The report, released this month by the education reform nonprofit Available to All, builds off The new report found overlaps and similarities among dozens of redlining maps from 1938 with school attendance zones in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County as well as upstate cities, such as Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls.��

The report also identified New York as “one of many states where a parent can be arrested and criminally charged for using an incorrect address to get their child into a high-quality school,” with one such incident occurring as recently as .��

The state’s laws and regulations make it “one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country,” the report said, adding it limits a to take advantage of — a practice that allows students to attend public schools outside their assigned district.

“There’s this paradox of New York, where it’s run by progressive politicians, it’s a very democratic state,” said Tim DeRoche, founder of Available to All, “but it’s the most segregated.”

Across the United States it’s common for sections of the same town or city, neighborhoods and streets to have communities that look vastly different from one another because of historical government-led housing segregation.

Redlining, the practice of drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on race and denying mortgage assistance to areas considered “hazardous” or “undesirable” typically housing people of color, was more than 50 years ago. Despite this, many public services, including , still perpetuate inequitable access to resources and opportunity based on housing.

While school districts themselves are drawn through legislative processes, districts are often given autonomy when drawing attendance zones for schools. Both boundaries, the report said, “carry on the legacy of redlining in New York.”

“Public schools must be ‘,’ and … if you look at the system we have across the country, you can see that we are falling so far short of that — and the primary reason for that is that we assign kids to schools based on their address,” DeRoche said. 

The report used Public School 19 and Public School 16 as examples. Both schools are in the north Bronx’s school District 11 and are located about a mile from one another — a 20-minute walk — but serve contrasting populations.

The Bronx

Attendance zone boundaries for P.S. 19 “mirror, almost perfectly, the area deemed to be ‘desirable’ by the racist redlining map drawn by federal government bureaucrats in 1938,” the report said. Whereas P.S. 16’s boundaries fell directly in a declining area, according to the 1938 map.

The remnants of redlining are echoed in both schools’ data — where P.S. 19 educates a population that is 43% Black and Latino and two-thirds low income, with 62% reading proficiency. That compares to P.S 16’s 88% Black and Latino student body, 95% of whom are low income with grade level reading just over 30%.

Schools like P.S. 19 “become almost quasi-private schools,” DeRoche said.

There were many examples across the New York City Public Schools system, as well as several upstate school districts.

Manhattan

Queens

“It’s really hard to find a place [in New York] that’s not segregated or a school district that’s not experiencing either racial segregation or some sense of class segregation,” said Kris DeFilippis, a former assistant superintendent in the New York City Department of Education, who is now a clinical professor at New York University. “Not much has changed. … Wherever those lines were drawn [in the 1930s], it has largely stayed the same, unless there’s been a movement toward gentrification.”

In Albany, New York’s capital, New Scotland Elementary School was zoned over neighborhoods identified as desirable in 1938. The school serves a student population that is less than half Black or brown (41%) and low-income (47%) with reading scores near 60%.��

Just about two miles away at Giffen Memorial Elementary School, more than three-quarters of students are Black and Hispanic (84%) and qualify for free and reduced priced lunch (84%). Less than a quarter of students at Giffen Memorial read on grade level (21%).

Much of Giffen Memorial’s attendance zone lines up with 1938 redlining declining areas.

Albany

“You wouldn’t see these massive gaps [in demographics and student achievement] between two schools two miles away … if those two schools were truly open to kids,” DeRoche said. “The government has to be enforcing that in some way. How are they enforcing it? Well, they’re enforcing it with these maps. The kids on the wrong side of the line aren’t eligible to go to the public school that’s a mile [or two] from their home.”

In upstate New York, while there’s access to charter and magnet schools, school choice within a district is limited among traditional public schools. Students are generally required to go to the school in their attendance zone, “unless there are exceeding circumstances,” DeFilippis said, “but that is rare, it just doesn’t happen.”

In New York City, “it’s a bit different,” DeFilippis continued. Students typically attend a local elementary school before choice options open up in middle and high school grades across the metropolitan area  – creating its own challenges and limitations when it comes to admission to later grades.

“There’s almost like a false narrative that in New York City students can go where they want,” DeFilippis said, “but it’s not entirely accurate.”

For a student, traveling across the city to attend a school that works best for them can be difficult and it may also be challenging to get into competitive schools because they “haven’t had the same experiences at the lower grades that their peers have had,” DeFillipis said. So, ultimately, the current setup, “does not lead to equitable outcomes for Black and brown students, or low-income students, at all.”

The report recommended possible solutions for lawmakers to consider, such as decriminalizing address sharing, requiring every public school to reserve at least 15% of seats for students who live outside the zone and allowing students to enroll in any public school within a three-mile radius of the child’s home.

The underlying principle, DeRoche said, is to “just decrease the link between where you live and which schools you’re allowed to attend.”

“These policies have been bad, not just for educational opportunity, but I think they’ve affected urban development and I think they’ve affected how our cities work and don’t work,” DeRoche said.

Yet in many ways Canfield Avenue Elementary School and Shenandoah Elementary School in the Beverlywood and Reynier Village neighborhoods of Los Angeles are worlds apart. 

Canfield’s student body is 46% white, while Shenandoah is 95% Black and Hispanic. Canfield has a pass rate of 77% on state reading exams, but just 31% of Shenandoah students met reading standards this year. 

The difference between these two schools isn’t about curriculum or funding, but rather the highly uneven attendance zones from which Canfield and Shenandoah draw their students.  

School attendance zones are meant to provide L.A. families with strong options for their children’s education. But a growing number of critics say the outdated school zones of LAUSD reinforce educational inequality by locking needy students out of a good education. 

Canfield’s residential school attendance zone is 83% white, while Shenandoah’s is 55% Hispanic, 14% Black, and 6% Asian, according to research conducted by The Urban Institute, a nonprofit think-tank. 

“Such massive inequities between neighboring schools, both within the same local public school system, are difficult to justify,” wrote Urban Institute researchers Tomas Monarrez and Carina Chien, who studied the two schools for their 2021 “Dividing Lines.”

The differences in the nearby schools’ catchment areas is reflected in their enrollment, with 49% of Canfield kids experiencing poverty, compared to 93% at Shenandoah. 

Monarrez and Chien found inequalities in school enrollment zones in districts across the country in their Urban Institute report, but singled out the racial segregation and uneven outcomes of LAUSD, the nation’s second-largest school district, for special attention. 

The entrenched and segregationist school zones that populate Los Angeles Unified are the deliberate outcomes of a racist past, according to local parent turned researcher-and-author Tim DeRoche.

