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School District Formation as an Explanation for Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Concentrated Poverty in Bexar County, Texas

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Developments in Demography in the 21st Century

Part of the book series: The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis ((PSDE,volume 48))

Abstract

Recent political debates in Texas have focused on school district consolidation and the economic impacts of this potential change (Boser 2013; Cooley and Floyd 2013; Taylor et al. 2014). Early indications are that such wide-scale consolidations across the state are not economically viable mainly because they do not save school districts money. While financial considerations are important to the discussion, they should not be the sole determining factor. In this chapter I extend the scope of the discussion and consider the social impacts of school district fragmentation. Using a socio-historical analysis of Bexar County, Texas I do the following: (1) consider how school district formation in the county reified persistent concentrated neighborhood poverty; and (2) due to this mechanism, I consider how school district consolidation should be considered within the framework of ending cycles of persistently concentrated neighborhood poverty. Bexar County demonstrates well the importance for considering the social impact of potential school district consolidation. The county has a history of place-based educational and economic disparities found between school districts (Drennon 2006), as evidenced early on in the Supreme Court decision of San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez (1973).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other operationalizations were used to define legacy neighborhoods including using: tracts that are in the top quartile in all census years from 1970-2010; tracts that were consistently one standard deviation above the mean dropout rate in all census years from 1970 to 2010 – yet results are similar as dropout legacy neighborhoods in Bexar County remain the same regardless of how legacy is operationalized.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Matthew J. Martinez

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  1. Matthew J. Martinez
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Demography, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), San Antonio, TX, USA

    Joachim Singelmann

  2. Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University College Station, College Station, TX, USA

    Dudley L. Poston, Jr

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Martinez, M.J. (2020). School District Formation as an Explanation for Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Concentrated Poverty in Bexar County, Texas. In: Singelmann, J., Poston, Jr, D. (eds) Developments in Demography in the 21st Century. The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26492-5_14

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