Executive Summary: "How Economic Segregation Affects Children’s Educational Attainment" by Susan Mayer

For upwardly mobile parents on a house hunt, the benefits of living in a well-to-do neighborhood with a good school district are clear.  Not only do such attributes make for high property values, but their children can count on a good formal education as well as the good informal education that comes from associating with successful, accomplished adults and peers outside of school.  Unlike parental folk wisdom, social science research is less equivocal on the effects that life in a low poverty neighborhood can have on children’s school success.  In her paper, sociologist Susan Mayer examines a few competing hypotheses on the effects of rising economic segregation and children’s educational attainment before doing her own assessment.

One hypothesis Mayer considers is that based on the political economy of school financing. According to the political economy of school financing, economic segregation between school districts reduces the educational attainment of low-income children because as poor neighborhoods become poorer, they tend to spend less on education. Another hypothesis touts the advantages of having wealthy neighbors for poor people. Wealth neighbors provide better role models, more monitoring and better institutions within the school district. The final hypothesis Mayer examines argues that economic segregation can increase the educational attainment of low-income children. Low-income children who live with wealthier ones are likely to loose in competition of for grades and markers of material success, which are provided by parents. They would feel relatively deprived when compared with their rich neighbors and would not want to try and compete in school. From this point of view, low income children are likely to achieve more when they live in neighborhoods and attend schools with other low income children.

One reason that social science research is in disagreement about the effects of economic segregation lies in the fact that past studies have focused either on changes in economic segregation within or between metropolitan areas. In her assessment, Mayer looks at changes both within and between census tracts and states. Mayer relies on census data and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. She controls for certain state characteristics like state mean income, the percentage of African-American and Hispanic residents and state returns to schooling, to isolate and estimate the effects of economic segregation on children’s school completion and success.

Her results show that an increase in economic segregation does not greatly influence overall educational attainment, as long as overall economic inequality remains the same. At the same time, economic segregation does widen the gap in educational achievement between high- and low income students. When wealthy students increasingly isolate themselves in wealthy neighborhoods, they experience an increase in educational attainment that is roughly equally to the decrease in achievement that low-income students experience as wealth peers leave. Mayer also found that an increase in economic segregation between neighborhoods or census tracts causes a wider achievement gap than an increase within a neighborhood.