DeRoche, whose book, “,” explores school zones and segregation in Los Angeles and other districts across the country, said attendance zones ought to be abolished or completely overhauled, but admits it’s unlikely that’ll happen anytime soon in L.A. 

“The district doesn’t want to touch them,” said DeRoche of LAUSD’s school zones, “because families overpaid for homes within those lines.”  

LA Unified officials say school attendance boundaries are shaped by a range of factors, including geography, enrollment trends, and school capacity. A district spokesperson saud boundaries are reviewed and adjusted as needed to support students and communities. 

According to conducted by Realtor.com, California has some of the largest public school real estate premiums in the U.S., with some of the most expensive school zones.

Home buyers may think the unequal nature of LA’s school zones is a consequence of a tight real estate market, DeRoche said, but at least eight LA elementary schools have school zones that closely mirror the racist, redlining maps of the 1930s, according to documents he recently unearthed. 

Redlining maps were developed by the federal government for use in mortgages and color-coded neighborhoods by their perceived investment risk. Areas with large numbers of Black residents were graded as “hazardous” and marked in red, leading to decades of disinvestment and segregation.  

For at least eight LAUSD schools, today’s student attendance boundaries match those of the discredited redlining maps nearly exactly. If a map of the school zone is placed atop a redlining map, the boundaries are the same. Attendance zones for many other schools match those of redlining maps partially. 

DeRoche made this startling discovery about LAUSD’s school zones while conducting an investigation of the district for his 2025 paper “,” which showed how lower- and middle-income families experience difficulty accessing top LAUSD elementary schools.

The use of school zones that mirror redlining maps occurs in public school districts across the country, but, in Los Angeles, it’s more prevalent than the national average, according to the research conducted by Monarrez and Chien for the Urban Institute.

Redlining isn’t the only vestige of America’s segregationist past that shows up in school zones. Across the country, modern school district boundaries of ,” where threats against Black people . 

Many of the school zones within LAUSD were drawn decades ago, and it’s unclear if those identified by DeRoche were drawn with the redlining maps in mind or not, he said. 

But it’s unlikely many parents of students enrolled in sought-after LAUSD elementary schools such as Ivanhoe Elementary, Mt. Washington Elementary and Mar Vista Elementary are aware that their school zones reflect those racist maps, DeRoche said. 

Nick Melvoin, a second-term LAUSD school board member whose district includes Mar Vista, said he wasn’t aware Mar Vista’s attendance zone mirrors that of an old, local redlining map, until DeRoche told him.  

The plain-spoken former attorney said he wasn’t surprised, though, given the history of exclusionary education policy in L.A. County, where Los Angeles Unified is but the largest of more than 70 local school districts.

“That is something that we don’t acknowledge,” said Melvoin. 

Throughout the county and over time, a number of districts that are surrounded by and adjacent to LAUSD have carved themselves out of the larger, more diverse district of LAUSD, “so that they have a little bit more exclusivity,” Melvoin explained.

That list, he said, includes Beverly Hills Unified, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified and Culver City Unified. 

In a perfect world, Melvoin said, maybe the attendance zone around Mar Vista in his own board district would be changed, but a better solution is to offer options that give families the choice to exit their local school zones and enroll in better options.

“I’d like a world where there are no enrollment boundaries, to really make sure that we’re equitable,” he said, “but where folks are still choosing their local schools, because we just have such a surplus of high quality options.” 

Some of the non-zone school options for LAUSD families include magnet schools, charter schools and schools in the district’s Open Enrollment platform, where families may enroll in schools outside their zones, as long as there are seats. 

An LAUSD spokesperson said 40% of students enrolled in schools outside their zoned area in the 2024-25 school year, reflecting the pervasiveness and efficacy of the district’s school choice programs. That’s up from 28% a decade ago, the spokesperson said.

Critics, including DeRoche, say the district’s programs still don’t do enough to provide good options for families.

DeRoche’s 2025 report found enrollment is down 46% among 456 LAUSD elementary schools from their peak, while over half of these schools have seen enrollment decline by over 50% over the last two decades. 

The decline has left a lot of open space in 39 high-performing schools, but that doesn’t mean LA students are filling them, according to DeRoche’s analysis. In fact, he and his team found nearly 7,000 empty seats in the sought-after schools. 

LAUSD officials disputed the analysis, saying its use of peak enrollment to measure school capacity is inaccurate, because those schools were overcrowded then.  

Melvoin said the district is working hard to make it easier for families to access schools outside their local zones, by providing its Open Enrollment platform to make it easier for families to enroll, and also by providing transportation for families that request it. 

“Now, throughout LA Unified in every grade level, families have other choices,” he said. Dual language and magnet programs, charters and schools of advanced studies are a few of the options available, he said. 

Beyond LA, a movement to promote school choice and eliminate dependence on zoned schools is gaining steam, said Derrell Bradford, president of the national education 50CAN.��

Bradford and his nonprofit are part of an alliance of more than 50 nonpartisan education groups committed to ending discriminatory public school district boundary lines, called the. 

The coalition argues that school boundaries are based on a student’s ZIP code and, de facto, a family’s wealth based on their home value. Formed last year, it has set a goal of ending the practice in all 50 states by 2030.

States, including Idaho, Nevada and Kansas, are already working to promote open enrollment with state laws that modify existing school zoning policies, said Bradford.

“Everything about how people think about where you go to school, and how you get into school is kind of up for public discussion right now, in a way that I think is helpful,” said Bradford. “Its time has come.”

More than 70% of Black female respondents in general math classes had “a negative math identity” compared to 14% of Black boys. And 86% of Black girls in general math did not see the connection between their desired careers and mastery of advanced mathematics — even when they wished to enter STEM fields. That is compared to 67% of Black boys. 

“What students believe about math — and their ability to learn math, to be good at math — is really important, both in the moment and in the long term,” said Ashli-Ann Douglas, a research associate at , a San-Francisco based national nonprofit. “And those beliefs are related to the quality of math instruction that they receive.” 

Douglas was the lead researcher on the report when she was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. The 251 students in her study — 83% were in the 11th grade and 17% had been retained at some point and were in 10th grade — participated in fall 2019. One child had skipped a grade and was a high school senior. 

More than 80% of respondents were Black: 78% lived in a home with an annual household income of less than $50,000 while more than a quarter lived in a home with a household income of less than $20,000.

Pamela Seda, president of the , which works to empower Black children by boosting their access and success in mathematics, said there are two stereotypes at work here: that Black people are not gifted in mathematics and that girls in general struggle with the subject. 

“When you put those stereotypes together it compounds the negative effects,” she said.

