Modeling Mechanisms of School Segregation and Policy Interventions: A Complexity Perspective

We revisit literature about school choice and school segregation from the perspective of complexity theory. This paper argues that commonly found features of complex systems are all present in the mechanisms of school segregation. These features emerge from the interdependence between households, their interactions with school attributes and the institutional contexts in which they reside. We propose that a social complexity perspective can add to providing new generative explanations of resilient patterns of school segregation and may help identifying policies towards robust school integration. This requires a combination of theoretically informed computational modeling with empirical data about specific social and institutional contexts. We argue that this combination is missing in currently employed methodologies in the field. Pathways and challenges for developing it are discussed and examples are presented demonstrating how new insights and possible policies countering it can be obtained for the cases of primary school segregation in the city of Amsterdam.