School choice & social stratification: How intra-district transfers shift the racial/ethnic and economic composition of schools

•We examine factors that influence parents’ propensity to exercise school choice.•We then determine the degree to which choice shifts stratification in schools.•Social factors rather than academic ones drive parental choice.•District-wide stratification in schools is slightly increased by school choice.•Much larger increases in stratification occur in diverse areas within the district.

The liberation model hypothesizes that school choice liberates students from underperforming schools by giving them the opportunity to seek academically superior schooling options outside of their neighborhoods. Subsequently, school choice is hypothesized to diminish stratification in schools. Data from one urban school district is analyzed to test these hypotheses. We specifically examine which factors influence the propensity for parents to participate in choice, and how school choice changes the racial/ethnic and economic composition of schools. We further examine how school choice influences similar changes within distinct sociogeographic areas within the district. We find that families who are zoned to more racially/ethnically and economically diverse schools in sociogeographically diverse areas are more likely to participate in school choice. We also find that intra-district choice is associated with a slight increase in social stratification throughout the district, with more substantial stratification occurring in the most demographically diverse areas and schools.