Demographic Consequences of Replacing Race-Based with Socioeconomic Place-Based Affirmative Action: Evidence from Academically Selective K–12 Public Schools

This grant is co-funded with the William T. Grant Foundation.
Recent court decisions have led to a shift from race-based to race-neutral school admissions policies. Neighborhood-based, or place-based, affirmative action is an increasingly popular race-neutral admissions policy aimed at increasing socioeconomic diversity within academically selective schools. However, research on the effects of admissions policies on selective K–12 school diversity has been limited. Public policy scholar Rene Crespin will investigate the impact of the shift from race-based to neighborhood-based affirmative action on racial and socioeconomic diversity in academically selective K–12 school admissions in Chicago. He will analyze student-level administrative data, publicly available data from the Chicago Public School District, the Illinois State Board of Education, the Common Core of Data, and the American Community Survey for his study.