Other people's children: Racial diversity and community support for public schools in the United States

Abstract

Can communities be both inclusive and high performing? We argue that there is a potential tension between community inclusion and community performance because increasing diversity will lower the density of homophilous social ties within a community, weakening social cohesion and perceptions of shared interest, and making it harder for the community to organize for collective action. These effects may be ameliorated in the presence of bridging ties, i.e., if members of different groups interact with each other on a regular basis. We test these arguments in the context of US public school spending, showing that increasing racial diversity in a school district lowers local support for funding. This relationship only holds for districts where schools are relatively segregated, however; where children of different races attend school together we see no significant impact of increasing diversity on local school funding. Supplementary analyses shows that these effects are stronger in district with low income and with lower educational levels, consistent with the trade-off between inclusion and collective action being stronger in the presence of resource constraints and the absence of shared values. We also show that lower local spending is associated with weaker student outcomes. Our study thus sheds new light on the drivers of community performance while also addressing a key societal grand challenge: equitable access to quality education for all children.