Shelly M. Jones, a mathematics education professor at Central Connecticut State University and member of the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics board of directors, said math curriculum is often not culturally relevant. 

Jones, in teaching graduate students, highlights the work of trailblazer , an expert in ethnomathematics, the study of how math is used in different cultures. 

One of s papers examined the math behind African-American hairstyles. It was, Jones said, a transformative lesson: One of her Black female students told her �Ҿ��������’s work made her feel recognized in the topic for the first time.

“Black girls don’t see themselves in mathematics,” Jones said. “The things that they like, they don’t see in math.”

Douglas, the researcher, found that 99% of respondents considered basic math — number and operations skills — to be useful while only 58% said the same of higher level math, including algebra and statistics. The study, published earlier this month in the American Educational Research Journal, helps explain why the nation is missing out on the talents of many underserved students, she said.

“This is one of the ways we lose out on the genius of young people,” Douglas said. “Math is a gatekeeper in a lot of ways: When students do not have the math skills they need to access different careers, that is a barrier. And when they don’t have the beliefs about the utility of math, the value of math, they are less likely to persist and advocate for improved quality of instruction.”

Douglas’s paper also revealed that 29% of Black boys said their teachers’ recognition or acknowledgment of their performance in class was an indicator of their math proficiency. 

None of the Black girls said they received such positive feedback. 

Black students also did not believe their teachers were adequately prepared to teach the subject, regardless of their credentials, the study notes. And Black girls were more likely to cite their own poor understanding of math as a sign that they were not good at the subject. 

Students’ personal testimony was powerfully revealing, researchers said. 

“He doesn’t know how to teach in a way that people understand,” said one student in a focus group. “He doesn’t know how to teach right.” 

The result was devastating.

“I’m failing now,” the student said. “I never failed last year. I’m failing this year.”

Researchers noted that several students described that same teacher as “nice,” indicating the issue was not about personality, but effectiveness. 

Douglas said her findings emphasize the need for more inclusive and equitable math teaching methods to help marginalized students — particularly Black girls. 

Even with the required credentials to work in the field, teachers need ongoing coaching to help them work with students and relay the importance of the subject in their lives, she said. 

She and others from her research team spent a few hours leading a districtwide training shortly after the study was conducted, providing hands-on lessons for educators in the summer of 2021. In addition, 10 educators, including teachers and their advisors, subsequently completed a semester-long coaching program led by Douglas and her team. 

Douglas’s report is part of a larger longitudinal study of math knowledge development that started when the students were in preschool: The children were recruited in 2006 from 57 pre-kindergarten classes at 20 public schools and four Head Start sites and were followed through high school. 

Kelley L. Durkin, research assistant professor in the department of teaching and learning at Vanderbilt, and Bethany Rittle-Johnson, a professor of psychology and human development at the university, oversaw the last phase of the project, which wrapped up in 2022.

Rittle-Johnson said she was surprised when some students said their math teachers refused to help them or shamed them for not paying attention. 

“All the students in our focus groups valued their education, but they did not all receive the quality of math instruction and support that every student deserves,” she said. “Inequitable access to resources for both students and teachers have serious consequences for students’ learning opportunities, and it is not fair nor just.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Foundation provide financial support to WestEd and ����Ӱ��.

Increasing numbers of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are acting as incubators for innovation in the teaching profession, and helping to grow the nation’s Black teacher pipeline.

����Ӱ�� recently partnered with the Progressive Policy Institute for an online panel examining how HBCUs are key contributors to bolstering Black educators.

In the replay below, you’ll hear from experts Katherine Norris of Howard University’s College of Education, Dr. Artesius Miller of Morehouse College and Utopian Academy for the Arts Charter School, Sharif El-Mekki from the Center for Black Teacher Development and ����Ӱ��’s Marianna McMurdock. Watch the full conversation:

Go Deeper: Explore our recent coverage of the teacher workforce below.

• How Black Educators in America’s Fastest-Shrinking City Are Reimagining Teacher Pipelines

• Teacher Prep Programs See ‘Encouraging’ Growth, New Federal Data Reveal

• Breaking Down the Walls to Teaching: Alternative Pipelines Boom

• Preserving Black History Starts with Ensuring There Are Black Teachers

Join ����Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute at 1 p.m. ET Wednesday for an online panel discussing the influence of HBCUs in revolutionizing K-12 education. You’ll hear from leaders Dr. Kathryn Procope, executive director of Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science; Dr. Angela Lang, founder of I Dream Big Charter School at Stillman College; and Dr. Quinhon Scott, executive director of Coppin Academy High School at Coppin University. Curtis Valentine of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project will moderate. 

or tune in to this page Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET to stream the event.

Recent coverage of K-12 innovation from ����Ӱ��: 

• 189 Innovative School Leaders: Teacher Staffing, AI, Mental Health Top Ed Issues
  
• 40 Years After ‘A Nation At Risk,’ Could Curriculum Reform Finally Move the Needle on Academic Improvement?
  
• Black Education Entrepreneurs — and Parents — Are Pushing the Boundaries of School Choice
  
• National Poll Finds Overwhelming Support Among Black Teachers & Parents for ESAs

Join ����Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute at 1 p.m. ET Thursday for an online panel examining the role HBCUs can play as charter school authorizers, providing stronger oversight and governance and thus ensuring better educational opportunities for students. You’ll hear from experts Dr. Nina Gilbert of Morehouse College, Dr. Karega Rausch of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and Dr. Evelyn Edney of Delaware State University.

or tune in to this page Thursday at 1 p.m. ET to stream the event.

, the pivotal Supreme Court decision that made school segregation unconstitutional, turns 70 years old on May 17, 2024.

At the time of the 1954 ruling, 17 U.S. states had laws permitting or requiring racially segregated schools. The Brown decision declared that segregation in public schools was “inherently unequal.” This was, in part, because the court argued that access to equitable, nonsegregated education played a critical role in creating informed citizens – for the political establishment amid the Cold War. With Brown, the justices overturned decades of that kept Black Americans in .

As a professor of education and demography at Penn State University, I research . I’m aware that, after several decades of , the upcoming Brown vs. Board of Education anniversary comes at an especially uncertain moment for public education and efforts to make America’s schools reflect the nation’s multiracial society.

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Recent setbacks

In June 2023, the Supreme Court efforts. The decision followed the COVID-19 pandemic, which in the U.S.

Meanwhile, politicians and school boards have banned or removed books by from school libraries and restricted teaching about . I believe these legal setbacks amid the current political climate make finally realizing the full promise of Brown more urgent.

