school effects might be applied to hypotheses regarding youth civic behavior and attitudes. The author provides two examples of mechanisms that provide unique pathways to civic learning in schools – student diversity and the existence of a micro-political environment – and discusses the consequences of the unequal distribution of civic opportunities in schools. She concludes with a discussion of the challenges for empirical research on the civic effects of schools.


Citations (13)


... These findings are consistent with the observation in the education literature that socioeconomic resources are key factors in educational achievement [32,42,43]. Although segregation across districts and communities continues [44][45][46], it also has become clear that economic and other resources of individual schools within a single school district can be just as unbalanced and segregated as across districts [47][48][49]. Without future research to learn more about the SEF students' socioeconomic situation, we cannot generalize the findings regarding SEF experience in relationship to school location. ...

Reference:

High school science fair: School location trends in student participation and experience
Identifying Progress Toward Ethnoracial Achievement Equity Across U.S. School Districts: A New Approach
  • Citing Article
  • April 2021

Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness

... These parents may also use their socioeconomic resources to purchase additional learning materials and provide stimulating learning opportunities-for instance, in early childhood care and education programs, after-school tutoring, extra-curricular activities, and instructional holiday camps (Duncan and Murnane 2011). Moreover, socioeconomically advantaged parents may invest their resources to live in neighborhoods with better schools and more academically oriented student populations (Aikens and Barbarin 2008;Bischoff and Tach 2020). Typically, these parents are very familiar with the education system and are actively involved in their children's schooling (Benner, Boyle, and Sadler 2016), giving their children a leg up in the educational attainment process (Lareau 2002). ...

School Choice, Neighborhood Change, and Racial Imbalance Between Public Elementary Schools and Surrounding Neighborhoods

Sociological Science

... Recent studies, such as those by Bischoff and Owens (2019), continue to address persistent social resource gaps exacerbated by income segregation, indicating ongoing challenges in achieving educational equity. ...

The Segregation of Opportunity: Social and Financial Resources in the Educational Contexts of Lower- and Higher-Income Children, 1990–2014
  • Citing Article
  • September 2019

Demography

... This seems relevant given the extensive research linking income and inequality with life expectancy outcomes [22][23][24][25][26]. However, recent studies have questioned the apparent rise in residential income segregation during the 2000s, attributing it partly to biases from the Census Bureau's shift from the decennial Census to the American Community Survey, underscoring the complexity of measuring income segregation [27][28][29]. Specifically, the evidence shows that income residential segregation has not grown as rapidly in recent decades among Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino American families as previously thought [27,[30][31][32], yet disparities with white families persist [28]. Additionally, a recent study highlights that socioeconomic status, race-ethnic composition, and geographic location each independently influence mortality rates [33]. ...

Has Income Segregation Really Increased? Bias and Bias Correction in Sample-Based Segregation Estimates
  • Citing Article
  • October 2018

Demography

... These findings are consistent with the observation in the education literature that socioeconomic resources are key factors in educational achievement [32,42,43]. Although segregation across districts and communities continues [44][45][46], it also has become clear that economic and other resources of individual schools within a single school district can be just as unbalanced and segregated as across districts [47][48][49]. Without future research to learn more about the SEF students' socioeconomic situation, we cannot generalize the findings regarding SEF experience in relationship to school location. ...

The Racial Composition of Neighborhoods and Local Schools: The Role of Diversity, Inequality, and School Choice: THE COMPOSITION OF NEIGHBORHOODS AND LOCAL SCHOOLS
  • Citing Article
  • September 2018

City & Community

... The preponderance of the evidence shows that rising income inequality slows economic growth [3][4][5][6]. Recent analyses have shown that once one controls for wealth inequality the negative effect of income inequality on economic growth falls away as statistically insignificant, and that it has in fact been wealth inequality that has been detrimental to growth, either in an inverse linear form or in the form of an inverse u-shape À la Kuznets [7][8][9][10]. This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature examining the impact of wealth inequality on economic growth, with a special emphasis on the types of capital held by the rich. ...

Does Wealth Distribution and the Source of Wealth Matter for Economic Growth? Inherited v. Uninherited Billionaire Wealth and Billionaires’ Political Connections
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2016

... Experts of character education believe that accurate and continuous civic education can be effective in formation of moral character of students, especially social ethics (Bischoff, 2016). Civic Education consists of both a core curriculum and teaching strategies that give students the knowledge, skills, virtues, and confidence to actively participate in democratic life. ...

The civic effects of schools: Theory and empirics
  • Citing Article
  • January 2016

Theory and Research in Education

... In this line, there has been a call to expand upon how school actors weigh and negotiate competing moral and ethical goods in the non-ideal complex grounds of their actual experience (Wilson, 2015), and to understand justice within specific contexts (Gewirtz, 2006), in which we frame our research. Consistent with this approach, there has been a growing interest in discussing educational actors' notions of justice and the practical dilemmas they face in the "real world" (Levinson & Fay, 2016), where values not only clash but also face feasibility constraints (Bischoff & Shores, 2014). In school choice research a rising trend of studies has focused on parents and the competing values they confront when making their schooling decisions, in which they tend to mobilize notions of justice in education, often in tension. ...

The role of social science in action-guiding philosophy: The case of educational equity
  • Citing Article
  • July 2014

Theory and Research in Education

... The hukou system restricts access to public schools, particularly for migrant families. Local parents use demographic composition as a proxy for school quality, reinforcing statistical discrimination and further intensifying SDS (Bischoff, 2008;Holme, 2002). Migrant children frequently face institutional marginalization; they are often directed away from high-quality public schools toward lower-quality private schools (Liu & Laura, 2017). ...

School District Fragmentation and Racial Residential Segregation: How Do Boundaries Matter?
  • Citing Article
  • January 2008

Urban Affairs Review