SASS Presents New Paper Examining the Link Between Neighborhood and School Boundaries at WRSA

In a (another) special session honoring SDSU’s renowned Professor of Geography Art Getis, SASS researchers will present a new paper at the 2023 annual meeting of the Western Regional Science Association.

Public schools and residential neighborhoods are two spatial contexts that can fundamentally shape the life outcomes of children. In this study, we develop new methodological approaches for the analysis of the the school- neighborhood nexus. We introduce spatially constrained geodemographic clustering to operationalize neighborhoods. We suggest a series of measures of spatial congruence between schools and neighborhoods, and we develop measures of spatial entropy for catchments and neighborhoods. These mea- sures afford a formalization of the constructs neighborhood school and school neighborhood. We provide a large scale empirical investigation of these new measures involving 110 of the largest metropolitan areas in the US, repre- senting 24,507 elementary school catchments and 17,608 neighborhoods.