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Map 37. Racial composition of private schools –Dade county district.

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Regarding the magnet schools in this area (Map 36), we can examine the location of magnet schools relative to the location of failing public schools and find that magnet schools are located really close to the failing public schools. However, when we take into account their AYP status, it is concerning to observe that that most of them are also failing. Only 17 magnet schools out of 83 schools meet AYP requirements across the district, a higher proportion of failing schools relative to charters. And of these failing magnet schools, it is worth noting that those in the northern part of the district that are mostly catering to African American Students are

virtually all but one failing to meet AYP, in contrast to the rest of the performing magnet schools enrolling mostly Latino students. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that these magnet schools are failing because they are enrolling students who have left the failing public school and that is why they are not meeting AYP standards.

At the southwestern side of the district, schools are predominately Latino. These tracts show a cluster of failing public schools in Map 34. When we turn our attention to the location, composition and performance status of charter schools in Map 35, we can observe that most of the small numbers of performing charter schools are located along the eastern side of the district where there are a robust number of performing public schools. This points to a mismatch

between high quality charters and failing public schools, whereby, high quality charter schools are virtually absent from areas in the district with a high number of failing public schools –i.e. those located toward the center part of the district-.

In the south part of the district, where census tract have moderate percentage of African American and Hispanics, the majority of public schools are underperforming. Again, when we turn our attention to the schools of choice, which are supposedly designed to meet the

shortcomings of the traditional public school system, it is worrisome to find most charter and magnet schools are also failing. Working under the assumption that there is equal access to schools of choice, they should be randomly distributed around public schools, and ideally, charter and magnet schools should have a higher presence around failing public schools, in other words, clustered around distressed neighborhoods lacking adequate schooling.

Map 38 (charter) and Map 39 (magnet) shifts to the results of the LISA analysis for the clustering of public schools with low and high accessibility to schools of choice, as measured by the distance to the nearest magnet and charter school.

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Map 38. LISA map of significant clusters of schools that are significantly distant –red ring buffers- or close –blue ring buffers- from a charter school -Dade county district.

Map 39. LISA map of significant clusters of schools that are significantly distant –red ring buffers- or close –blue ring buffers- from a magnet school –Dade county district.

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Low school choice accessibility hotspots are represented by the red bullseye around a school point, which indicates that a public school is at the center of a cluster –group- of schools with high distances to charter and magnet schools. The location of low school choice

accessibility hotspots does not seem to align particularly with the underlying racial composition of the census tracts. Again, the focus should be on the statistical significant hotspots that

correspond to failing public schools as can be observed in several areas of Dade County school district for both charter and magnet schools, as well as the coldspots –blue bullseye- that correspond to performing public schools –green dots-. Taken together, these hotspots and coldspots indicate that a spatial mismatch between schools of choice and public schools is also present in Dade County. All these observations should be place in perspective, where one underperforming school point or dot in the map actually represents many students lacking

adequate schooling and an entire community within the school boundaries that are deprived from the academic and social benefits of good schools. Only after placing the output of the spatial analysis within the context of reality, we can grasp the implications of a spatial mismatch

between high quality schools of choice and failing public schools for the life trajectories of entire communities.

Fairfax County Public School District

The analysis of Fairfax county public school district includes 108 traditional public schools and 68 magnet schools. Map 40 shows the standard deviation of the public and magnet school locations. Unlike the previous district (Dade), this map shows failing and performing public schools have a different distribution. While the distribution of public schools meeting AYP are concentrated in the center of the district, the distribution of the failing public schools are located toward the eastern part of the district which is precisely the area with the highest census tract percentage of Hispanic/Latinos and African Americans. Magnet schools on the other hand are more spread across the west and east part of the districts and are similar for both failing and performing schools.

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Map 40. Standard deviational ellipse of failing and performing public, magnet and charter schools and private schools in the district.

Map 41 shows 46 out of 68 magnet schools are meeting AYP, which contrasts with many of the previous districts included in this analysis that have a higher number of schools of choice that are failing. A similar remark can be established for the public schools in the district, with 108 out of 131 schools meeting AYP. However, it is troublesome to observe that this small proportion of failing public and magnet schools are located for the most part in census tracts with

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high percentages of African American and Latinos. This is unexpected, given that public failing schools are scattered around the district while failing magnet schools seem to be somewhat clustered.