Now available with free access from our current issue, Unequal Schools and Communities: A Critical Examination of Neoliberal Education Reform! A tightly wound braid: Forces of opportunity and exclusion within an era of school choice legislation, by Elizabeth A. Gilblom , Hilla Sang , Jonathan E. Messemer , Anne Galletta & Rene Molenaur

We explore longitudinally the spatial dimensions of race and income isolation shaped by a period of accelerated school choice options within and beyond the urban context of a school portfolio system. Three entangled strands within national policy directives offer a conceptual frame for understanding how educational policy is often argued as responsive to equity concerns and is other times embedded in the language of deregulation and efficiency. The focus of the study is the racial and socioeconomic isolation within charter and district schools in Cleveland neighborhoods as well as that of surrounding Cuyahoga County suburbs in Ohio. We consider the implications of this landscape for exacerbating an already problematic context of racial and economic segregation in the state. Drawing on multiple data sources, including historical sources, census tract demographics from the U.S. Census Bureau, Common Core of Data (CCD) available from the National Center of Educational Statistics (NCES), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), we analyze history, demographic trends, and school facility locations to map the changing urban landscape at a local level at four intervals between 1999 and 2015. The research points to evidence of a movement of bodies and facilities while sustaining race and class stratification.