You introduced a strawman. If self-sorting has introduced dramatically greater geographic segregation since 1988, the onus is on you to show it before claiming that.
In practice, school district gerrymandering has effectively recreated "separate but equal". There is research (cited in the article linked below) that school districts are doing this.
> In practice, school district gerrymandering has effectively recreated "separate but equal". There is research (cited in the article linked below) that school districts are doing this
Am I reading this wrong or does the article you cite in fact make a point that's exactly the opposite of your claim?
The graph of school district shapes' effect on educational vs residential racial segregation[1] shows that the net effect is to _reduce_ segregation (though not very significantly), and that at the district level, this is true of a fairly substantial majority of districts.
The thesis of the article seems to be that educational racial segregation is overall largely a consequence of residential racial segregation, and that district shapes mitigate this to a minor degree. The article is saying that districts _should_ be gerrymandered, in order to make districts less segregated than the residential areas around them.
I get why you might have interpreted it otherwise: the article is typically poorly-written for Vox and pretty much designed to trick readers into exactly the misunderstanding you fell into. Mentioning that "some" district shapes increase segregation relative to residential, showing multiple cherry-picked examples of same, and then smoothly seguing into advocacy for gerrymandering to reduce segregation relative to the residential baseline is pretty much designed to trap readers that aren't paying attention or actually looking at the graphs. Regardless of your view on the topic, framing the data in the graph the way they did without clarifying that the examples they emphasized are in the minority by far is just dishonest journalism (if you can call what Vox does "journalism"...)
Thank you for the extra sources! The Monarrez paper supports my point: "the mean district desegregates a little".
The Richards paper, on the other hand, claims in the abstract that gerrymandering "generally exacerbates segregation". I wasn't sure how to reconcile this claim with Monarrez's paper, the graph from my comment, as well as https://mobile.twitter.com/alv9n/status/950388285318328321 (from the articles author).
So I read the Richards paper, and now I can't reconcile why it explicitly contradicts its abstract (and your claim) in multiple places:
> Interestingly, gerrymandering was
inversely related to segregation, such that districts with higher levels of segregation were less gerrymandered than less segregated districts.
..
> Indeed, in the only direct
examination of the effects of educational gerrymandering, Clark (1987) con-
cluded that gerrymandering of attendance zone boundaries in Topeka in the
1950s and 1960s were either neutral or desegregative in nature.
The results of her paper show a minuscule mean effect on school segregation due to gerrymandering: between 0.001% (ie 0.00001)and 0.003% mean increase in the level of segregation, with an outlier of 0.006% for Asian-White segregation.
As I mention above, this contradicts the findings from the other papers discussed. But even if we take this paper as our source of truth, it still seems like residential segregation is responsible for the vast majority of district segregation, and that the total magnitude of the gerrymandering effect is tiny.
You're ignoring that the paper's results (which they note) are affected by desegregation orders, and southern racial segregation shows different trends.
That's no straw man, with a self segregated population you are going to see that reflected in schools without massive effort. Not sending kids on 1+ hour bus ride is going to mean some increase. It's up to you to say thouse buss rides are 'worth it' not just that removing them makes some arbitrary metric worse.
Based on Retric's commenting history, I doubt s/he is suggesting self-sorting, just observing the current reality without speculating on the whys and hows.
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