Tricia Ruiz
Thesis
Exploring the Links between School Segregation and Residential Segregation: A Geographical Analysis of Schools and Neighborhoods in the United States, 2000
Supervisory Committee: Suzanne Davies Withers (Committee Chair) and Mark Ellis
Abstract: More than fifty years after the hallmark ruling of Brown vs. the Board of Education, school segregation remains a critical issue for both policymakers and researchers. This thesis explores the connection between segregation in schools and residential segregation in the U.S., which operationally requires analysis of the associations between the composition of school populations and that of neighborhood populations. Towards that end, I merge school-district student demographic data for the school year 1999-2000, with Census 2000 data tabulated at the district-level, to perform regression analyses of student racial composition and resident racial composition, and to employ a typology measure of segregation, which was recently developed by Poulsen, Johnston and Forrest (2001). Using data summaries, maps and regression models, this cumulative, exploratory and descriptive project provides a geographical analysis of schools and neighborhoods in the U.S. The main unit of analysis studied here is the school district, but I also include a comparison of the school district with school-level and census tract-level data. The data reveal that residential segregation, as expected, predicts school segregation, and that overall at the district level, levels of school segregation across the nation are not significantly greater than levels of residential segregation. However, the results vary for different racial groups. By considering the spatial and scalar aspects of segregation in schools and neighborhoods across the U.S., this work contributes a unique geographic perspective to the broader framework of policy and social science research on the theoretical and empirical links between school segregation and residential segregation.
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