Socioeconomic-Based School Assignment Policy and Racial Segregation Levels: Evidence From the Wake County Public School System

In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment system that the Wake County Public School System employed throughout the 2000s to provide evidence on this issue. Although our results show that Wake County Public School System’s socioeconomic-based assignment policy had negligible effects on average levels of segregation across the district, it substantially reduced racial segregation for students who would have attended majority-minority schools under a residence-based assignment policy. The policy also exposed these students to peers with different racial/ethnic backgrounds, higher mean achievement levels, and more advantaged neighborhood contexts. We explore how residential context and details of the policy interacted to produce this pattern of effects and close the article by discussing the implications of our results for research and policy.