Resistance to Brown ruling

The Brown vs. Board of Education decision did not immediately change the nation’s public schools, especially in the completely segregated South, where there was . Resistance was so fierce in the first decade after Brown that compliance with desegregation orders at times required to escort to enroll in formerly all-white schools.

It would be a decade after Brown before the federal courts, a newly enacted and expanded federal education funding spurred .

While only 2% of Southern Black K-12 students attended majority white schools in 1964 – 10 years after Brown – the number had by 1970. The South surpassed all other regions in desegregation progress for Black students.

Segregation persists

Public school students today are the most racially diverse in U.S. history. At the time of Brown, about and most other students were Black.

Today, according to a , 46% of public school students are white, 28% are Hispanic, 15% are Black, 6% Asian, 4% multiracial and 1% American Indian. Based on my analysis of 2021 federal education data, public schools in 22 states and Washington, D.C., served majorities of students of color.

And yet, public schools are deeply segregated. In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where were students of color. Black and Hispanic students who attend racially segregated schools also are overwhelmingly enrolled in .

A , a nonprofit that produced reports on school funding inequities, found that schools in predominantly nonwhite districts received $23 billion less in funding each year than schools in majority white districts. This equates to roughly $2,200 less per student per year. Unequal funding results in , to name just one example.

Benefits of diversity

While Brown was an attempt to address the inequality that students experienced in segregated Black schools, the harms of segregation affect students of all races.

Racially integrated schools are associated with , or simply building that teach children how to work effectively with others.

White students are the to students of other races and ethnicities, and therefore they often miss out on the benefits of diversity. Nearly half of white public school students attend a school in which white students are 75% or more of the student body.

Factors that exacerbate segregation

Although residential segregation is , many U.S. communities remain both . Segregated schools, therefore, often reflect segregated neighborhoods.

However, how students are assigned to schools and districts can play a key role in how segregated those schools are.

This is because school attendance boundaries often determine which local public school a student may attend. How those boundaries are drawn or redrawn can exacerbate or alleviate school segregation. More than that are predominantly of one race are located within 10 miles of a school that is predominantly of another race.

Studies show that within school districts could make a substantial number of schools less segregated.

The same is true when it comes to school district boundaries. A high level of income and racial segregation also exists . And district secession – when schools leave an existing school district to – is . Redrawing district boundaries or preventing the formation of new boundaries could affect segregation.

Another key factor is the rise of public school choice, which allows parents to send children to charter schools or other schools beyond their zoned school. One study found that areas with more students enrolled in charter schools were associated with .

Potential solutions

Several hundred , which require districts to eradicate segregation that existed prior to the Brown decision, still exist. These are largely concentrated in some Southern states.

For the rest of the country, efforts are attempts to finally achieve the goals of the Brown decision. These include Berkeley, California’s and legal cases brought against states that challenge existing segregation under .

Finally, since reducing residential segregation could also reduce school segregation, some efforts have combined and policies. Connecticut, for example, has piloted for eligible participants in its interdistrict school desegregation program.

Like 70 years ago when Brown was decided, addressing public school segregation remains important for a healthy democracy – one that today is more multiracial than ever before.

After days speaking with colleagues about declining U.S. employment and social mobility, the University of Maryland professor asked whether scholars should give more thought to the condition of families. Given their centrality to children’s life prospects, she reasoned, the policy community seemed oddly disengaged from discussions about parenting and household structure. In particular, the gradual increase in one-parent homes didn’t receive expert scrutiny in proportion with its importance to schooling and workforce preparation. 

As Kearney expected, her inquiry was met with an uncomfortable quiet. In her experience, while social scientists were willing to acknowledge America’s undeniable trend toward single parenting, especially among the poor and working class, they were reluctant to weigh its consequences — and somewhat skeptical that anything could be done about it. Compared with subjects like taxation, welfare and finance, she writes, families are a seldom-discussed “elephant in the room.”

But her background as both an economist and a mother of three has given her an ideal perspective on the changing face of family life. researching income inequality and social assistance, Kearney has often framed her work explicitly in the context of family formation. Her recent studies of declining birth rates have influenced public discussions of K–12 enrollment and finance as school leaders scramble to cope with rapidly declining class sizes.

The patterns laid out in The Two-Parent Privilege are stark, though they may not come as a shock to educators. Between 1980 and 2019, Kearney writes, the proportion of American children living with married parents fell from 77 percent to 63 percent. But families vary wildly along lines of education and class: Among children of mothers with four-year college degrees, 84 percent live with married parents (a decline of six percentage points over four decades), while the same figure fell by 23 points (from 80 percent to 57 percent) among children of mothers who didn’t finish high school. 

The thrust of the book isn’t doomsaying or disapproval, and Kearney does not advocate a return to “traditional” families with breadwinner fathers and homemaker mothers. Yet she doesn’t shy from reporting the “substantial disadvantages” faced by children raised by single parents, including much harder roads to attaining higher education and earning a middle-class wage. If marriage increasingly becomes a luxury good, the inevitable consequence will be to deepen society’s divides and further encumber disadvantaged children.  

The strained family resources granted to children in single-parent homes — whether measured in time, attention, or emotional bandwidth — can also be felt in classrooms, Kearney argues. With teacher burnout soaring as schools tackle the post-COVID academic recovery, schools may have to rely on family support more than ever. 

“It’s too much to ask teachers to not only do the job they’re trained and paid to do, but also make up for what kids aren’t getting at home,” she said. “How many more school counselors can we hire, and how much can we pile on top of schools’ mandate, before we decide to take a look at kids’ home lives and think about addressing that directly?”

In a conversation with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Kearney discussed why she wrote The Two-Parent Privilege and whether anything can be done to address the problems it identifies. 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: You call the importance of parenting and family structure the “elephant in the room” when it comes to policy discussions. What makes those things so hard to talk about?

Melissa Kearney: In our own lives, we all quietly acknowledge how important parenting is. Those of us who have kids spend inordinate amounts of time trying to be good parents to our kids and worry about whether we’re parenting correctly. 

But this subject also feels very private. People don’t want to sound judgmental of others, and we bristle when others sound judgmental about our parenting decisions. So whether or not people raise their kids in a married, two-parent home is, on the one hand, one of the most personal decisions they make, but it’s also an incredibly consequential decision for kids. And because families are the fundamental economic and social unit of our society, we can’t talk about things like inequality and child wellbeing at the aggregate level without talking about the impact of parenthood.

