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Fry, Katherine Yuko

University of British Columbia

In the last thirty years, racial segregation within American public schools has grown. Scholars have cited school choice policies and attendance zone boundaries as leading causes for this resurgence of de facto segregation, eliciting concerns for the equitable delivery of education amongst American public school students. This study centers Seattle Public Schools to examine how historical and contemporary mechanisms have contributed to resegregation within the district and their potential implications for opportunity hoarding amongst public high schools. Grounded in Critical Geography, my research is guided by the following questions: 1) How do Seattle Public School’s attendance zone boundaries reflect patterns of historical housing discrimination in Seattle? Can the attendance zone boundaries of Seattle Public Schools [SPS] be considered gerrymandered? 2) In what ways might attendance zone boundaries contribute to opportunity hoarding in Seattle Public Schools? What are the implications for policy and practice? Using Comparative Historical Analysis and Digital Cartography, my research seeks to provide a visualization of how historical mechanisms of discrimination continue to persist in the contemporary educational policy of Seattle Public Schools. Furthermore, I intend for the archival research and digital maps produced in this thesis to be utilized as community resources to better understand the racialization of space in Seattle Public Schools through a holistic lens.

Text

2024-04-26

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88038

Educational Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/