Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Process of Racial Resegregation in Housing and Schools: The Sociology of Reputation

Item

Title

The Process of Racial Resegregation in Housing and Schools: The Sociology of Reputation

Author

Wells, Amy Stuart

Research Area

Class, Status and Power

Topic

Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

The United States has a long history of racial and ethnic segregation in housing patterns and public school enrollment as well as efforts to dismantle this segregation. This essay discusses what we have learned in the United States about how difficult it is to halt the patterns of housing and school segregation even as our nation becomes more diverse, racial attitudes are reportedly improving, and the twentieth century urban‐suburban racial distinctions disappear. To explain the process of resegregation that occurs repeatedly, the author developed a new interdisciplinary framework to foster a deeper understanding of how racialized perceptions of places or neighborhoods and the schools embedded within them perpetuates segregation despite changing demographics, attitudes and metro migrations across urban‐suburban lines. The sociology of reputation, the bias of crowds, and the choices of home buyers with the most capital amid the existing separate and unequal structures are the bodies of research the author draws upon to help us see familiar segregation patterns anew.

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Identifier

etrds0457

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The Process of Racial Resegregation
in Housing and Schools: The
Sociology of Reputation
AMY STUART WELLS

Abstract

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The United States has a long history of racial and ethnic segregation in housing
patterns and public school enrollment as well as efforts to dismantle this segregation.
This essay discusses what we have learned in the United States about how difficult
it is to halt the patterns of housing and school segregation even as our nation
becomes more diverse, racial attitudes are reportedly improving, and the twentieth
century urban-suburban racial distinctions disappear. To explain the process of
resegregation that occurs repeatedly, the author developed a new interdisciplinary
framework to foster a deeper understanding of how racialized perceptions of
places or neighborhoods and the schools embedded within them perpetuates
segregation despite changing demographics, attitudes and metro migrations across
urban-suburban lines. The sociology of reputation, the bias of crowds, and the
choices of home buyers with the most capital amid the existing separate and unequal
structures are the bodies of research the author draws upon to help us see familiar
segregation patterns anew.

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EXISTING RESEARCH ON SEGREGATION AND WHAT IS MISSING
Most research on racial segregation in housing and schools within the
United States examines the degree and outcomes of racial segregation (Massey
& Denton, 1993; Wells and Frankenberg, 2007) or school and housing choices
that often result in increased racial and socioeconomic segregation as more
affluent and white parents use powerful social networks to guide their
preferences (Holme, 2002; Wells et al., 2014). While both lines of inquiry are
important, what has been missing in the literature is an exploration of the
reinforcing relationship between the individual choices and the segregated
places and schools. In other words, rather than thinking of the housing
and school choice process as a way those with the most options—namely
affluent Whites—make individual decisions with input from their networks,
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

we must examine these choices as socially constructed within a racialized
context in which otherwise viable choices are framed as unthinkable.
THE PARADOX OF THE SIMULTANEOUS DRIVE FOR DIVERSITY
AND RESEGREGATION
There are three main factors in the recent US history that should, theoretically,
lead our country toward less racial/ethnic segregation in housing and public
schools and not more:

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1. Demographics: The United States is becoming increasingly racially/ethnically diverse, and this increased diversity is even more dramatic among
the school-age population, now less than 50% White, non-Hispanic
(National Center for Education Statistics, 2014).
2. Metro Migrations: Coinciding with the demographic trend is a profound
shift in who lives where. More low-income families of color have been
moving to once-all-White suburbs, just as more Whites are moving
back into gentrifying areas of cities their grandparents fled decades
ago (Ehrenhalt, 2012). Hence, both suburban and urban spaces overall
have become more racially and ethnically diverse, creating more
opportunities for sustainable racially and socioeconomically integrated
communities and schools.
3. Racial Attitudes: A growing proportion of our post-Civil Rights society
values diverse environments—at least in the abstract (Wells et al., 2009).
Americans of all racial and ethnic groups are more likely to say they
accept cultural differences and view diversity in social situations as a
positive (Krysan & Faison, 2011). These attitudinal changes are particularly pronounced among Whites, who generally have more choices
about where to live and send their children to school (Alba & Nee, 2005;
Louie, 2005).
Taken together, these three factors strongly suggest that we should see more
racially diverse schools and communities today than in the past. In fact, the
research on residential patterns and school segregation trends, however, tells
us a different story—one that is contradictory and complex as a temporary,
fragile diversity occurs at the initial stage of neighborhood change followed
by a process of resegregation as Whites flee changing suburbs and people of
color are displaced from gentrifying areas of cities.
The pervasiveness of racial segregation in the United States, therefore, is
best understood in the context of the three factors noted above and evidence
that they have indeed helped to create more racially diverse neighborhoods
in the last few decades (Ellen, Horn, & O’Regan, 2012; Glaeser & Vigdor,

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2012). But at the same time, most of these neighborhoods are incredibly
unstable, and thus, they quickly resegregate (DeSena & Shortell, 2012; Hyra,
2015; Wells et al., 2014).
So the question is why, in the context of more favorable conditions for meaningful integration, does diversity not “stick”? The evidence suggests two
overlapping factors: (i) Resegregation is fostered, supported, and rationalized by racialized perceptions of what constitutes a “good” neighborhood
and a “good” school and (ii) The housing and school choices of those with
the most status—namely the white and affluent home buyers—both drive
the process of resegregation and are most sensitive to these racialized perceptions of what is “good.”
In the next two sections of this essay, the author proposes a new framework
for explaining this pernicious resegregation process as well as the hypersensitivity of the most privileged home buyers to the resulting status hierarchies
of neighborhoods and schools that are embedded in segregated structures.
A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE PROCESS
OF RACIAL RESEGREGATION: PERCEPTIONS OF PLACE AND PEOPLE
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To better understand the how and why of racial resegregation, the author
draws from two related but previously separate theoretical frameworks,
the sociology of reputation (Caplow, 1964; Strathdee, 2009), and the bias
of crowds (Payne, Vuletich, & Lundberg, 2017) to understand the socially
constructed nature of race, place, and education.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF REPUTATION
The sociology of reputation argues that the status of a place or institution,
or the reputed understanding of the “quality” or “desirability” of neighborhoods and schools, is correlated with the race and class of the students and
residents within them, even after controlling for several other “objective”
indicators. Thus, places and institutions such as schools have reputations
that vary depending on who is associated with them. The idea of organizational reputation as co-determined by the status of its members or students is
also not new (Caplow, 1964). According to Caplow (1964), membership and
affiliations have an iterative relationship with organizational status because
the prestige of an organization is strongly affected by its alliances with other
high-status organizations and by the prestige its members import from other
contexts. However, as Strathdee (2009) points out, sociologists of education
have rarely examined the concept of reputation as it relates to “elite” educational institutions, which results in a lack of clarity about what is driving the
formation of reputation in our field.

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In other words, reputations are socially constructed within and in the service of social stratification (Caplow, 1964), meaning that they are based on
racial and ethnic biases that are shared and made more meaningful within
the context of a particular housing market or a set of school choices. Most
notably, the reputations of communities, schools, or universities are not, as
we often assume them to be, based entirely—or even primarily—on objective criteria that would make the honor, prestige, and status that comes with a
good reputation “earned” or “well-deserved” (Weber, 1978). Hence, the prestige and status of a neighborhood or a school varies dramatically in terms
of the social status—but not necessarily the intelligence or ability—of WHO
lives there and WHICH students enroll.
This strong correlation between high-status people and high-status institutions or places is reinforced by these so-called objective measures or tangible
distinctions between these institutions or places that favor those with the
most money or the valued cultural capital. In fact, most of these “objective”
measures (e.g., “tangible” factors related to resources, academic outcomes,
and property values) are defined in a way that privileges those affiliated
with the highest status people (Caplow, 1964; Koretz, 2008; Schneider, 2017;
Tienken & Zhao, 2013). But recent research demonstrates that even when
these tangible factors are controlled for, the differential status of people,
based on race, ethnicity, and SES, in particular, strongly correlates with the
status and thus the “reputation” of place or an organization such as a school
with which they associate (Caplow, 1964; Strathdee, 2009; Wells et al., 2014).
No matter how supportive neighbors in a mostly Black community are of
each other or how phenomenal teachers in a school serving low-income
students of color may be, these places and institutions—one usually nested
within the other—are rarely, if ever, deemed to be highly reputable or even
“good.”
Ranking Schools and Stratifying Students In recent years, the ranking of
educational institutions online and in the popular press has created explicit
status hierarchies based primarily on narrow outcome measures such as
standardized test scores that make schools hypersensitive to their positions.
All accredited law schools, for example, have been ranked by US News and
World Report every year since 1993, making these annual lists an organizational reality. Research on the law schools’ response to these rankings has
shown they adjust their behavior to increase their ranking, which helps
them attract “high-quality” students and faculty members, as measured by
ranking indicators of quality. As a result, law schools have increased their
spending on merit-based scholarships as they attempt to “buy” top students
(Sauder, 2005). These so-called top or most desirable students—those whose