What makes it all the more complicated is that there are differences by socioeconomics, race, and ethnicity. We need to be both honest and empathetic about why those differences exist and what it says about the barriers to marriage and forming two-parent homes. And another issue I’ve encountered is that once you start acknowledging that single-parent homes are generally a disadvantageous home structure for children — and for single women, frankly — you start to sound like you might not want to celebrate the economic achievements of women. There’s a potentially anti-feminist sound to that line of argument, and it’s another thing that raises people’s hackles about whether this is something appropriate to talk about.

You don’t sound surprised by that political dynamic. 

I’ve been talking more and more to younger journalists about this, and they ask directly, “Do people not want to talk about this because it makes them sound Republican?” 

Isn’t that interesting? I’m very aware of the social science controversy that stems from differences across socioeconomic, and racial/ethnic groups, and I am pretty close to the feminist struggle and that debate. But for the generation of journalists and academics in their 20s and 30s now, their world is so polarized by political identity that they might just think, “This sounds Republican” and not want to talk about it.

Do you find it ironic that this subject is something of a taboo among educated professionals? I think it’s safe to say that most writers and academics who have kids do so after getting married, and they tend to be quite active parents. Yet they seem reluctant to preach what they practice.

This is so true. I’ve yet to encounter an audience that is as uncomfortable with this topic as the scholars and think-tankers who, as you say, are predominantly raising their kids in two-parent homes. What’s been interesting to me is that the single moms I’ve spoken to have really opened up about why it’s hard for them to do everything by themselves.

I’ve spoken more and more with people affected by the issues I’m writing about, and the other interesting thing I’ve heard from them is that many have never really thought about their challenges in these terms. This is just their reality: They’ve been dealt a crappy hand, and they don’t often stop and wonder, “How come all those women with college degrees have partners to help them all day, and I’m doing it all by myself? What are the society-level barriers that disproportionately put me — and my sisters and cousins and friends — in this position?”

It’s a luxury for us to be able to sit and decide that we don’t want to discuss this topic.

You describe marriage as an institution that’s great at conferring both resources and stability. Do you distinguish between the benefits of material resources, like extra money to pay for tutoring or summer camp, and the emotional or psychological advantages that kids get from having two parents at home?

Using the data sets and source modeling that I’m familiar with as an economist, it’s more accessible for me to think about the benefits of marriage primarily as an increase in resources. But I define resources broadly. 

Increased income, for example, is that comes from having married or two-parent households. That’s not just because people with higher levels of income are more likely to get married, it’s because a committed, two-parent couple brings in the resources of two people. Of course, it’s not surprising that two-parent households tend to have twice as much income as one-parent households because in the majority of families, mothers now work. 

It’s true across the spectrum of education and class. Unmarried, college-educated mothers bring in much less household income than two college-educated parents. On the opposite end of the education distribution, if you’re looking at mothers with just high school diplomas, they also earn about half as much as someone with the same education level who is also married or has a partner in the house with a high school diploma. 

Some social scientists look at this phenomenon and say, “That’s something the government can actually address, so we can talk about that.” And in theory, the government can address income differences between single parents and couples. But as a practical matter, we’re just not in a position where the government will start sending checks to households that equal the earnings of another working adult. 

A second parent also brings their time, which frees up the time of the first parent. Married mothers are able to spend more time with their kids because somebody else is helping to do all the other stuff that needs to happen in order to make a household run. And this relates to another resource that parents invest in their kids, which is emotional bandwidth. 

Raising kids takes a lot of energy and patience, and when there’s a second person in the house that you can tap into for — paying your bills, reading to your kids, driving them around — there’s more emotional bandwidth to engage in what developmental psychologists say is the most beneficial kind of parenting: nurturing parenting, less authoritative parenting. It feels commonsensical, but something we see in studies is that single mothers are more likely to resort to, let’s say, . 

When I say something like that, it might make you think, “Gee, that sounds awful and judgmental.” But I’m not blaming single mothers. If I didn’t have a partner that I could lean on when I was stressed, I can assure you that I would also be much harsher, more often, with my kids. There’s no moral failing here. When resources are strained, it’s harder to parent the way you want. 

Kids eventually bring their home lives to school with them. Are we essentially asking educators to supply some of the attention, time, and emotional support that many kids in single-parent homes have had to go without? And is that a realistic goal to assign to them?

What happens in the classroom is not my expertise. But from talking to teachers and looking at the numbers of kids showing up in public schools with academic and emotional deficits, it’s pretty obvious that we’re asking a ton of schools and teachers these days. 

A big part of my motivation to write this book was this sense that we can’t just keep saying, “We need to improve schools!” We’re telling teachers to teach students, but first they have to recognize their trauma and deal with the fact that many of them aren’t able to sit and learn all day. It’s too much to ask teachers to not only do the job they’re trained and paid to do, but also make up for what kids aren’t getting at home. How many more school counselors can we hire, and how much can we pile on top of schools’ mandate, before we decide to take a look at kids’ home lives and think about addressing that directly?

That’s the question I’ve arrived at from talking to teachers and reading about what’s going on in schools. Someone else — ideally someone who studies K–12 education more specifically — needs to sketch out the relationship between the decline in the stable, two-parent home and the teacher burnout and disciplinary problems we’re seeing in schools. But I don’t think we can keep having this same conversation about schools needing to improve without being honest about what’s going on in kids’ homes, how it has changed over time, and how much it determines their readiness to learn and their ability to behave in the way schools need them to.

In the book, you cite numerous studies showing that children born to unmarried parents or raised in single-parent homes experience worse educational and economic outcomes later in life. But is there a lot of research evidence examining the links between family structure and behavior in school?

There is a ton of descriptive evidence that is really compelling on that subject, but I want to clarify that I’m looking for more investigation of the links between home environment and teacher burnout and turnover. My guess is that it’s high, and now that I’m saying it out loud, I could probably think of some ways that scholars might look at that.

There’s a paper by Miriam Bertrand and Jessica Pan called “,” which includes nationally representative data on enough kids that they were able to look at sibling comparisons. What they show is that boys from single-parent homes are significantly more likely than their sisters to get in trouble at school, relative to boys and their sisters in two-parent households. This is important because we know that boys are more likely to act out at school. 

I want to be clear that none of this is to say that boys are necessarily more disadvantaged than girls by being raised in a single-parent home. We know from the psychology literature that girls are more likely to internalize stress and depression. Compared with boys, they don’t act out as much in the ways that will get them suspended from school. But if we grant the fact that boys are disproportionately more likely to engage in that kind of behavior, that gender gap is larger for kids that come from single-parent homes. 

