What does gentrification mean for local schools? Fewer students

January 23, 2020
Chalkbeat

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The latest findings also show that gentrification is relatively rare. But where it does happen, the changes have real — and complex — consequences for students, as schools may be forced to grapple with budget cuts but neighborhoods also see declining crime rates.

“It really is a mixed bag,” said Francis Pearman, the Stanford professor who conducted the new study. “There’s no clear story to tell.”

Pearman examined neighborhoods in urban and suburban areas across the U.S. He considers a neighborhood as subject to gentrification if, in 2000, it had a low average household income and had seen relatively little new housing built in the previous decades. Then he examined whether, by 2014, a neighborhood had seen an influx of college-educated residents and an increase in real housing values.

By this definition, less than one in five urban and suburban public schools were in “gentrifiable” neighborhoods to begin with. Of those, about one in five did in fact gentrify.

That means a total of 4% of public schools in metro areas experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2014. Looking just within cities, the share approaches 8%, aligning with other recent national studies showing that gentrification is a relatively rare phenomenon, with substantial variation from city to city.

When neighborhoods do gentrify, Pearman found, local district schools tend to lose students. The average drop is small: 17 students, or 3% of enrollment. This comes from a decline in low-income and Hispanic students, with no countervailing increase in affluent or white students.

These findings aren’t surprising. Pearman’s prior work has shown that gentrification is more likely when an area offers a lot of school choices; other research has found that in many cities, neighborhoods have grown racially integrated but schools have not.

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Mentioned Publications

Research in the neighborhood effects tradition has primarily concerned itself with understanding the consequences of growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods. In recent years, however, the in-migration of relatively affluent households into disinvested central city neighborhoods—commonly referred to as gentrification—has markedly risen, transforming the racial, socioeconomic, and institutional composition of many urban neighborhoods. This article examines what existing literature reveals about what these changes mean for children’s academic achievement, with particular attention paid to the impacts of gentrification-induced changes to the social ecology, institutional composition, residential stability, and environmental conditions of urban neighborhoods. The final section proposes a rigorous interdisciplinary research agenda for advancing this budding field of education research.

This study examines patterns and relations between gentrification and urban schooling across U.S. cities using longitudinal data from 2000 to 2014. The first section presents new statistics on the incidence and distribution of gentrification occurring around urban schools in the United States as a whole. Of the roughly 18% of urban schools located in divested neighborhoods in the year 2000, roughly one in five experienced gentrification in their surrounding neighborhood by 2014. However, there exists considerable heterogeneity in the prevalence of gentrification across U.S. cities, with exposure rates ranging from zero in some cities to over 50% in others. The second section finds evidence that gentrification is associated with declining enrollment overall and with respect to Latinx and economically-disadvantaged students in neighborhood schools. This study also finds evidence that the largest declines in student enrollment occur when gentrifiers are White.

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