Anita A. Summers

Intradistrict Distribution of School Inputs to the Disadvantaged: Evidence for the Courts.

This paper details a method for those interested in investigating the equity aspects of intradistrict distributions of educational resources. It should be viewed as a procedure for post Hobson v. Hansen lawyers which steps away from some of the speculative quality of the evidence that has been, and is still, being used. Using detailed individual school data in a systematic way allows the investigator to delineate which unequally distributed resources positively contribute to stated equity objectives, which resources are outside the school administrations control, and what the overall Equity picture is, starting from the components. Using aggregate measures, such as per pupil expenditures in each school, does not permit this, and results in much debate on whether or not one particular componentschool size, for example--explains away the expenditure variations. The method is applied to data for the Philadelphia School District.

Estimating Household Income from Location

Abstract A Block Income Estimating Procedure (BIEP) in presented for estimating the average income of the households of a Census block, using block housing information and Census tract distributions relating to housing and household income. Such block income estimates are very useful when dealing with household data sets which do not include income but where the households address is known. In addition, BIEP can be used to estimate the average income of geographic areas that do not coincide with Census tracts or postal zip code areas, the smallest spatial units for which official data are available. BIEPs efficacy is tested using a special Census tabulation for Philadelphia school feeder areas, and it is compared with its closest rival, a tracts-average procedure. BIEP is found to work well relative to the other procedure.