Abstract
Public schools and residential neighborhoods are two spatial contexts that can fundamentally shape the life outcomes of children. However, there is a lack of formalized approaches to comprehensively examine the spatial interactions between schools and neighborhoods. In this study, we develop a new approach to disentangle the spatial structure of the school-neighborhood nexus. We first introduce spatially constrained geodemographic clustering to operationalize neighborhoods. Then we develop measures for assessing the spatial congruence between school catchments and neighborhoods. Finally, we introduce spatial entropy measures to assess school diversity with respect to the neighborhoods they serve and to assess neighborhood diversity with respect to their relationships to local school boundaries. These newly developed measures allow us to examine how such interactions between schools and neighborhoods contribute to ethnoracial integration by performing a large-scale empirical investigation of the largest 110 metropolitan areas in the US, representing 24,507 elementary school catchments and 17,608 neighborhoods.
Sergio Rey
Director and Professor
My research interests include geographic information science, spatial inequality dynamics, regional science, spatial econometrics, and spatial data science.
Elijah Knaap
Assistant Professor
My research interests include urban inequality, neighborhood dynamics, housing markets, spatial data science, regional science, and housing & land policy.
Ran Wei
Associate Professor
My research interests lie in the development and implementation of GIScience methods and techniques to address substantive social and environmental problems
Dylan Skrah
PhD Student
I am a student in the Joint Doctoral Program in Geography at SDSU. I study education landscapes using urban social science. I am interested in how dynamics of neighborhood change are affected by charter schools relative to traditional public schools. My research is predicated on, and critical of, applied economics in a public policy setting. Through my dissertation, I hope to provide a cogent answer to the question ‘What are schools for?’