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credentials augment the law school’s ranking—then, in turn, are attracted to
the highest ranked schools.
This example of the twenty-first-century law schools speaks to Caplow’s
(1964) argument about the power of the most prestigious organizations
to influence how the standards of achievement are measured in a field.
The institutions with the most prestige also have the clearest advantage
in maintaining their prestige, which contributes to some degree to an
“aggrandizement effect” or the overestimation of an organization’s prestige
by its own members. This, in turn, exaggerates the value of membership
and reduces the attractiveness’ of outside affiliations (Caplow, 1964). The
size of organizations such as private clubs and honorary societies is thus
inversely correlated with standing, while scarcity of access or exclusivity
may be positively correlated with an organization’s prestige, as those who
lack access desire to be associated with the organization or school (Shenker
and Yuchtman-Yaar, 1997).
The systematic exclusion, therefore, of lower-status people from high
prestige, reputable organizations or communities and the unwillingness of
high-status individuals to associate with low prestige institutions is a central
but ill-defined concept within sociology since Weber (1978) wrote about
status dimension of social stratification in Economy and Society. According to
Shenker and Yuchtman-Yaar (1997), with the exception of Caplow (1964), the
idea “that one’s status may be co-determined by the organizations he/she is
affiliated with is a point all but neglected in the sociology literature.”
And yet, empirical research that supports this codeterminant relationship
between the status or reputation of a neighborhood and the status of the people who live there dates as far back as the 1960s (Useem, Useem, & Gibson,
1960) and has been supplemented by more recent studies on housing segregation and white flight (Farley et al., 1978; Massey & Denton, 1993). This
research on how race and place get constructed, and how Whites, in particular, tend to have skewed perspectives on the racial makeup of their communities, also relates to recent research on segregated settlement patterns
in gentrifying cities (DeSena & Shortell, 2012; Mason, Morlock, & Pisano,
2012). What these studies tell us is that reputations of places are socially
constructed—or as Griswold (1992) notes, reputations exist largely within
residents’ imaginations. “Place” as a collective memory perspective suggests
that neighborhood reputation is socially constructed through the meaning
that residents make of where they live (Zelner, 2015). In this way, spatial theorists help us understand the concept of sociology of reputation as it relates to
different places and how they are constructed through their symbolic meaning, their resources or lack thereof and the people who live within them
(Gotham, 2003; Harvey, 2009). In this respect, Wells (2015) and Wells et al.
(2014, 2017) found that White suburban homebuyers perceive communities

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that are becoming racially and ethnically diverse more negatively even when
there are no tangible differences between those and other predominantly
White communities. This implicit bias of place, we learned, was in large measure correlated with the status of the students in public schools associated
with those places (Wells et al., 2014).
THE BIAS OF CROWDS AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REPUTATIONS

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This sociology of reputation argument as it relates to the perception of place
and a hierarchical understanding of the value of different people associated
with those places connects in important ways to a social-psychological
argument known as implicit bias, which examines how “relatively unconscious and relatively automatic features of prejudiced judgment” affect
social behavior. This concept of implicit bias is increasingly used in the legal
field, particularly in the criminal justice literature, and in popular press
reports on racial profiling and police brutality in recent years. And while the
implicit bias concept has not often been applied to research on school and
housing choice, the author argues that it often results in White homebuyers
devaluing more racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods and schools
even when there are no tangible differences between those places and others
with more White residents (Wells, 2015).
And more recently, a new area of implicit bias research has found that
implicit bias is “situational”—meaning that people with similar backgrounds and experiences develop different degrees of inter-racial implicit
bias depending on the context in which they live and interact with people of
different backgrounds. This research finding, labeled the “bias of crowds,”
concludes that when contexts are more equal and just, people are less likely
to hold implicit biases or to be the victims of them (Payne et al., 2017).
Together, the theories of sociology of reputation and the bias of crowds
support a growing body of research evidence that finds that such socially constructed understandings of the reputation and thus desirability of a “good”
school are heavily influenced by biased perceptions of the demographics
of the students enrolled. In other words, predominantly white and affluent
schools and neighborhoods are perceived to be “better than” other less-white
or less-affluent schools even when the data imply otherwise (see Saporito,
1998 and Saporito & Hanley, 2014).
The process, therefore, by which a once predominantly white and
middle-class community and school district with a “good” reputation
becomes “not-so-good” and eventually “bad” as the racial makeup of the
student body changes—even before the loss of tangible material resources
that usually follows—is a process we must identify before we can address
resegregation. In some of these school districts in the first phases of these

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demographic transitions, the tangible factors, including funding, curricular
offerings, teaching staff, and the student outcomes change very little initially.
But as the skin color of the student population changes, the reputation of
the district declines regardless, taking with it the property values (Wells
et al., 2014). Indeed, the author and her research team found that the percent
of Black students enrolled in public schools in a given school district could
lower the property values of otherwise similar houses by as much as $50,000
depending on which side of the school district boundary line it was on
(Wells et al., 2014). Such declines in property values lead to an eventual
decline factors as well.
INDIVIDUAL CHOICES AMID STATUS HIERARCHIES

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As noted earlier, racial segregation is reproduced when implicit biases of
places and schools based on the race of the people within them solidify
their socially constructed reputations to mold decisions that individuals
make about where to live and where to send their children to schools. In
these moments of demographic transition in both urban and suburban contexts, homebuyers—particularly those with the most economic and social
capital—make these decisions, often based primarily on the reputation of
a school or district as constructed by their peers and social networks. In
this way, home buying choices in a suburban county that is fragmented
and divided into multiple, tiny municipalities and school districts, easily
resolidifies the practice of making race-based classifications of schools
as “good” or “bad,” fueling a self-fulfilling prophecy discussed above in
which districts undergoing demographic changes are deemed less desirable,
leading to a decline in property values, followed by a shrinking tax base
and a loss in tangible or materials factors in schools. And the cycle of racial
segregation repeats (Wells et al., 2014).
In this section, the author examines the critical moment within that
cycle—when home-buyers make implicitly biased choices based on socially
constructed and racialized reputations of schools and communities or
perceptions of place that both correlate with the race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status of the people who live there. Her research found that these
reputations and perceptions are not always accurate are not always accurate
in terms of objective measures of tangible factors—for example, quality of
housing or academic outcomes.
STATUS OF PLACE; STATUS OF PEOPLE; STATUS OF SCHOOLS: CHOOSING CLASSMATES
AND NEIGHBORS
Based on the arguments presented so far, we can reconsider the housing
and school choice process as far from rational in an economic sense (Wells,

