Gerrymandering is known best as a tool to manipulate boundaries for voting districts, but school districts have long used the same tool to manipulate school boundaries. The author used geospatial techniques — mapping various kinds of demographic data onto school boundaries — to examine public school attendance zones and their effect on students. The author’s research yielded several key insights. Like congressional districts, school zones are highly gerrymandered; the gerrymandering of school zones serves to worsen the already severe racial segregation of public schools, but affirmative gerrymandering can effectively increase diversity and reduce racial segregation.
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