Showcase of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors (SOURCE)

The Impacts of Racial Integration and Free and Reduced Lunch Programs on Education Quality in Rock Hill

There has historically been a strong correlation between race, socioeconomic status, and the quality of education students receive at any given school. Focusing on Rock Hill School District data, I examine whether deliberate balancing of racial and socioeconomic disparities leads to more equality in educational quality. In addition, I also examine the policy impact of Free/Reduced Lunch on educational quality. I use a panel of data that includes all of Rock Hill School District Three and three middle schools for the period between 2007 and 2019. This timeframe includes both a period when the schools were much more heavily segregated by class and race and a period following an integration. As a dependent variable I use measures of education quality, such as teacher/pupil ratio. My independent variables are free/reduced lunch eligibility and racial composition of schools, such as the proportion of African American students. My hypothesis is that the quality of education was much poorer in schools with higher proportions of socioeconomically disadvantaged racial minorities, while Free/Reduced Lunch policy contributed to an increase in educational quality. To account for the issue of endogeneity due to unobserved omitted variables, I use fixed effects (FE) estimation.