Segregated Activities, Segregated Schools? Neighborhoods, Activity Spaces, and Enrollments in Los Angeles

In the era of school choice, much research has examined how families access nonneighborhood schools, but little attention has been given to families’ prior connections to nonneighborhood locations. This study examines how activity spaces —the places where people work, play, worship, and otherwise spend time—relate to school enrollments and, by extension, school segregation. Combining longitudinal data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey with school and neighborhood demographics, the study tests hypotheses derived from the social structural sorting perspective, which predict that families’ activity spaces will influence school sorting processes. First, among schools more than two miles from the home, families were twice as likely to enroll when the school was near a previous activity location. Second, net of residence, racially segregating prior activity spaces (consisting of higher own-group proportions than the neighborhood) predicted racially segregating school enrollments (in schools with higher own-group proportions than the neighborhood school). The results demonstrate links between activity space segregation and school segregation, with implications for larger patterns of social and educational stratification in the twenty-first century.