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Results suggest that white residents may initially be threatened by racial change and judge declining school quality according to the racial change itself. As a consequence, white families may flee these integrating schools and neighborhoods, further contributing to school and neighborhood segregation.
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Results show that a growing proportion of blacks influences white neighborhood residents’ perceptions that school quality is declining over and above the current status of schools and changes in that status over the past four to five years, but only for schools that were predominantly white at the beginning of the four- to five-year period, in 1999-2000.
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Those near schools with greater proportions in poverty, with high incidences of violence, and lower test scores (indicating high distress on the school distress index) are more likely to say school quality is decreasing than are those who live among less troubled schools.
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White residents near schools that saw the proportion of blacks increase up to seven percentage points are significantly more likely to report that school quality declined as black representation increased.
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In schools where black populations are decreasing, larger decreases are actually associated with a greater likelihood of saying that the schools have declined. In fact, among those who saw declines in black representation (represented by the spline for change of -8.42 percent to 0 percent), there is a statistically significant negative slope.
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The smaller the decrease (the less negative the change) in the percentage of black students, then, the less likely neighborhood residents are to say that school quality has declined in the past five years. The larger the decrease (the more negative the change), the more likely residents are to say that school quality has decreased for the neighborhood residents that are represented by this spline.