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1993). While the decisions people make about where they live and send their
children to school are imbedded in material realities, including location of
jobs, their income and wealth, and real estate availability, these decisions are
also about status hierarchies, including racial and socioeconomic hierarchies.
The old real estate mantra of “location, location, location,” is a spatial marker
of not just tangible factors (e.g., the size of the lots and houses or the quality of construction) but it also applies to who lives there and thus, how high
status those associated with this community are (Wells et al., 2014).
Basically, the evidence tells us that choosing neighborhoods is about choosing your neighbors because the people who live in a given community convey their status, prestige, and reputation (or lack thereof) on their neighborhood, and by association, their neighbors. If race is indeed a master status as
Blumer (1958) claimed, with Blacks at the bottom of the socially constructed
hierarchy, then perceptions of neighborhoods with many Black residents will
too often be bad regardless of the conditions. These constructions of places
provide a larger context for school and neighborhood choices and effects subsequent status-conscious housing choices.
But this phenomenon is not entirely new. In fact, a post WWII study of
75 “middle-management men,” their neighborhood choices and their stress
levels related to where they live and with whom they associate, found that
as men (presumably white men, although it is not stated directly) advance
in their careers, make more money and gain higher executive positions, they
become increasingly aware of and concerned about who their neighbors are
(Useem et al., 1960). In fact, as these men gain status professionally, there
are fewer “appropriate neighborhoods [emphasis added] in which they believe
they can live” (p. 73). Furthermore, they are most likely to reside near those
perceived to be peers in the business world. The authors (Useem et al., 1960)
find that living in “appropriate neighborhoods” shape men’s self-esteem
and identity. In other words, it is bad for these men’s self-esteem to live
in a neighborhood with lower-status neighbors. Since the 1960s, the social
science research that examines neighborhood choice and segregation has
built—directly and indirectly—on these conceptions of status, prestige, and
reputation as they relate to race, class, and home choices. The research on
school choices, however, has been less directly tied to this evidence.
Ranking Schools and Stratifying Students: School Choices The codetermined
relationship between the reputation of a school and the status of the students and families associated with it affects school choices in at least three
overlapping ways:
1. White parents with high-status educational credentials are most likely
to say they prefer racially diverse schools for their children, and more

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likely to care about the perceived reputation of the schools their children
attend (Sikkink & Emerson, 2008; Sewell, 1992).
2. More affluent, highly educated, and usually White parents are strongly
influenced by their tight social networks on issues of school reputation
and status (Holme, 2002; Horvat & Lewis, 2013; Lareau and Goyette,
2014; Roda & Wells, 2013). “School quality” and thus the reputation of
schools is constructed by social groups (Wells, 2015).
3. And finally, there is a negative correlation between White parents’
perceptions of school quality or reputation and the percentage of
students of color enrolled (Karsten, Ledoux, Roeleveld, Felix, & Elshof,
2003; Roda & Wells, 2013; Saporito, 1998). For instance, Billingham
and Hunt (2016), who studied the effects of school racial composition
and several nonracial school characteristics on white parents’ school
choices, found that the proportion of black students in a hypothetical
school has a consistent and significant inverse association with the
likelihood of white parents enrolling their children in that school, even
after controlling for many school quality factors. Similarly, Saporito
(1998) found that white parents choosing schools avoided with large
numbers of African American students schools, even those located in
more affluent neighborhoods because they equated the lower status of
African Americans in the United States with the status of the schools
that enrolled them. They did not want their children associated with
those schools no matter what information they had on the impact of the
school on children’s achievement or safety.
Indeed, education research suggests that many of the most affluent White
parents only take their embrace of “diversity” so far. In fact, the research
shows that even when parents consider diversity to be a benefit, they still
tend to choose schools that are predominantly White, oftentimes citing measures of school quality as the most important factor in making their decisions
(Lacireno-Paquet & Brantley, 2012; Roda & Wells, 2013).
This contradiction is in part explained by increasing inequality and narrow
definitions of “school quality” that too often align with demographic characteristics of schools. Even for parents who say they prefer diverse schools,
these structural challenges make finding and choosing these schools less
likely. In addition, affluent parents, who often espouse progressive racial
attitudes, regularly choose nondiverse schools due to their concerns about
the inter-generational transmission of status to their children and their
own implicit biases about the relationship between race and school quality
(Lacireno-Paquet & Brantley, 2012; Wells et al., 2009).
When taken together, these factors add up to more racial and social class
segregation as those families with the most choices opt out of more racially

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and socioeconomically diverse schools, perpetuating the cycle of segregation
and resegregation.
CONCLUSION: ADDRESSING THE BIASES OF REPUTATIONS

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This essay demonstrates the ways in which race, place, and schools are
constructed in a manner that leads to more racial segregation and inequality.
These social constructions of “good” places help us understand of how
parents and home buyers make sense of different neighborhood and school
options and thus, how racial segregation is reproduced time and time again,
despite the factors outlined above that suggest our society should be moving
in the other direction.
It seems quite evident, therefore, that even when we do find diverse
communities and public schools, they are often fragile, unstable, and in the
process of resegregating. Studying the process of resegregation is important
to understanding how we might stop or reverse it as our nation becomes
increasingly diverse.
Indeed, we have evidence that this process can be reversed with a great
deal of effort. For instance, strategically designed real estate campaigns to
promote diverse neighborhoods and local policies to manage choice options
generally have good results in addressing housing segregation. Furthermore,
we know that public schools can foster racial literacy among their students
and parents and create classrooms that enable students to learn empathy
and care across racial and ethnic boundaries. Such educational policies and
practices when combined with housing strategies to address biases toward
neighborhoods that have unearned bad reputations because of the race and
thus status of who does and does not live there can make a difference in how
home buyers define “good” schools and communities.
The takeaway here is that experiences matter and can alter racialized perceptions of places and schools. Recognizing that reputations and choices are
socially constructed enables us to envision how they can be reconstructed.
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Unequal Long Island School Districts. The Teachers College, Columbia University
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Amy Stuart Wells is a professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers
College, Columbia University and the 2018–2019 president of the American
Educational Research Association (AERA). She is the director of The Public
Good, a Public School Support Organization (PSSO) that uses systematic
research to engage racially diverse public school constituents about issues of
racial literacy and equality. She is also the director of Reimagining Education:
Teaching and Learning in Racially Diverse Schools, a Professional Development
Summer Institute that trains more than 300 educators in issues of racial
literacy and culturally relevant pedagogy. She is the author and editor of
five books and more than 50 articles and book chapters on issues of race
and education, including Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregation’s
Graduates with Jennifer Jellison Holme, Anita Revilla and Awo Korantema
Atanda (2009; University of California Press). Wells is a member of the
National Academy of Education, and she is an AERA Fellow.
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The Process of Racial Resegregation
in Housing and Schools: The
Sociology of Reputation
AMY STUART WELLS

Abstract

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The United States has a long history of racial and ethnic segregation in housing
patterns and public school enrollment as well as efforts to dismantle this segregation.
This essay discusses what we have learned in the United States about how difficult
it is to halt the patterns of housing and school segregation even as our nation
becomes more diverse, racial attitudes are reportedly improving, and the twentieth
century urban-suburban racial distinctions disappear. To explain the process of
resegregation that occurs repeatedly, the author developed a new interdisciplinary
framework to foster a deeper understanding of how racialized perceptions of
places or neighborhoods and the schools embedded within them perpetuates
segregation despite changing demographics, attitudes and metro migrations across
urban-suburban lines. The sociology of reputation, the bias of crowds, and the
choices of home buyers with the most capital amid the existing separate and unequal
structures are the bodies of research the author draws upon to help us see familiar
segregation patterns anew.

