School segregation and social processes that shape early and middle childhood development

Abstract

De facto school segregation, stemming from structural racism, has myriad consequences for children’s development. Extant research documents the implications of segregated schools for children’s academic resources and opportunities, but there is less attention on the social processes that unfold as a result of school segregation, particularly in early and middle childhood. Social processes–including ethnic-racial socialization, stereotyping and prejudice, and intergroup contact–are important mechanisms wherein school segregation affects academic and social development, thereby upholding a recursive cycle of structural racism. We synthesize cross-disciplinary theoretical and empirical research to propose a conceptual framework for how school segregation relates to social processes that shape early and middle childhood development. We conclude with reflections and future directions including prioritizing the social benefits and costs of desegregation for minoritized children, expanding research within an intersectional framework, accounting for structural inequities and injustice in child development research more broadly, and implications for education and learning.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Jeffrey Greene and three anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful feedback strengthened our manuscript. We also thank Dr. Josefina Bañales for her invaluable feedback during the early stages of conceiving and writing this manuscript. Finally, the first author would like to thank the National Academy of Education and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Program for supporting this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Throughout the article, we chose to capitalize American Indigenous, Asian, Black, Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander, and Latinx and chose not to capitalize white, consistent with the Columbia Journalism Review standards that delineate the differing social significance of racial/ethnic categories representing a “shared sense of identity and community” (Laws, 2020).