UCLA

This study examined the effects of incongruence (mismatch) between neighborhood and school racial/ethnic composition on middle school students’ experiences with teacher-and-peer-initiated discrimination. The subsample of 1,289 students (44% Latino, 26% White, 14% Black, and 16% Asian) comes from a larger longitudinal study of 26 ethnically diverse middle schools and over 300 neighborhoods that vary in ethnic diversity. This study relies on students’ self-reports of perceived discrimination and school demographic data from the California Department of Education. Student home addresses were geocoded using Geographic Information Systems, ArcGIS 10.1, and then matched to demographic data obtained from American FactFinder. Neighborhood-school incongruence scores were calculated by subtracting the proportion of same-ethnicity peers in the school from the proportion of same-ethnicity residents in the neighborhood. Overall, our results suggest that neighborhood-school incongruence affects students’ perceptions of teacher-and-peer-initiated racial/ethnic discrimination differently depending on students’ racial/ethnic group and gender. Results from multilevel models show that there was a three-way interaction, such that race/ethnicity and gender moderated the association between neighborhood-school incongruence and teacher-and-peer-initiated discrimination. These findings emphasize the importance of examining both the neighborhood and school contexts in understanding students’ experiences with racial/ethnic discrimination.