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EXISTING RESEARCH ON SEGREGATION AND WHAT IS MISSING
Most research on racial segregation in housing and schools within the
United States examines the degree and outcomes of racial segregation (Massey
& Denton, 1993; Wells and Frankenberg, 2007) or school and housing choices
that often result in increased racial and socioeconomic segregation as more
affluent and white parents use powerful social networks to guide their
preferences (Holme, 2002; Wells et al., 2014). While both lines of inquiry are
important, what has been missing in the literature is an exploration of the
reinforcing relationship between the individual choices and the segregated
places and schools. In other words, rather than thinking of the housing
and school choice process as a way those with the most options—namely
affluent Whites—make individual decisions with input from their networks,
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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we must examine these choices as socially constructed within a racialized
context in which otherwise viable choices are framed as unthinkable.
THE PARADOX OF THE SIMULTANEOUS DRIVE FOR DIVERSITY
AND RESEGREGATION
There are three main factors in the recent US history that should, theoretically,
lead our country toward less racial/ethnic segregation in housing and public
schools and not more:

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1. Demographics: The United States is becoming increasingly racially/ethnically diverse, and this increased diversity is even more dramatic among
the school-age population, now less than 50% White, non-Hispanic
(National Center for Education Statistics, 2014).
2. Metro Migrations: Coinciding with the demographic trend is a profound
shift in who lives where. More low-income families of color have been
moving to once-all-White suburbs, just as more Whites are moving
back into gentrifying areas of cities their grandparents fled decades
ago (Ehrenhalt, 2012). Hence, both suburban and urban spaces overall
have become more racially and ethnically diverse, creating more
opportunities for sustainable racially and socioeconomically integrated
communities and schools.
3. Racial Attitudes: A growing proportion of our post-Civil Rights society
values diverse environments—at least in the abstract (Wells et al., 2009).
Americans of all racial and ethnic groups are more likely to say they
accept cultural differences and view diversity in social situations as a
positive (Krysan & Faison, 2011). These attitudinal changes are particularly pronounced among Whites, who generally have more choices
about where to live and send their children to school (Alba & Nee, 2005;
Louie, 2005).
Taken together, these three factors strongly suggest that we should see more
racially diverse schools and communities today than in the past. In fact, the
research on residential patterns and school segregation trends, however, tells
us a different story—one that is contradictory and complex as a temporary,
fragile diversity occurs at the initial stage of neighborhood change followed
by a process of resegregation as Whites flee changing suburbs and people of
color are displaced from gentrifying areas of cities.
The pervasiveness of racial segregation in the United States, therefore, is
best understood in the context of the three factors noted above and evidence
that they have indeed helped to create more racially diverse neighborhoods
in the last few decades (Ellen, Horn, & O’Regan, 2012; Glaeser & Vigdor,

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2012). But at the same time, most of these neighborhoods are incredibly
unstable, and thus, they quickly resegregate (DeSena & Shortell, 2012; Hyra,
2015; Wells et al., 2014).
So the question is why, in the context of more favorable conditions for meaningful integration, does diversity not “stick”? The evidence suggests two
overlapping factors: (i) Resegregation is fostered, supported, and rationalized by racialized perceptions of what constitutes a “good” neighborhood
and a “good” school and (ii) The housing and school choices of those with
the most status—namely the white and affluent home buyers—both drive
the process of resegregation and are most sensitive to these racialized perceptions of what is “good.”
In the next two sections of this essay, the author proposes a new framework
for explaining this pernicious resegregation process as well as the hypersensitivity of the most privileged home buyers to the resulting status hierarchies
of neighborhoods and schools that are embedded in segregated structures.
A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE PROCESS
OF RACIAL RESEGREGATION: PERCEPTIONS OF PLACE AND PEOPLE
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To better understand the how and why of racial resegregation, the author
draws from two related but previously separate theoretical frameworks,
the sociology of reputation (Caplow, 1964; Strathdee, 2009), and the bias
of crowds (Payne, Vuletich, & Lundberg, 2017) to understand the socially
constructed nature of race, place, and education.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF REPUTATION
The sociology of reputation argues that the status of a place or institution,
or the reputed understanding of the “quality” or “desirability” of neighborhoods and schools, is correlated with the race and class of the students and
residents within them, even after controlling for several other “objective”
indicators. Thus, places and institutions such as schools have reputations
that vary depending on who is associated with them. The idea of organizational reputation as co-determined by the status of its members or students is
also not new (Caplow, 1964). According to Caplow (1964), membership and
affiliations have an iterative relationship with organizational status because
the prestige of an organization is strongly affected by its alliances with other
high-status organizations and by the prestige its members import from other
contexts. However, as Strathdee (2009) points out, sociologists of education
have rarely examined the concept of reputation as it relates to “elite” educational institutions, which results in a lack of clarity about what is driving the
formation of reputation in our field.

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In other words, reputations are socially constructed within and in the service of social stratification (Caplow, 1964), meaning that they are based on
racial and ethnic biases that are shared and made more meaningful within
the context of a particular housing market or a set of school choices. Most
notably, the reputations of communities, schools, or universities are not, as
we often assume them to be, based entirely—or even primarily—on objective criteria that would make the honor, prestige, and status that comes with a
good reputation “earned” or “well-deserved” (Weber, 1978). Hence, the prestige and status of a neighborhood or a school varies dramatically in terms
of the social status—but not necessarily the intelligence or ability—of WHO
lives there and WHICH students enroll.
This strong correlation between high-status people and high-status institutions or places is reinforced by these so-called objective measures or tangible
distinctions between these institutions or places that favor those with the
most money or the valued cultural capital. In fact, most of these “objective”
measures (e.g., “tangible” factors related to resources, academic outcomes,
and property values) are defined in a way that privileges those affiliated
with the highest status people (Caplow, 1964; Koretz, 2008; Schneider, 2017;
Tienken & Zhao, 2013). But recent research demonstrates that even when
these tangible factors are controlled for, the differential status of people,
based on race, ethnicity, and SES, in particular, strongly correlates with the
status and thus the “reputation” of place or an organization such as a school
with which they associate (Caplow, 1964; Strathdee, 2009; Wells et al., 2014).
No matter how supportive neighbors in a mostly Black community are of
each other or how phenomenal teachers in a school serving low-income
students of color may be, these places and institutions—one usually nested
within the other—are rarely, if ever, deemed to be highly reputable or even
“good.”
Ranking Schools and Stratifying Students In recent years, the ranking of
educational institutions online and in the popular press has created explicit
status hierarchies based primarily on narrow outcome measures such as
standardized test scores that make schools hypersensitive to their positions.
All accredited law schools, for example, have been ranked by US News and
World Report every year since 1993, making these annual lists an organizational reality. Research on the law schools’ response to these rankings has
shown they adjust their behavior to increase their ranking, which helps
them attract “high-quality” students and faculty members, as measured by
ranking indicators of quality. As a result, law schools have increased their
spending on merit-based scholarships as they attempt to “buy” top students
(Sauder, 2005). These so-called top or most desirable students—those whose

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credentials augment the law school’s ranking—then, in turn, are attracted to
the highest ranked schools.
This example of the twenty-first-century law schools speaks to Caplow’s
(1964) argument about the power of the most prestigious organizations
to influence how the standards of achievement are measured in a field.
The institutions with the most prestige also have the clearest advantage
in maintaining their prestige, which contributes to some degree to an
“aggrandizement effect” or the overestimation of an organization’s prestige
by its own members. This, in turn, exaggerates the value of membership
and reduces the attractiveness’ of outside affiliations (Caplow, 1964). The
size of organizations such as private clubs and honorary societies is thus
inversely correlated with standing, while scarcity of access or exclusivity
may be positively correlated with an organization’s prestige, as those who
lack access desire to be associated with the organization or school (Shenker
and Yuchtman-Yaar, 1997).
The systematic exclusion, therefore, of lower-status people from high
prestige, reputable organizations or communities and the unwillingness of
high-status individuals to associate with low prestige institutions is a central
but ill-defined concept within sociology since Weber (1978) wrote about
status dimension of social stratification in Economy and Society. According to
Shenker and Yuchtman-Yaar (1997), with the exception of Caplow (1964), the
idea “that one’s status may be co-determined by the organizations he/she is
affiliated with is a point all but neglected in the sociology literature.”
And yet, empirical research that supports this codeterminant relationship
between the status or reputation of a neighborhood and the status of the people who live there dates as far back as the 1960s (Useem, Useem, & Gibson,
1960) and has been supplemented by more recent studies on housing segregation and white flight (Farley et al., 1978; Massey & Denton, 1993). This
research on how race and place get constructed, and how Whites, in particular, tend to have skewed perspectives on the racial makeup of their communities, also relates to recent research on segregated settlement patterns
in gentrifying cities (DeSena & Shortell, 2012; Mason, Morlock, & Pisano,
2012). What these studies tell us is that reputations of places are socially
constructed—or as Griswold (1992) notes, reputations exist largely within
residents’ imaginations. “Place” as a collective memory perspective suggests
that neighborhood reputation is socially constructed through the meaning
that residents make of where they live (Zelner, 2015). In this way, spatial theorists help us understand the concept of sociology of reputation as it relates to
different places and how they are constructed through their symbolic meaning, their resources or lack thereof and the people who live within them
(Gotham, 2003; Harvey, 2009). In this respect, Wells (2015) and Wells et al.
(2014, 2017) found that White suburban homebuyers perceive communities

