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2005 - Taking Race Out of the Equation: School Reassignment and the Structure of Peer Effects

Attribution: Hoxby, Caroline, & Weingarth, Gretchen
Researchers: Caroline HoxbyGretchen Weingarth
University Affiliation: Stanford University
Email: choxby@stanford.edu
Research Question:
1.Learn about the structure of peer effects work. 2. Whether desegregation on the basis of family income has different effects than racial segregation
Published: 1
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Harvard University/Dpt. Of Economics
Journal Entry: December
Year: 2005
Findings:
  • Schools, colleges, and workplaces should worry of creating peer groups in which some people are isolated. However, they should also avoid creating a critical mass around certain type of person.
  • Evidence does suggests that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types.
  • Strong evidence that peer’s race, ethnicity, and income have only very slight effects once we have properly accounted for peers’ achievement. .
  • Switching from race-based to income-based desegregation has at most very slight effects, reassignments mainly affected achievement through the redistribution of lower and higher achieving peers.
  • Fears of racial, ethnic, and economic desegregation are overblown.
Keywords: DesegregationMathPeer EffectsReadingSESRegions: SouthMethodologies: QuantitativeResearch Designs: Secondary Survey DataAnalysis Methods: Fixed Effects Regression Models Sampling Frame:third to eight graders Wake County School District
Sampling Types: PopulationAnalysis Units: StudentData Types: Quantitative-Longitudinal
Data Description:
  • Several Models of Peer effects: Bad Apple Model, Shining Light Model, Boutique Model, Focus Model, Rainbow Model, Single Crossing Model, Subculture Model.
  • Data on third through eight graders in Wake County from 1994-95 through 2002-03 school years.
  • DV: Achievement measured as student’s score on North Carolina’ statewide end-of-grade test (used a student’s total (reading +math) scales score)
  • IV: Student’s race, ethnicity, free or reduced-price lunch participation, and initial school, peers’ initial achievement, student’s year to year transitions (staying, being reassigned by policy, making a feeder transition, or moving for a potentially endogenous reason).
Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:
Archives: K-12 Integration, Desegregation, and Segregation Abstracts
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