The researchers then go further and ask why that is. In these data that reveal all sorts of things about children’s home lives, they see that boys raised by single mothers get less time with their moms and are more likely to be exposed to harsher punishment; as one example, they’re more likely to be spanked. What’s interesting is that the differences in parenting are not particularly large, but boys are especially responsive to those differences. In plain English, here’s the way I think about that: If I didn’t spend as much time as my daughter — if I parented her less — she still wouldn’t be very likely to act out and get suspended from school. But if my son were struggling, and I ignored him or was harsher in parenting him, he’d be particularly responsive to that in a way that would make him especially likely to get in trouble.

You devote a chapter to the difficulties faced by boys raised apart from their fathers, who often struggle to mature into suitable partners and fathers themselves. Do you think your analysis dovetails with the common finding, prominently expressed in Richard Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men, that boys are somehow more vulnerable than girls to setbacks at home and in school?

That idea is a pretty good summary of my read of the literature. There’s a really interesting paper that came out in recent years supporting this idea — that boys are particularly disadvantaged when dads aren’t around — but it’s from a very different perspective.

comes out of the , which is run out of Harvard by [economist] Raj Chetty. They look at the neighborhood characteristics that are predictive of adult earnings, and they find that the factor that is most associated with smaller earnings gaps between white and African American men is the presence of African American dads in a given neighborhood. This suggests that having those dads in the neighborhood is good for all African American boys, beyond the benefit of having one’s own father in the house. 

These findings are predictive, rather than causal, which means that if you ask what it is about having these dads in the neighborhood that’s causally good for boys, we’d have to speculate. But it really lends credence to the idea that an absence of dads within the home, and within the neighborhood, is really associated with worse outcomes for those boys growing up.

That paper was a huge deal. I seem to remember that the finding about fathers wasn’t exactly soft-pedaled, but I saw its importance in than, say, the New York Times.

The germ of this idea of writing a book came a number of years ago. I was asked to discuss the , which tracked the geography of mobility across places. After Raj gave his presentation, I got up and pointed to a figure in the paper that shows that the factor most highly correlated with upward mobility is the share of two-parent homes in their neighborhoods. 

Even at the time, I was thinking, “This is really challenging for us as economists because it’s not what we talk about, and it’s not what we know how to change. But looking at this figure, none of the things we talk about — , college tuition — none of them matter nearly as much as the share of homes with two parents. So we need to shift our attention.” 

Frankly, a lot of people don’t want to shift our attention, including some of the authors of those papers. If you look at the policy briefs at Opportunity Insights, including the one I just mentioned, they sort of downplay this finding. It’s really important that we don’t downplay it, and we don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s screaming to be acknowledged.

Not long after reading that paper, I ran across the story of , which I mention in the book. It’s hokey, but I’m fundamentally hokey at heart. There was a school in Shreveport, Louisiana, where fights were breaking out all the time, and the adults just couldn’t get it under control. But a group of fathers in the neighborhood got together and said, “We’re putting ourselves on duty: We’re going to hang out at the school and go to the football games.”

They don’t punish the kids, and they don’t act like security guards. They’re just there to keep a watch on the kids and make them laugh. I thought, “Ah, this is how dads act as a public good in their neighborhoods.” That anecdote helped me make sense of this finding, and it also illustrates the burden that kids’ changing home lives is placing on schools. 

All of this probably jibes with people’s expectations about family and child-rearing. But isn’t your analysis contradicted by the fact that out-of-wedlock births and single-family homes have increased dramatically over the last half-century — dating all the way back to the 1965 Moynihan Report, which was the landmark acknowledgment of this trend — and if anything, young people seem to be better off? Test scores, high school graduation, and college enrollment are all up in recent decades, while bad outcomes like and are down.

This is a really important question. I’ve run some simulations of this just for myself, but I wound up leaving them out of the book because those kinds of simulations always rely on a whole bunch of assumptions. The point I would raise is that mothers have gotten much older and more educated over time, and teen childbearing has plummeted. 

Based on that, we would expect that kids are entering into much better-resourced home lives and consequently doing much better over time. 

Just from the fact that kids are now so much more likely to be born to mothers with higher education, and who are better able to provide for their kids and set up their households, we would expect to see a reduction in child poverty and associated challenges. But had rates of two-parent and married parent homes remained what they were in the 1980s alongside those other changes, I think we would have seen kids do that much better. Economists always say this, and it’s annoying, but it’s all about the counterfactual.

So, yes, kids are doing better. Racial gaps in kids’ test performance have been closing. There have been all sorts of gains. But I do think that, had we not had this increase in one-parent homes, those gains would have been even larger. Simulating the counterfactual is really hard, but it’s sort of remarkable to think of the share of kids born to mothers with a college degree, for example. It’s so much higher than it was 20 or 40 years ago, and if you think college-educated moms are in a better position to give their kids enriching home environments, we would expect children’s outcomes to have improved over this period.

That brings us to another trend you explore in the book: that of highly educated and career-focused women struggling to find good candidates for marriage and domestic partnership (i.e., stable, employed men who are interested in having kids). This results in some women putting off marriage, or foregoing it entirely, and sometimes opting to raise kids on their own.

Exactly. And it’s another reason why people might bristle at my negative characterization of the rise of single-mother homes. An immediate reaction is, “But we don’t want to go back to a world where women are dependent on men and have no choice but to be in a lousy relationship.” 

I wholeheartedly agree with that. We really don’t want a return to a situation where women don’t have the opportunities to financially provide for themselves, and that’s my position even if doing so would mean that we would have higher marriage rates. I can hold that thought in my head while simultaneously thinking that it’s not advantageous for anybody that economically vulnerable women have to do this all by themselves. 

To be clear, it’s not just that non-college-educated men are more likely to be out of work than they used to be. They are more likely to be out of work, and non-college-educated women are more likely to have access to economic opportunity. Both of those things contribute to a reduction in marriage. Those trends raise the question of why so many men are not presenting as viable marriage partners. That could be true from their own perspective — they don’t feel like they can take care of a family, so they’re shying away from it — or from the perspective of women, who choose not to marry them because they don’t seem to have what it takes to be a reliable partner and provider. Whichever side is making that decision, we’re at an equilibrium where the value proposition of marriage is lower outside the college-educated class. 

I think this raises a really important conceptual question: If, as you say, marriage is increasingly correlated with education and class, how do we know that marriage itself is actually doing anything important? The children of relatively affluent and educated couples might do better even if their parents weren’t married, right?

When you talk about the middle class, it depends on what you mean. 

One way we could think about the middle class is just “people with a high school degree.” Those people are essentially sitting at the middle of the education distribution, but they are now much less likely to get married and set up a two-parent household than they were 20 years ago. 

