Distance to School, Neighborhood Disadvantage, and Education Outcomes

Background and Purpose: Given the substantial achievement gap in both reading and mathematics outcomes for Black and Hispanic children, there have been educational reform policies and programs designed to reduce the achievement gap. Neighborhood disadvantage, spatially concentrated in low-income neighborhoods, has been identified as a primary factor associated with the achievement gap in education.  In a continued attempt to facilitate racially and socioeconomically diverse school environments and improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, current political rhetoric targeting desegregation efforts has resulted in the creation of a variety of programs that encourage student mobility by transporting children from their local neighborhood schools to better-resourced schools, often in different neighborhoods. An understanding of the relationship between distance and educational outcomes is important in order to better understand the impact of current educational policies on children’s education. It remains unclear how travelling far distances might impact student’s achievement, particularly in an urban sprawl such as Los Angeles.

Methods: An ecological, cross-sectional design was implemented to explore the relationship between distance to school and student outcomes. This study utilized RAND’s LA Family and Neighborhood Survey to assess these relationships for all children in the sample ages 9 – 17 (N = 1,014). Ordinary least regression (OLS) models were employed to test the relationship between distance and outcomes. Distance to school, the primary independent variable, was measured in miles from the home location to the school location. The dependent variables included three Woodcock Johnson Tests of Achievement: Passage Comprehension (reading skills), Applied Problems (math skills), and Letter-Word Identification (basic vocabulary skills). Separate entropy indices were calculated to measure both racial and income segregation at the Census tract level.  

Results: Distance is significantly, positively related to math skills. Income segregation and racial segregation are negatively associated with math skills and reading skills. However, distance significantly moderates the negative relationship between both racial and income segregation, such that students who live in similarly segregated neighborhoods but travel farther distances to school do better on the math assessment as compared to students who do not travel far for their education. Yet, the magnitude of the effect is not large enough to completely offset the negative relationship between neighborhood segregation and lower math outcomes.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest that greater student mobility is associated with improved mathematical outcomes for students. These findings also suggest that greater distance to school significantly reduces the negative association between income segregation, racial segregation, and mathematical ability. Results imply that students living in segregated areas that are able to travel farther distances to school significantly minimize the educational disadvantage they encounter by living in segregated neighborhoods. However, students who continue to live in segregated neighborhoods and are unable to access better schools that are farther away, continue to be disadvantaged academically. Thus, while it is important to provide access to better schools for students who live in segregated neighborhoods, it is also important to continue to improve upon public schools that remain segregated communities.