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that are becoming racially and ethnically diverse more negatively even when
there are no tangible differences between those and other predominantly
White communities. This implicit bias of place, we learned, was in large measure correlated with the status of the students in public schools associated
with those places (Wells et al., 2014).
THE BIAS OF CROWDS AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REPUTATIONS

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This sociology of reputation argument as it relates to the perception of place
and a hierarchical understanding of the value of different people associated
with those places connects in important ways to a social-psychological
argument known as implicit bias, which examines how “relatively unconscious and relatively automatic features of prejudiced judgment” affect
social behavior. This concept of implicit bias is increasingly used in the legal
field, particularly in the criminal justice literature, and in popular press
reports on racial profiling and police brutality in recent years. And while the
implicit bias concept has not often been applied to research on school and
housing choice, the author argues that it often results in White homebuyers
devaluing more racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods and schools
even when there are no tangible differences between those places and others
with more White residents (Wells, 2015).
And more recently, a new area of implicit bias research has found that
implicit bias is “situational”—meaning that people with similar backgrounds and experiences develop different degrees of inter-racial implicit
bias depending on the context in which they live and interact with people of
different backgrounds. This research finding, labeled the “bias of crowds,”
concludes that when contexts are more equal and just, people are less likely
to hold implicit biases or to be the victims of them (Payne et al., 2017).
Together, the theories of sociology of reputation and the bias of crowds
support a growing body of research evidence that finds that such socially constructed understandings of the reputation and thus desirability of a “good”
school are heavily influenced by biased perceptions of the demographics
of the students enrolled. In other words, predominantly white and affluent
schools and neighborhoods are perceived to be “better than” other less-white
or less-affluent schools even when the data imply otherwise (see Saporito,
1998 and Saporito & Hanley, 2014).
The process, therefore, by which a once predominantly white and
middle-class community and school district with a “good” reputation
becomes “not-so-good” and eventually “bad” as the racial makeup of the
student body changes—even before the loss of tangible material resources
that usually follows—is a process we must identify before we can address
resegregation. In some of these school districts in the first phases of these

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demographic transitions, the tangible factors, including funding, curricular
offerings, teaching staff, and the student outcomes change very little initially.
But as the skin color of the student population changes, the reputation of
the district declines regardless, taking with it the property values (Wells
et al., 2014). Indeed, the author and her research team found that the percent
of Black students enrolled in public schools in a given school district could
lower the property values of otherwise similar houses by as much as $50,000
depending on which side of the school district boundary line it was on
(Wells et al., 2014). Such declines in property values lead to an eventual
decline factors as well.
INDIVIDUAL CHOICES AMID STATUS HIERARCHIES

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As noted earlier, racial segregation is reproduced when implicit biases of
places and schools based on the race of the people within them solidify
their socially constructed reputations to mold decisions that individuals
make about where to live and where to send their children to schools. In
these moments of demographic transition in both urban and suburban contexts, homebuyers—particularly those with the most economic and social
capital—make these decisions, often based primarily on the reputation of
a school or district as constructed by their peers and social networks. In
this way, home buying choices in a suburban county that is fragmented
and divided into multiple, tiny municipalities and school districts, easily
resolidifies the practice of making race-based classifications of schools
as “good” or “bad,” fueling a self-fulfilling prophecy discussed above in
which districts undergoing demographic changes are deemed less desirable,
leading to a decline in property values, followed by a shrinking tax base
and a loss in tangible or materials factors in schools. And the cycle of racial
segregation repeats (Wells et al., 2014).
In this section, the author examines the critical moment within that
cycle—when home-buyers make implicitly biased choices based on socially
constructed and racialized reputations of schools and communities or
perceptions of place that both correlate with the race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status of the people who live there. Her research found that these
reputations and perceptions are not always accurate are not always accurate
in terms of objective measures of tangible factors—for example, quality of
housing or academic outcomes.
STATUS OF PLACE; STATUS OF PEOPLE; STATUS OF SCHOOLS: CHOOSING CLASSMATES
AND NEIGHBORS
Based on the arguments presented so far, we can reconsider the housing
and school choice process as far from rational in an economic sense (Wells,

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1993). While the decisions people make about where they live and send their
children to school are imbedded in material realities, including location of
jobs, their income and wealth, and real estate availability, these decisions are
also about status hierarchies, including racial and socioeconomic hierarchies.
The old real estate mantra of “location, location, location,” is a spatial marker
of not just tangible factors (e.g., the size of the lots and houses or the quality of construction) but it also applies to who lives there and thus, how high
status those associated with this community are (Wells et al., 2014).
Basically, the evidence tells us that choosing neighborhoods is about choosing your neighbors because the people who live in a given community convey their status, prestige, and reputation (or lack thereof) on their neighborhood, and by association, their neighbors. If race is indeed a master status as
Blumer (1958) claimed, with Blacks at the bottom of the socially constructed
hierarchy, then perceptions of neighborhoods with many Black residents will
too often be bad regardless of the conditions. These constructions of places
provide a larger context for school and neighborhood choices and effects subsequent status-conscious housing choices.
But this phenomenon is not entirely new. In fact, a post WWII study of
75 “middle-management men,” their neighborhood choices and their stress
levels related to where they live and with whom they associate, found that
as men (presumably white men, although it is not stated directly) advance
in their careers, make more money and gain higher executive positions, they
become increasingly aware of and concerned about who their neighbors are
(Useem et al., 1960). In fact, as these men gain status professionally, there
are fewer “appropriate neighborhoods [emphasis added] in which they believe
they can live” (p. 73). Furthermore, they are most likely to reside near those
perceived to be peers in the business world. The authors (Useem et al., 1960)
find that living in “appropriate neighborhoods” shape men’s self-esteem
and identity. In other words, it is bad for these men’s self-esteem to live
in a neighborhood with lower-status neighbors. Since the 1960s, the social
science research that examines neighborhood choice and segregation has
built—directly and indirectly—on these conceptions of status, prestige, and
reputation as they relate to race, class, and home choices. The research on
school choices, however, has been less directly tied to this evidence.
Ranking Schools and Stratifying Students: School Choices The codetermined
relationship between the reputation of a school and the status of the students and families associated with it affects school choices in at least three
overlapping ways:
1. White parents with high-status educational credentials are most likely
to say they prefer racially diverse schools for their children, and more

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likely to care about the perceived reputation of the schools their children
attend (Sikkink & Emerson, 2008; Sewell, 1992).
2. More affluent, highly educated, and usually White parents are strongly
influenced by their tight social networks on issues of school reputation
and status (Holme, 2002; Horvat & Lewis, 2013; Lareau and Goyette,
2014; Roda & Wells, 2013). “School quality” and thus the reputation of
schools is constructed by social groups (Wells, 2015).
3. And finally, there is a negative correlation between White parents’
perceptions of school quality or reputation and the percentage of
students of color enrolled (Karsten, Ledoux, Roeleveld, Felix, & Elshof,
2003; Roda & Wells, 2013; Saporito, 1998). For instance, Billingham
and Hunt (2016), who studied the effects of school racial composition
and several nonracial school characteristics on white parents’ school
choices, found that the proportion of black students in a hypothetical
school has a consistent and significant inverse association with the
likelihood of white parents enrolling their children in that school, even
after controlling for many school quality factors. Similarly, Saporito
(1998) found that white parents choosing schools avoided with large
numbers of African American students schools, even those located in
more affluent neighborhoods because they equated the lower status of
African Americans in the United States with the status of the schools
that enrolled them. They did not want their children associated with
those schools no matter what information they had on the impact of the
school on children’s achievement or safety.
Indeed, education research suggests that many of the most affluent White
parents only take their embrace of “diversity” so far. In fact, the research
shows that even when parents consider diversity to be a benefit, they still
tend to choose schools that are predominantly White, oftentimes citing measures of school quality as the most important factor in making their decisions
(Lacireno-Paquet & Brantley, 2012; Roda & Wells, 2013).
This contradiction is in part explained by increasing inequality and narrow
definitions of “school quality” that too often align with demographic characteristics of schools. Even for parents who say they prefer diverse schools,
these structural challenges make finding and choosing these schools less
likely. In addition, affluent parents, who often espouse progressive racial
attitudes, regularly choose nondiverse schools due to their concerns about
the inter-generational transmission of status to their children and their
own implicit biases about the relationship between race and school quality
(Lacireno-Paquet & Brantley, 2012; Wells et al., 2009).
When taken together, these factors add up to more racial and social class
segregation as those families with the most choices opt out of more racially

