New CCPR Affiliate Professor Ann Owens discusses her working paper “The Changing Relationship between School and Residential Segregation” with CCPR

Segregation in the United States remains a persistent and evolving challenge. While conventional wisdom suggests that residential and school segregation move in tandem, recent work by new CCPR Faculty Affiliate Ann Owens, Professor of Sociology at UCLA, demonstrates a more complex and cyclical relationship. Her research employs an integrated approach to understanding how housing policies, neighborhood characteristics, and educational systems interact to perpetuate, or sometimes alleviate, social inequality. Rather than focusing on single causes, Professor Owens shows how these factors form a mutually reinforcing cycle, shaped over time by the policies that govern them. In conversation with CCPR, Professor Owens reflected on the Segregation Tracking Project, a public data initiative she leads in collaboration with her colleague Professor Sean Reardon of Stanford University. The Segregation Tracking Project is a public data initiative that launched in 2024 and provides open access to measures of school and residential segregation across U.S. metropolitan areas since the early 1990s. “The goal of the project is to be a public data resource for information on residential and school segregation,” Professor Owens explained. “All of those data are now publicly available on our website, and we have an interactive map as well.”

Drawing on this dataset, their recent working paper, “The Changing Relationship between School and Residential Segregation”, identifies a paradox that challenges long-held assumptions:

“White-Black residential segregation declined by about 20% in large metropolitan areas on average, from 1990 to 2020,” Professor Owens finds. “But school segregation between schools has increased by about 20% from 1990 to 2020.” 

As neighborhoods become increasingly racially and ethnically mixed, schools are becoming more homogenous. This divergence complicates the conventional belief that schools reflect neighborhood characteristics. Professor Owens explains that families with children are often making housing decisions based on school options, reversing the assumed direction of influence: “Families with children are deciding where to live, likely in part, based on the local school offerings… If you’re making a decision based on schools, that feeds into where you live.” Their data further suggest that reductions in residential segregation are primarily driven by individuals without children, as residential segregation patterns among families with school-age children closely resemble school segregation patterns. 

Professor Owens also identifies policy changes that contribute to the rise in school segregation despite progress in residential integration. One such factor is the expiration of court orders mandating school desegregation in some districts that followed the Brown v. Board of Education decision. “Since the 1990s and 2000s, those orders have been expiring as courts have determined that the districts have met their obligation,” she noted. “And what we see is in those districts, when those orders expire, [school segregation] goes back to where it was.” Another factor is the expansion of charter schools. As Professor Owens explains, “There’s been past research, including some of my own, showing that as charter schools expand, school segregation increases,” she explained. She adds, “Families are willing to live in neighborhoods with a slightly greater mix of racial and ethnic residents if they can send their child to a charter school and avoid a local neighborhood school when it’s serving low-income children and children of color.” While charter schools serve as a proxy for broader school choice, Professor Owens emphasizes that a lack of comprehensive national data on educational school choice policies constrains researchers’ ability to capture the scope of policy effects fully.

For Professor Owens, the significance of segregation lies not in spatial separation alone but in the inequalities it produces. “We study segregation as an indicator of inequality of opportunity. The reason that we care about segregation is because it’s linked to unequal distribution of resources.” This perspective resists deficit narratives that frame communities of color as inherently lacking and instead highlights how unequal funding, staffing, and related factors perpetuate disparities. For example, after a 2007 Supreme Court decision, school districts were limited in how they could consider race in assignment policies.

Looking ahead, Professor Owens and her colleagues are developing a database of housing and education policies to better understand how different approaches interact. They aim to identify combinations of policies that reinforce or reduce segregation. For example, “If you have an urban policy that increases multifamily apartment buildings, that might do well to improve residential integration,” she explained, “but if that coexists with an education policy that’s full school choice, then people might opt out of more integrated schools.” This next phase of research reflects Professor Owens’s recognition that single-domain solutions are insufficient. 

Professor Owens’s work reveals segregation to be not a relic of the past nor a one-directional process, but a dynamic cycle of housing, education, and policy. Her research shows that understanding and addressing inequality requires attention to the interplay of multiple systems and the ways in which policies shape choices and outcomes over time. As she concludes, “Policies that both pay attention to the distribution of students or residents across places, but also look at the inequalities between those contexts are really important.”