So it’s not just the middle and upper classes pulling away from the disadvantaged; it’s the college-educated class, which is really the upper-middle class. The highest-income people are the ones who are really pulling away in terms of marriage rates. 

It’s important to make that point because this phenomenon has contributed to the erosion of middle-class economic security. Again, it depends on whether you want to call someone with a high school degree, but no college degree, “middle-class.” It’s a reasonable thing to do, and then you can ask why the middle class feel like it’s struggling now. Part of the answer is that they’re much more likely to only have one parent and one potential earner in the house.

But you can also look within education groups and just compare the middle-class kids whose parents are married versus those whose parents are not. For those with married parents, their household has a higher income. They’re more likely to graduate high school, more likely to go to college, and more likely to earn more in adulthood. These differences are not just about who’s getting married, but they are magnified by the class distinctions in who’s getting married. 

And it seems to be cyclical. As you put it, this decline in marriage is “both a cause and a consequence of the economic and social challenges facing our nation.”

One thing I think it’s useful to remember is that there were massive cultural changes in the 1960s and ’70s. Following that period, we saw across the education distribution. Everyone moved away from marriage, to an extent, given the social and cultural changes of that era.

What happened in the ’80s and ’90s is that the decline in marriage stabilized among college-educated men and women, even as it kept falling for everyone else. At the same time, we were also living through global economic changes that disproportionately benefited the college-educated class and disproportionately harmed those without a college degree. 

When we piled those economic changes on top of new social and cultural norms, we got this perfect storm that diminished the economic security of non-college-educated workers and led to a reduction in employment among non-college-educated men. In turn, that led to a decline in marriage and a rise in single-parent households. We have research showing that this isn’t just a correlational statement, there were causal relationships at play. In other words, you have economic shocks leading to comparatively higher levels of two-parent homes among an already economically advantaged group. And because marriage and two-parent homes are economically advantageous situations, those kids have tons of resources thrown at them, and the gaps in kids’ childhood experiences become wider than if they have arisen from income inequality by itself. 

In the end, we’ve got this terrible perpetuation of inequality transmitted across generations, such that college-educated people enjoy all the advantages that the economy delivers to them; that’s combined with an advantageous household structure that allows their kids to experience tons of resources and opportunities; those kids are more likely to be academically prepared for college and earn a degree; and they’re more likely to marry another college-educated worker and perpetuate the cycle for advantage for their own children. That’s the cause-and-effect cycle.

I suspect that another reason why policymakers don’t pay more attention to marriage and family formation is that it’s unclear if the public sector can actually do anything to change things. I’m reminded in particular of the George W. Bush administration’s to raise marriage rates in the 2000s. But are there ways that policy changes can move the needle here?

I definitely think this is one reason why social scientists have been less likely to highlight declining marriage rates, including those of us who are inclined to see them as a problem. We don’t have an obvious policy lever to pull. 

I was definitely one of those social scientists who derided the Bush administration’s Healthy Marriage Initiative. I looked at the same results as everyone else, and it looked like they threw money at this problem and didn’t increase marriage at all. But I’ve softened my position in the following way: The bucket of money that was given to the Administration for Children and Families has shifted its scope from trying to encourage marriages to . That’s an important goal because a lot of families really do face barriers to setting up a two-parent household and enjoying a healthy marriage between parents, and we need to meet those families where they are. The government can support community programs that work with vulnerable or fragile families.

Another reason I’ve softened a bit is that when you read the interviews with low-income, unmarried couples who have enrolled voluntarily in these programs, they talk about wanting a stable marriage. They may want what other families have, but they don’t quite know how to achieve it. So instead of thinking about these programs as the government swooping in and telling people they should be married — and mostly not being listened to — we can recognize the fact that these couples don’t want their relationships to be filled with strife or violence. They don’t want to be doing this alone. Maybe they lament that one of them is in prison, but they still want to be good parents. Why shouldn’t the government support programs that are well-informed of the barriers and the traumas these families face and that are working to help them achieve in their own lives what college-educated and higher-income folks so readily accomplish? 

It’s a policy area that’s vastly underfunded and under-studied. But I’m not convinced that there aren’t programs that could be very helpful, family by family, in communities.

As critics pounce, advocates for greater pre-K investments grumble, “Look, the study showed that pre-K was solidly effective at preparing kids for kindergarten. Why are we measuring its value in terms of metrics that come way later? By that logic, we shouldn’t just end pre-K investments … we should also cancel 2nd grade (and maybe the rest of early elementary school).”

To be sure, there’s a showing that early education programs are effective. They’re among we can make! But that doesn’t stop us replaying the aforementioned pattern. 

It’s a weird tendency in education debates: we blame good, tested, and effective ideas for not solving the full extent of U.S. inequities. Even the best ideas — the ones that help students succeed, the ones that close divisions in schools and society — rarely get credit for their efficacy. So pre-K debates have less to do with whether pre-K works at preparing kids for kindergarten, and more with whether it “works” on some other array of distant metrics.��

Folks in education do this all the time. Take charter schools, for example. Over the past several decades, a bevy of studies have shown that when charters are opened and overseen by rigorous authorizers, they can significantly improve academic achievement, particularly for students from historically marginalized communities. In the 2010s, researchers at Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) released showing that well-regulated charters tend to be for raising the test scores of English learners, students from low-income families, and African-American students. of charter schools’ academic performance found similarly encouraging results across the country. 

But as a policy idea, charter schools are besieged with criticism for “failing” to fully in all places and at all times. It’s not that there’s no room for criticism of charter schools; indeed, studies have shown that with tend to generally be than comparable public schools. It’s just that, too often, even are regularly blamed for not yet having defeated the full breadth of systemic and economic inequality in American life. 

Why is this? The blame cuts in two directions, but both have to do with how we define effectiveness of particular programs. First: advocates for certain education reforms often set up their ideas for failure. Pre-K advocates spent many years promising that universal pre-K could close achievement gaps before they begin to widen, obviate the need for controversial K-12 reforms by raising academic achievement, increase participants’ future incomes and lower their chances of incarceration as adults, and . Against that backdrop, is it any wonder that pre-K programs that simply prepare kids to succeed in kindergarten feel like flops? 

This kind of overpromising can be useful for drawing attention to a policy idea, but advocates ought to recognize that inflated rhetoric comes with the cost of raising expectations well beyond what they can likely deliver. (Note: there is that pre-K programs with modest short-term academic impacts may still improve participants’ long-term life outcomes.)