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and socioeconomically diverse schools, perpetuating the cycle of segregation
and resegregation.
CONCLUSION: ADDRESSING THE BIASES OF REPUTATIONS

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This essay demonstrates the ways in which race, place, and schools are
constructed in a manner that leads to more racial segregation and inequality.
These social constructions of “good” places help us understand of how
parents and home buyers make sense of different neighborhood and school
options and thus, how racial segregation is reproduced time and time again,
despite the factors outlined above that suggest our society should be moving
in the other direction.
It seems quite evident, therefore, that even when we do find diverse
communities and public schools, they are often fragile, unstable, and in the
process of resegregating. Studying the process of resegregation is important
to understanding how we might stop or reverse it as our nation becomes
increasingly diverse.
Indeed, we have evidence that this process can be reversed with a great
deal of effort. For instance, strategically designed real estate campaigns to
promote diverse neighborhoods and local policies to manage choice options
generally have good results in addressing housing segregation. Furthermore,
we know that public schools can foster racial literacy among their students
and parents and create classrooms that enable students to learn empathy
and care across racial and ethnic boundaries. Such educational policies and
practices when combined with housing strategies to address biases toward
neighborhoods that have unearned bad reputations because of the race and
thus status of who does and does not live there can make a difference in how
home buyers define “good” schools and communities.
The takeaway here is that experiences matter and can alter racialized perceptions of places and schools. Recognizing that reputations and choices are
socially constructed enables us to envision how they can be reconstructed.
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Unequal Long Island School Districts. The Teachers College, Columbia University
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Amy Stuart Wells is a professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers
College, Columbia University and the 2018–2019 president of the American
Educational Research Association (AERA). She is the director of The Public
Good, a Public School Support Organization (PSSO) that uses systematic
research to engage racially diverse public school constituents about issues of
racial literacy and equality. She is also the director of Reimagining Education:
Teaching and Learning in Racially Diverse Schools, a Professional Development
Summer Institute that trains more than 300 educators in issues of racial
literacy and culturally relevant pedagogy. She is the author and editor of
five books and more than 50 articles and book chapters on issues of race
and education, including Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregation’s
Graduates with Jennifer Jellison Holme, Anita Revilla and Awo Korantema
Atanda (2009; University of California Press). Wells is a member of the
National Academy of Education, and she is an AERA Fellow.
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Schooling, Learning, and the Life Course (Education), Aaron M. Pallas

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The Process of Racial Resegregation
in Housing and Schools: The
Sociology of Reputation
AMY STUART WELLS

Abstract

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The United States has a long history of racial and ethnic segregation in housing
patterns and public school enrollment as well as efforts to dismantle this segregation.
This essay discusses what we have learned in the United States about how difficult
it is to halt the patterns of housing and school segregation even as our nation
becomes more diverse, racial attitudes are reportedly improving, and the twentieth
century urban-suburban racial distinctions disappear. To explain the process of
resegregation that occurs repeatedly, the author developed a new interdisciplinary
framework to foster a deeper understanding of how racialized perceptions of
places or neighborhoods and the schools embedded within them perpetuates
segregation despite changing demographics, attitudes and metro migrations across
urban-suburban lines. The sociology of reputation, the bias of crowds, and the
choices of home buyers with the most capital amid the existing separate and unequal
structures are the bodies of research the author draws upon to help us see familiar
segregation patterns anew.

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EXISTING RESEARCH ON SEGREGATION AND WHAT IS MISSING
Most research on racial segregation in housing and schools within the
United States examines the degree and outcomes of racial segregation (Massey
& Denton, 1993; Wells and Frankenberg, 2007) or school and housing choices
that often result in increased racial and socioeconomic segregation as more
affluent and white parents use powerful social networks to guide their
preferences (Holme, 2002; Wells et al., 2014). While both lines of inquiry are
important, what has been missing in the literature is an exploration of the
reinforcing relationship between the individual choices and the segregated
places and schools. In other words, rather than thinking of the housing
and school choice process as a way those with the most options—namely
affluent Whites—make individual decisions with input from their networks,
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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we must examine these choices as socially constructed within a racialized
context in which otherwise viable choices are framed as unthinkable.
THE PARADOX OF THE SIMULTANEOUS DRIVE FOR DIVERSITY
AND RESEGREGATION
There are three main factors in the recent US history that should, theoretically,
lead our country toward less racial/ethnic segregation in housing and public
schools and not more:

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1. Demographics: The United States is becoming increasingly racially/ethnically diverse, and this increased diversity is even more dramatic among
the school-age population, now less than 50% White, non-Hispanic
(National Center for Education Statistics, 2014).
2. Metro Migrations: Coinciding with the demographic trend is a profound
shift in who lives where. More low-income families of color have been
moving to once-all-White suburbs, just as more Whites are moving
back into gentrifying areas of cities their grandparents fled decades
ago (Ehrenhalt, 2012). Hence, both suburban and urban spaces overall
have become more racially and ethnically diverse, creating more
opportunities for sustainable racially and socioeconomically integrated
communities and schools.
3. Racial Attitudes: A growing proportion of our post-Civil Rights society
values diverse environments—at least in the abstract (Wells et al., 2009).
Americans of all racial and ethnic groups are more likely to say they
accept cultural differences and view diversity in social situations as a
positive (Krysan & Faison, 2011). These attitudinal changes are particularly pronounced among Whites, who generally have more choices
about where to live and send their children to school (Alba & Nee, 2005;
Louie, 2005).
Taken together, these three factors strongly suggest that we should see more
racially diverse schools and communities today than in the past. In fact, the
research on residential patterns and school segregation trends, however, tells
us a different story—one that is contradictory and complex as a temporary,
fragile diversity occurs at the initial stage of neighborhood change followed
by a process of resegregation as Whites flee changing suburbs and people of
color are displaced from gentrifying areas of cities.
The pervasiveness of racial segregation in the United States, therefore, is
best understood in the context of the three factors noted above and evidence
that they have indeed helped to create more racially diverse neighborhoods
in the last few decades (Ellen, Horn, & O’Regan, 2012; Glaeser & Vigdor,

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2012). But at the same time, most of these neighborhoods are incredibly
unstable, and thus, they quickly resegregate (DeSena & Shortell, 2012; Hyra,
2015; Wells et al., 2014).
So the question is why, in the context of more favorable conditions for meaningful integration, does diversity not “stick”? The evidence suggests two
overlapping factors: (i) Resegregation is fostered, supported, and rationalized by racialized perceptions of what constitutes a “good” neighborhood
and a “good” school and (ii) The housing and school choices of those with
the most status—namely the white and affluent home buyers—both drive
the process of resegregation and are most sensitive to these racialized perceptions of what is “good.”
In the next two sections of this essay, the author proposes a new framework
for explaining this pernicious resegregation process as well as the hypersensitivity of the most privileged home buyers to the resulting status hierarchies
of neighborhoods and schools that are embedded in segregated structures.
A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE PROCESS
OF RACIAL RESEGREGATION: PERCEPTIONS OF PLACE AND PEOPLE
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To better understand the how and why of racial resegregation, the author
draws from two related but previously separate theoretical frameworks,
the sociology of reputation (Caplow, 1964; Strathdee, 2009), and the bias
of crowds (Payne, Vuletich, & Lundberg, 2017) to understand the socially
constructed nature of race, place, and education.
THE SOCIOLOGY OF REPUTATION
The sociology of reputation argues that the status of a place or institution,
or the reputed understanding of the “quality” or “desirability” of neighborhoods and schools, is correlated with the race and class of the students and
residents within them, even after controlling for several other “objective”
indicators. Thus, places and institutions such as schools have reputations
that vary depending on who is associated with them. The idea of organizational reputation as co-determined by the status of its members or students is
also not new (Caplow, 1964). According to Caplow (1964), membership and
affiliations have an iterative relationship with organizational status because
the prestige of an organization is strongly affected by its alliances with other
high-status organizations and by the prestige its members import from other
contexts. However, as Strathdee (2009) points out, sociologists of education
have rarely examined the concept of reputation as it relates to “elite” educational institutions, which results in a lack of clarity about what is driving the
formation of reputation in our field.

