Structuring Choice Policy, School Segregation and the Two-Staged School Choice Process

School choice is both an important tool for school desegregation policy and an enabler of racial segregation. In this paper, we used a two-stage model of complex decision making to illustrate the relationship between school choice policy structure and school segregation. Our analyses draw on data describing the choices available to kindergarteners entering the Wake County Public School System between 2000 and 2010. As it pursued school diversity goals, the Wake County Public School System constructed school choice sets that included geographically proximal and relatively racially diverse default “base” schools as well as a range of segregating and desegregating options. While most families selected the base school, White and Asian families disproportionately used the choice system to avoid schools with large concentrations of Black students.