Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents’ and students’ willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics potentially correlated with race, white and Asian families preferred white schools over black and Latinx schools, Latinx families preferred Latinx schools over black schools, and black families preferred black schools over white schools. Results, importantly, demonstrate that racial composition has larger effects on white and Latinx parents’ preferences compared with white and Latinx students and smaller effects on black parents compared with black students. To ensure results were not an artifact of experimental conditions, I validate findings using administrative data on New York City families’ actual school choices in 2013. Both analyses establish that families express heterogenous racialized school preferences.

大多数美国学生就读于种族隔离的学校。为了理解这种模式，我对积极选择学校的纽约市家庭进行了一项调查实验，并调查他们是否表达了种族化的学校偏好。我发现学校种族构成对白人、黑人、拉丁裔和亚裔家长和学生的上学意愿有不同的影响。独立于可能与种族相关的特征，白人和亚裔家庭更喜欢白人学校而不是黑人和拉丁裔学校，拉丁裔家庭更喜欢拉丁裔学校而不是黑人学校，黑人家庭更喜欢黑人学校而不是白人学校。结果，重要的是，证明与白人和拉丁裔学生相比，种族构成对白人和拉丁裔父母的偏好影响更大，而与黑人学生相比，种族构成对黑人父母的影响更小。为确保结果不是实验条件的产物，我使用 2013 年纽约市家庭实际学校选择的行政数据验证了调查结果。两项分析都表明，家庭表达了异质的种族学校偏好。