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In other words, reputations are socially constructed within and in the service of social stratification (Caplow, 1964), meaning that they are based on
racial and ethnic biases that are shared and made more meaningful within
the context of a particular housing market or a set of school choices. Most
notably, the reputations of communities, schools, or universities are not, as
we often assume them to be, based entirely—or even primarily—on objective criteria that would make the honor, prestige, and status that comes with a
good reputation “earned” or “well-deserved” (Weber, 1978). Hence, the prestige and status of a neighborhood or a school varies dramatically in terms
of the social status—but not necessarily the intelligence or ability—of WHO
lives there and WHICH students enroll.
This strong correlation between high-status people and high-status institutions or places is reinforced by these so-called objective measures or tangible
distinctions between these institutions or places that favor those with the
most money or the valued cultural capital. In fact, most of these “objective”
measures (e.g., “tangible” factors related to resources, academic outcomes,
and property values) are defined in a way that privileges those affiliated
with the highest status people (Caplow, 1964; Koretz, 2008; Schneider, 2017;
Tienken & Zhao, 2013). But recent research demonstrates that even when
these tangible factors are controlled for, the differential status of people,
based on race, ethnicity, and SES, in particular, strongly correlates with the
status and thus the “reputation” of place or an organization such as a school
with which they associate (Caplow, 1964; Strathdee, 2009; Wells et al., 2014).
No matter how supportive neighbors in a mostly Black community are of
each other or how phenomenal teachers in a school serving low-income
students of color may be, these places and institutions—one usually nested
within the other—are rarely, if ever, deemed to be highly reputable or even
“good.”
Ranking Schools and Stratifying Students In recent years, the ranking of
educational institutions online and in the popular press has created explicit
status hierarchies based primarily on narrow outcome measures such as
standardized test scores that make schools hypersensitive to their positions.
All accredited law schools, for example, have been ranked by US News and
World Report every year since 1993, making these annual lists an organizational reality. Research on the law schools’ response to these rankings has
shown they adjust their behavior to increase their ranking, which helps
them attract “high-quality” students and faculty members, as measured by
ranking indicators of quality. As a result, law schools have increased their
spending on merit-based scholarships as they attempt to “buy” top students
(Sauder, 2005). These so-called top or most desirable students—those whose

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credentials augment the law school’s ranking—then, in turn, are attracted to
the highest ranked schools.
This example of the twenty-first-century law schools speaks to Caplow’s
(1964) argument about the power of the most prestigious organizations
to influence how the standards of achievement are measured in a field.
The institutions with the most prestige also have the clearest advantage
in maintaining their prestige, which contributes to some degree to an
“aggrandizement effect” or the overestimation of an organization’s prestige
by its own members. This, in turn, exaggerates the value of membership
and reduces the attractiveness’ of outside affiliations (Caplow, 1964). The
size of organizations such as private clubs and honorary societies is thus
inversely correlated with standing, while scarcity of access or exclusivity
may be positively correlated with an organization’s prestige, as those who
lack access desire to be associated with the organization or school (Shenker
and Yuchtman-Yaar, 1997).
The systematic exclusion, therefore, of lower-status people from high
prestige, reputable organizations or communities and the unwillingness of
high-status individuals to associate with low prestige institutions is a central
but ill-defined concept within sociology since Weber (1978) wrote about
status dimension of social stratification in Economy and Society. According to
Shenker and Yuchtman-Yaar (1997), with the exception of Caplow (1964), the
idea “that one’s status may be co-determined by the organizations he/she is
affiliated with is a point all but neglected in the sociology literature.”
And yet, empirical research that supports this codeterminant relationship
between the status or reputation of a neighborhood and the status of the people who live there dates as far back as the 1960s (Useem, Useem, & Gibson,
1960) and has been supplemented by more recent studies on housing segregation and white flight (Farley et al., 1978; Massey & Denton, 1993). This
research on how race and place get constructed, and how Whites, in particular, tend to have skewed perspectives on the racial makeup of their communities, also relates to recent research on segregated settlement patterns
in gentrifying cities (DeSena & Shortell, 2012; Mason, Morlock, & Pisano,
2012). What these studies tell us is that reputations of places are socially
constructed—or as Griswold (1992) notes, reputations exist largely within
residents’ imaginations. “Place” as a collective memory perspective suggests
that neighborhood reputation is socially constructed through the meaning
that residents make of where they live (Zelner, 2015). In this way, spatial theorists help us understand the concept of sociology of reputation as it relates to
different places and how they are constructed through their symbolic meaning, their resources or lack thereof and the people who live within them
(Gotham, 2003; Harvey, 2009). In this respect, Wells (2015) and Wells et al.
(2014, 2017) found that White suburban homebuyers perceive communities

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that are becoming racially and ethnically diverse more negatively even when
there are no tangible differences between those and other predominantly
White communities. This implicit bias of place, we learned, was in large measure correlated with the status of the students in public schools associated
with those places (Wells et al., 2014).
THE BIAS OF CROWDS AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REPUTATIONS

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This sociology of reputation argument as it relates to the perception of place
and a hierarchical understanding of the value of different people associated
with those places connects in important ways to a social-psychological
argument known as implicit bias, which examines how “relatively unconscious and relatively automatic features of prejudiced judgment” affect
social behavior. This concept of implicit bias is increasingly used in the legal
field, particularly in the criminal justice literature, and in popular press
reports on racial profiling and police brutality in recent years. And while the
implicit bias concept has not often been applied to research on school and
housing choice, the author argues that it often results in White homebuyers
devaluing more racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods and schools
even when there are no tangible differences between those places and others
with more White residents (Wells, 2015).
And more recently, a new area of implicit bias research has found that
implicit bias is “situational”—meaning that people with similar backgrounds and experiences develop different degrees of inter-racial implicit
bias depending on the context in which they live and interact with people of
different backgrounds. This research finding, labeled the “bias of crowds,”
concludes that when contexts are more equal and just, people are less likely
to hold implicit biases or to be the victims of them (Payne et al., 2017).
Together, the theories of sociology of reputation and the bias of crowds
support a growing body of research evidence that finds that such socially constructed understandings of the reputation and thus desirability of a “good”
school are heavily influenced by biased perceptions of the demographics
of the students enrolled. In other words, predominantly white and affluent
schools and neighborhoods are perceived to be “better than” other less-white
or less-affluent schools even when the data imply otherwise (see Saporito,
1998 and Saporito & Hanley, 2014).
The process, therefore, by which a once predominantly white and
middle-class community and school district with a “good” reputation
becomes “not-so-good” and eventually “bad” as the racial makeup of the
student body changes—even before the loss of tangible material resources
that usually follows—is a process we must identify before we can address
resegregation. In some of these school districts in the first phases of these

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demographic transitions, the tangible factors, including funding, curricular
offerings, teaching staff, and the student outcomes change very little initially.
But as the skin color of the student population changes, the reputation of
the district declines regardless, taking with it the property values (Wells
et al., 2014). Indeed, the author and her research team found that the percent
of Black students enrolled in public schools in a given school district could
lower the property values of otherwise similar houses by as much as $50,000
depending on which side of the school district boundary line it was on
(Wells et al., 2014). Such declines in property values lead to an eventual
decline factors as well.
INDIVIDUAL CHOICES AMID STATUS HIERARCHIES

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As noted earlier, racial segregation is reproduced when implicit biases of
places and schools based on the race of the people within them solidify
their socially constructed reputations to mold decisions that individuals
make about where to live and where to send their children to schools. In
these moments of demographic transition in both urban and suburban contexts, homebuyers—particularly those with the most economic and social
capital—make these decisions, often based primarily on the reputation of
a school or district as constructed by their peers and social networks. In
this way, home buying choices in a suburban county that is fragmented
and divided into multiple, tiny municipalities and school districts, easily
resolidifies the practice of making race-based classifications of schools
as “good” or “bad,” fueling a self-fulfilling prophecy discussed above in
which districts undergoing demographic changes are deemed less desirable,
leading to a decline in property values, followed by a shrinking tax base
and a loss in tangible or materials factors in schools. And the cycle of racial
segregation repeats (Wells et al., 2014).
In this section, the author examines the critical moment within that
cycle—when home-buyers make implicitly biased choices based on socially
constructed and racialized reputations of schools and communities or
perceptions of place that both correlate with the race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status of the people who live there. Her research found that these
reputations and perceptions are not always accurate are not always accurate
in terms of objective measures of tangible factors—for example, quality of
housing or academic outcomes.
STATUS OF PLACE; STATUS OF PEOPLE; STATUS OF SCHOOLS: CHOOSING CLASSMATES
AND NEIGHBORS
Based on the arguments presented so far, we can reconsider the housing
and school choice process as far from rational in an economic sense (Wells,

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1993). While the decisions people make about where they live and send their
children to school are imbedded in material realities, including location of
jobs, their income and wealth, and real estate availability, these decisions are
also about status hierarchies, including racial and socioeconomic hierarchies.
The old real estate mantra of “location, location, location,” is a spatial marker
of not just tangible factors (e.g., the size of the lots and houses or the quality of construction) but it also applies to who lives there and thus, how high
status those associated with this community are (Wells et al., 2014).
Basically, the evidence tells us that choosing neighborhoods is about choosing your neighbors because the people who live in a given community convey their status, prestige, and reputation (or lack thereof) on their neighborhood, and by association, their neighbors. If race is indeed a master status as
Blumer (1958) claimed, with Blacks at the bottom of the socially constructed
hierarchy, then perceptions of neighborhoods with many Black residents will
too often be bad regardless of the conditions. These constructions of places
provide a larger context for school and neighborhood choices and effects subsequent status-conscious housing choices.
But this phenomenon is not entirely new. In fact, a post WWII study of
75 “middle-management men,” their neighborhood choices and their stress
levels related to where they live and with whom they associate, found that
as men (presumably white men, although it is not stated directly) advance
in their careers, make more money and gain higher executive positions, they
become increasingly aware of and concerned about who their neighbors are
(Useem et al., 1960). In fact, as these men gain status professionally, there
are fewer “appropriate neighborhoods [emphasis added] in which they believe
they can live” (p. 73). Furthermore, they are most likely to reside near those
perceived to be peers in the business world. The authors (Useem et al., 1960)
find that living in “appropriate neighborhoods” shape men’s self-esteem
and identity. In other words, it is bad for these men’s self-esteem to live
in a neighborhood with lower-status neighbors. Since the 1960s, the social
science research that examines neighborhood choice and segregation has
built—directly and indirectly—on these conceptions of status, prestige, and
reputation as they relate to race, class, and home choices. The research on
school choices, however, has been less directly tied to this evidence.
Ranking Schools and Stratifying Students: School Choices The codetermined
relationship between the reputation of a school and the status of the students and families associated with it affects school choices in at least three
overlapping ways:
1. White parents with high-status educational credentials are most likely
to say they prefer racially diverse schools for their children, and more

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likely to care about the perceived reputation of the schools their children
attend (Sikkink & Emerson, 2008; Sewell, 1992).
2. More affluent, highly educated, and usually White parents are strongly
influenced by their tight social networks on issues of school reputation
and status (Holme, 2002; Horvat & Lewis, 2013; Lareau and Goyette,
2014; Roda & Wells, 2013). “School quality” and thus the reputation of
schools is constructed by social groups (Wells, 2015).
3. And finally, there is a negative correlation between White parents’
perceptions of school quality or reputation and the percentage of
students of color enrolled (Karsten, Ledoux, Roeleveld, Felix, & Elshof,
2003; Roda & Wells, 2013; Saporito, 1998). For instance, Billingham
and Hunt (2016), who studied the effects of school racial composition
and several nonracial school characteristics on white parents’ school
choices, found that the proportion of black students in a hypothetical
school has a consistent and significant inverse association with the
likelihood of white parents enrolling their children in that school, even
after controlling for many school quality factors. Similarly, Saporito
(1998) found that white parents choosing schools avoided with large
numbers of African American students schools, even those located in
more affluent neighborhoods because they equated the lower status of
African Americans in the United States with the status of the schools
that enrolled them. They did not want their children associated with
those schools no matter what information they had on the impact of the
school on children’s achievement or safety.
Indeed, education research suggests that many of the most affluent White
parents only take their embrace of “diversity” so far. In fact, the research
shows that even when parents consider diversity to be a benefit, they still
tend to choose schools that are predominantly White, oftentimes citing measures of school quality as the most important factor in making their decisions
(Lacireno-Paquet & Brantley, 2012; Roda & Wells, 2013).
This contradiction is in part explained by increasing inequality and narrow
definitions of “school quality” that too often align with demographic characteristics of schools. Even for parents who say they prefer diverse schools,
these structural challenges make finding and choosing these schools less
likely. In addition, affluent parents, who often espouse progressive racial
attitudes, regularly choose nondiverse schools due to their concerns about
the inter-generational transmission of status to their children and their
own implicit biases about the relationship between race and school quality
(Lacireno-Paquet & Brantley, 2012; Wells et al., 2009).
When taken together, these factors add up to more racial and social class
segregation as those families with the most choices opt out of more racially

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and socioeconomically diverse schools, perpetuating the cycle of segregation
and resegregation.
CONCLUSION: ADDRESSING THE BIASES OF REPUTATIONS

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This essay demonstrates the ways in which race, place, and schools are
constructed in a manner that leads to more racial segregation and inequality.
These social constructions of “good” places help us understand of how
parents and home buyers make sense of different neighborhood and school
options and thus, how racial segregation is reproduced time and time again,
despite the factors outlined above that suggest our society should be moving
in the other direction.
It seems quite evident, therefore, that even when we do find diverse
communities and public schools, they are often fragile, unstable, and in the
process of resegregating. Studying the process of resegregation is important
to understanding how we might stop or reverse it as our nation becomes
increasingly diverse.
Indeed, we have evidence that this process can be reversed with a great
deal of effort. For instance, strategically designed real estate campaigns to
promote diverse neighborhoods and local policies to manage choice options
generally have good results in addressing housing segregation. Furthermore,
we know that public schools can foster racial literacy among their students
and parents and create classrooms that enable students to learn empathy
and care across racial and ethnic boundaries. Such educational policies and
practices when combined with housing strategies to address biases toward
neighborhoods that have unearned bad reputations because of the race and
thus status of who does and does not live there can make a difference in how
home buyers define “good” schools and communities.
The takeaway here is that experiences matter and can alter racialized perceptions of places and schools. Recognizing that reputations and choices are
socially constructed enables us to envision how they can be reconstructed.
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Amy Stuart Wells is a professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers
College, Columbia University and the 2018–2019 president of the American
Educational Research Association (AERA). She is the director of The Public
Good, a Public School Support Organization (PSSO) that uses systematic
research to engage racially diverse public school constituents about issues of
racial literacy and equality. She is also the director of Reimagining Education:
Teaching and Learning in Racially Diverse Schools, a Professional Development
Summer Institute that trains more than 300 educators in issues of racial
literacy and culturally relevant pedagogy. She is the author and editor of
five books and more than 50 articles and book chapters on issues of race
and education, including Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregation’s
Graduates with Jennifer Jellison Holme, Anita Revilla and Awo Korantema
Atanda (2009; University of California Press). Wells is a member of the
National Academy of Education, and she is an AERA Fellow.
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The Process of Racial Resegregation in Housing and Schools: The Sociology of Reputation