Race, Geography, and School Choice Policy: A Critical Analysis of Detroit Students’ Suburban School Choices

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam

Study advances understanding of how race and racism operate within geospatial analyses of school choice policy, using a critical race spatial approach to Detroit students’ suburban school choices. The analysis frames school choice through racial and spatial dynamics, opportunity hoarding, and predatory landscapes. Results show enrollment choices are constrained by racial geography, concentrated in few schools and districts, and vary by racial group. For Detroit exiters, schools are more segregated and of lower quality than suburban peers, motivating research on family choice and school/district behavior.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Purpose and Research Questions

Research Question 1

Research Question 2

AERA Open January-December 2022, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 1–19 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584211067202 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2022. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Race, Geography, and School Choice Policy: A Critical Analysis of Detroit Students’ Suburban School Choices Jeremy Singer Sarah Winchell Lenhoff Wayne State University The purpose of this study is to advance our thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice policy. Todo so, we present a critical race spatial analysis of Detroit students’suburban school choices. To frame our study, we describe the racial and spatial dynamics of school choice, drawing in particular on the concepts of opportunity hoarding and predatory landscapes. We find that Detroit students’suburban school choices were circumscribed by racial geography and concentrated in just a handful of schools and districts. We also find notable differences between students in different racial groups. For all Detroit exiters, their schools were significantly more segregated and lower quality than those of their suburban peers. We propose future directions for research on families’school choices as well as school and district behavior at the intersection of race, geography, and school choice policy. Keywords: charter schools, critical race spatial analysis, descriptive analysis, open enrollment, policy analysis, race, school choice, social context, social stratification, suburban education Purpose and Research Questions Supporters of school choice have argued that policies such as charter schools, vouchers, magnet schools, and open enrollment provide better educational opportunities to racially minoritized students (J. Scott, 2013), especially in urban districts (J. Scott & Holme, 2016), by giving them higher quality or less segregated school options than their residentially assigned school. In the United States, this premise is complicated by historical policy decisions related to geography, such as redlining, school segregation, and district zoning (Frankenberg, 2013) . Even as school choice breaks the link between residence and school, the educational “geography of opportunity” (Tate, 2008) remains racially stratified across political and economic zones that created and have maintained residential racial segregation (e.g., Frankenberg et al., 2017; Siegel-Hawley et al., 2017; Taylor et al., 2019) . It is within these geographically stratified contexts that families weigh the costs of choosing schools with the potential benefits (Lareau et al., 2021; Posey-Maddox et al., 2021), and schools and districts compete to enroll students (Lubienski et al., 2009) . Thus, especially as theories and methodologies from geography have become more popular in educational research (Butler & Sinclair, 2020; Cobb, 2020; Mann & Saultz, 2019; Yoon et al., 2018), researchers have increasingly examined the role of geography in enabling or restricting school choices (Lubienski & Lee, 2017) . Much of the geographic research on school choice has focused on spatial factors, such as where schools are located and students’commute distance and time (M. R. Scott & Marshall, 2019), with subsequent attention to the role of transportation access (e.g., Stein et al., 2020; Trajkovski et al., 2021) . Others have studied social aspects of geography, such as racialized and class-based perceptions of schools and neighborhoods (Bell, 2009; Yoon & Lubienski, 2017); the construction of district and school assignment boundaries and perception of boundaries related to physical features (Burdick-Will et al., 2020); and the strategic locational decisions of schools based on neighborhood characteristics (Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011) . The purpose of this study is to advance our thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice polic

FAQs

What is the study’s main purpose regarding school choice policy?

To advance thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice policy and to propose future research directions at the intersection of race, geography, and school choice dynamics.

How does the study analyze Detroit students’ suburban school choices?

It applies a critical race spatial analysis using student- and school-level administrative data, public-use community data, and metro Detroit racial geography data from the 2015–2016 school year.

What do the findings say about segregation and school quality for Detroit exiters?

Detroit exiters’ suburban school choices are limited by racial geography and concentrated in a small number of schools and districts, and their schools are significantly more segregated and lower quality than those of suburban peers.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam