Most of the time, kids attend the school closest to where they live. It's convenient, and frequently it's the only option their family can afford.

Historically, school assignments were rigidly determined by a map in the school district office that defined school attendance areas. Kids went to school where the map said to go, and that was that.

These attendance areas were created for practical reasons — students had to be within walking distance of school. Taxes played a part, too: local property taxes determined local school funding. For homeowners it made sense to connect where you live and pay taxes with where your children went to school.

Today, that reasoning is mostly gone because the school finance system has changed. There is rarely a direct significant connection between local property taxes and the amount of money a school receives. Still, rigid attendance areas continue to be the norm.

How many school districts in California?

California is organized (or separated, or segregated) into about a thousand school districts. These vary from tiny, rural districts that serve only a handful of students to sprawling urban districts. Los Angeles Unified School District, America’s second-largest, serves close to half a million. It is so large that the state PTA treats it as four districts.

In any district with more than one school, parents and students tend to care a lot about attendance areas — they determine which children go to which school. If you live on this side of the tracks, you go to this school. If you live on the other side, you go to that one. You can’t transfer over a district line unless both school districts agree. (Good luck with that.)

Former California State Senator Gloria Romero refers to zip codes as "five digits of separation." Parents will go to great lengths to get their kids into the “right” school. Sometimes, parents desperate to get away from the “wrong” school will lie about their address, even at the risk of being sent to jail for it. Can your child attend school near your place of employment? Maybe, if you're a live-in nanny.

The rules for school assignments are determined by each school district. Some districts make school assignments with a map alone. Some use a lottery. Some use a ranked choice system, or test scores, or complex hybrid solutions. These systems matter a lot to families. Changes in the rules drive changes the housing market. It's so important to families that they will move to a different home. Families time their moves to minimize disruption, even if it costs more. In wealthy areas, real estate agents become experts about school assignment policies.

Homeless? There are rules for that, too.

Race and school attendance

The role of race in school assignment has long been a matter of critical national concern. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that to separate children in school “from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may effect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone". The court held, therefore, that “separate” education was “inherently unequal.”

California is a very diverse state, in aggregate. But the state's ethnic, racial and economic diversity looks more impressive on paper than it does in person. Many communities are not diverse at all. In honor of the 65th anniversary of the Brown decision, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA published Harming our Common Future. Among all of America’s states, the report found, “California is the most segregated for Latinos, where 58% attend intensely segregated schools, and the typical Latino student is in a school with only 15% white classmates".

The Urban Institute has invested considerable creativity in the work of making segregation visible through data and maps. Search their work to see patterns in your area.

Education in rural schools

Buses and school integration

The Brown decision compelled many school districts to integrate the schools within their boundaries. This was a difficult and disruptive order, because many families live in segregated communities. In some large districts such as Los Angeles, for a time desegregation orders required children to ride buses to schools outside their own neighborhood. From an education point of view, desegregation worked, but forced busing was widely unpopular from the start.

Over time, additional court decisions (especially Milliken v. Bradley) ended court-ordered busing.

The end of busing did not signal the end of racial isolation, which by some measures has grown worse according to Harming California's Future, a 2021 report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. For a summary of recent Federal civil rights rulings related to education see the UCLA Civil Rights Project documentation of McFarland v. Jefferson County Public Schools & Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS)

Social science indicators of poverty, well-being, educational attainment and more are notoriously correlated with zip code. Organizing school enrollment strictly by geography is no longer the only option. One of the major school reform themes of recent decades has been the idea that families should have choices about where their children attend school.

Not every student attends the school nearest home. Does choice tend to make segregation better or worse? Read on to lesson 5.2 to find out... but first take a moment to pass the quiz below and earn your ticket.

Updated July 2017
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