TY - JOUR AU - Billings,Stephen B. AU - Deming,David J. AU - Rockoff,Jonah E. TI - School Segregation, Educational Attainment and Crime: Evidence from the end of busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 18487 PY - 2012 Y2 - October 2012 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18487 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18487.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Stephen B. Billings University of North Carolina Charlotte Department of Economics 9201 University City Boulevard Charlotte, NC 28223 E-Mail: sbillings2@gmail.com David J. Deming Harvard Graduate School of Education Gutman 411 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02139 Tel: 617/495-0583 E-Mail: david_deming@gse.harvard.edu Jonah E. Rockoff Columbia University Graduate School of Business 3022 Broadway #603 New York, NY 10027-6903 Tel: 212/854-9799 Fax: 212/316-9219 E-Mail: jonah.rockoff@columbia.edu AB - We study the impact of the end of race-based busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools (“CMS”) on academic achievement, educational attainment, and young adult crime. In 2001, CMS was prohibited from using race in assigning students to schools. School boundaries were redrawn dramatically to reflect the surrounding neighborhoods, and half of its students received a new assignment. Using addresses measured prior to the policy change, we compare students in the same neighborhood that lived on opposite sides of a newly drawn boundary. We find that both white and minority students score lower on high school exams when they are assigned to schools with more minority students. We also find decreases in high school graduation and four-year college attendance for whites, and large increases in crime for minority males. The impacts on achievement and attainment are smaller in younger cohorts, while the impact on crime remains large and persistent for at least nine years after the re-zoning. We show that compensatory resource allocation policies in CMS likely played an important role in mitigating the impact of segregation on achievement and attainment, but had no impact on crime. We conclude that the end of busing widened racial inequality, despite efforts by CMS to mitigate the impact of increases in segregation. ER -