Second: policy critiques are almost always driven more by prior political preferences than the facts on the ground. Sure, when new ideas arrive in public education, critics justifiably warn against “experimenting on schools and kids.” But as the evidentiary base gets better for a particular idea over time, critics shift to less honest work—muddying the measurement waters. If pre-K seems to be really effective at improving children’s school readiness and long-term outcomes, critics who loathe public investment in education and pine for traditional one-income households with stay-at-home mothers caring for kids … find it easy to redefine successful pre-K as something else (e.g. ). 

If, with sufficient public oversight, charter schools produce strong academic outcomes for historically marginalized children, critics who worry that charter schools divert resources and attention from traditional school districts … find it easy to frame those successes out of the picture by measuring charters against other benchmarks (even those that also also elude traditional public schools). For instance, it’s frustrating to see refusing to enroll hard-to-serve students who might be at risk of failing to graduate on time, ).

To be sure, the design, implementation, and defense of new education policies are always going to be plagued by politics. That’s a basic element of living in a democracy. But we really need to stop blaming good-faith efforts to improve schools for failing to solve American racism, economic inequality, etc. 

Instead, we ought to think of education reforms as . Nearly every study shows that developmentally appropriate, well-funded pre-K is good for kids—but . Indeed, a system of high-quality pre-K that feeds into an equitably funded system of effective K-12 schools…is also likely to fall short. (Add in , and a , though, and we might really be getting somewhere.) 

But that’s no excuse for doing nothing. The roots of racist inequities against communities of color are centuries deep and systemically wide; undoing them requires sustained reforms at all levels.

But if the family wants to move their child to better schools in the nearby Elwood, Union or Manhattan districts they would be hard-pressed to find housing in that price range.��

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These invisible boundaries are what researchers at Bellwether Education Partners call “border barriers” — lines between districts that frequently keep low-income families out of higher-quality schools. The Chicago area, the authors write, has 45 such divisions, where families in low-income housing brush up against districts with more resources and better schools but few, if any, affordable rental units.��

Bellwether explores these differences in “Priced Out of Public Schools,” released last week that adds a new layer to our understanding of how closely housing and education are intertwined. Districts with out-of-reach rental prices spend, on average, at least $4,600 more per student — the result of higher property taxes. While states’ school finance formulas aim to equalize funding across districts, they don’t make up the gap.��

“As we think about what we need to do moving forward, it’s not just an education solution alone,” said Alex Spurrier, co-author of the report and a senior analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, an education think tank. States, he said, should consider multiple policy levers to address “what is a very thorny challenge.”

The report comes as continue to rise and many low-income families , long delays for federal rental assistance funds and landlords who reject . When families relocate to more affordable housing, their children often must leave not only their schools, but their districts as well — especially in states like Texas, California and Illinois, where metro area maps are dotted with dozens of small school districts. The authors label the phenomenon “educational gerrymandering,” the creation of smaller, exclusive districts that cater to higher-income, less racially diverse student populations. While the report recommends multiple approaches to address the disparities, experts note that altering district boundaries is politically risky: People with money are likely to vote against those who meddle too much.

“People who have wealth are willing to use it to get high-quality schools.” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and the deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The rules of the game do produce some inequities.” 

Mergers and secessions

Some of those rules date back to nearly a century ago when the nation entered a movement that by 1970 had cut more than 100,000 districts down to less than 20,000. Now there are 13,000.

But district mergers tended to lack high-minded ambitions to create more racial or socioeconomically balanced schools. Rather, they were likely to be unions of districts with similar demographics, explained Tomas Monarrez, a research associate at the Urban Institute who has studied racial and ethnic segregation in schools.

Some of the starkest examples of drawing boundaries to benefit wealthier populations include recent efforts by some communities to break away from larger, often county-level, school districts. the 2017 report from EdBuild, noted 73 secessions since 2000, with another 55 either attempted or in progress.

Several have launched in the Northeast, but the Bellwether report also includes examples in the South. In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, communities within Shelby County split off into smaller districts in 2014 after the majority Black Memphis district dissolved and merged into the county district. In Alabama, there have been 10 successful attempts since 2000, with in the works.��

“At the very least, we should be wary of those secession trends,” Monarrez said. Mergers, however, can minimize disparities in access to quality schools if leaders pursue them with the goal of improving equity, he said.

Some states have created where multiple districts share tax revenue or allow students to transfer into schools across district lines as a way to reduce disparities. The Nebraska legislature created such a plan involving 11 Omaha-area districts. In Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, encompassing Boston and the surrounding area, is another example.

But Malkus, at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned that such options only tend to “nibble around the margins.” Daniel Thatcher, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, noted that open enrollment programs can make school funding disparities worse because the receiving district gets the state funding for those students.

School choice programs are another way to allow students to attend a school outside their neighborhood, the authors suggest. The results of that approach are mixed. that within a district, charters lead to a slight decrease in student diversity. But across a metro area, the presence of charters can create schools that are more racially mixed.

That’s what leaders in School District 49, adjacent to the Colorado Springs, Colorado, district have found. The district is considered “inaccessible” to lower-income families because there’s not enough affordable housing to meet the demand, according to the Bellwether report. But more than a third of the district’s students come from outside the district for traditional, charter and online options, said Peter Hilts, the system’s chief education officer. Half of the Colorado Springs district’s students are nonwhite, compared to 43 percent in District 49.

“There’s no question that open, inclusive choice has made us a more diverse district,” Hilts said. “If you genuinely want educational equity, you must believe in school choice, and if you truly advocate for inclusive choice, you must address other factors like transportation, affordable housing, and childcare options that can inhibit choice.”

Housing affordability not only affects families wishing to move into a district, but also those who want to stay put. In Tacoma, Washington, low-income families are beginning to leave because of a lack of housing options, said Elliott Barnett, a senior planner for the city. Proximity to quality schools is a key element of , a project that recommends building additional types of housing in neighborhoods that were previously reserved for single-family homes.

“We know that where a person lives has a link to their access to opportunities that have a big impact on our lives such as education achievement, income, life expectancy and others.” Barnett said. “Even if kids can travel from elsewhere to a high-performing school outside their neighborhood, that is another burden to overcome.” 

Some states, like and , have recently passed legislation to increase the supply of affordable housing. While such efforts haven’t always taken school locations into account, Monarrez said that’s beginning to change. California governor Gavin Newsom mentioned the need for a wider array of housing options near schools as one goal of his state’s legislation.��

The next step, Monarrez said, is for policymakers to reconsider district boundaries as well.

“We need to find out more about what would happen if we changed these lines,” he said. “A viable solution is drawing better lines.”

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors.