Reducing racial segregation of public school districts

Racial segregation in public education has been declared as unconstitutional for over 60 years in the United States. Yet many public school districts remain largely separate and unequal. A commonly used approach to reduce school segregation is redelineating school attendance zones to create more racially diverse classrooms. However, there is a need for a school districting approach that can minimize racial or socioeconomic segregation at the district level. In this paper, we develop a spatial optimization model that delineates school attendance zones with the aim of minimizing racial segregation of school district to enable the assessment of the impacts of school attendance zones on the racial segregation of school district. Applications of this model to Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) and San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) in California, USA show that it is possible to reduce racial segregation by 64% at RUSD and 56% at SDUSD, demonstrating the potential of the proposed model.