7.1 The Geography of Educational Opportunity in California
The substantive results of our analysis provide compelling evidence that the geography of educational opportunity in California is not distributed evenly throughout the state. Rather, student achievement in general–and math achievement, in particular–is strongly related to the achievement of nearby schools and school districts. The highest-performing districts (shown in red) tend to cluster in wealthy coastal enclaves, while the lowest-performing districts (shown in blue) tend to cluster in poorer inland cities. At the school level, similar macro-level trends are apparent, but so too are intra-district disparities, such as the clustering of low performance in central city regions like downtown Los Angeles.
From a scientific perspective, these results show the importance of considering potential spatial spillovers, when modeling phenomena such as student achievement. In the event that achievement in one place is tied to achievement in nearby places, then conventional modeling approaches will lead to biased conclusions.
From a policy perspective, the significant clustering of achievement in certain regions provides an opportunity to explore spatially-explicit interventions. One avenue that may be ripe for additional research is the role of school funding mechanisms and their attachment to space. School budgets are often (though not always) funded by local property taxes. Since wealthy municipalities can raise more tax revenue, these places can also spend more on public education, but they can also use other land use policies like zoning to govern growth and limit access to high quality education.
Another important consideration is that a crucial lever into education policy is housing policy Rather than (or, in addition to) increasing funding streams for disadvantaged schools stuck inside low-performing clusters, policy measures that support affordable housing and fair housing choice can help ensure that high quality schools avoid becoming a hoarded public good.
7.2 Local Geographies
California’s Local Control Funding program tries to use state funds to help equalize the playing field of public education, and the recent state budget also includes a controversial provision known as the “equity multiplier” designed to help funnel funds directly to schools serving large shares of poor students. Although the equity multiplier provides greater accountability for how individual schools spend their funds (as opposed to districts), it has been criticized for failing to focus attention on Black and other racial and ethnic minority students in the state. Another way to consider modifying funding structures might be to prioritizing lagging schools inside existing “coldspots” to help disrupt spatial achievement traps. In many cases, these locations are also the same regions of the state with the largest shares of minority populations.
7.2.1 Northern California
In Northern California, clusters of low-performing schools are often located in Black and Latino neighborhoods like East Oakland, and north and south Sacramento
7.2.2 Southern California
In Southen California, again, low-performing clusters appear most often in predominantly minority neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, the cluster is particularly prominent in the southeastern portion of the city, where most of it’s Black residents live. In the inland portions of the region, low-performing clusters are located in communities with predominant Hispanic and Latino populations, like San Bernadino and Moreno Valley.
Along with prior work on the relationship between racial inequality and educational opportunity, the results in this analysis show that California’s public education landscape poses particular challenges for the state’s minority residents. While the path toward a more equitable future is long, spatially explicit analyses such as these can help identify the places lagging behind, and potentially offer better insight into policy solutions most effective for ensuring equality in racial and spatial opportunity.