Neighborhood and school segregation across educational careers: patterns, processes, and implications for educational inequality

The purpose of this research environment is to explain how the dynamics of residential and school segregation shape ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in academic outcomes, and suggest policy remedies.

Despite extensive research on the causes and consequences of segregation, we still have surprisingly little knowledge about how the two fit together. This is partly due to complex relationships between them.

When parents choose a place to live and send their children to school, it is both influenced by and influences the composition of schools and neighborhoods.

These compositions can affect short-term achievements among students, which guide subsequent educational choices and shape academic outcomes.

This interplay means that structural interventions in school and housing policies–changes in the quantity, quality, and spatial distribution of schools and housing, as well as the rules governing access to them–can lead to sudden compositional shifts and unintended consequences.

To address these complexities, we form an interdisciplinary team with unique methodological, substantive, and theoretical expertise.

We use Swedish register data to estimate state-of-the-art models of residential and school choices and causal models of school and neighborhood effects.

We integrate our findings into generative simulations and novel visualizations of segregation processes, using these to vet potential policy interventions that we theorize will reduce segregation and inequality.