School county data request

Macartan Humphreys writes:

We have a student here who is trying to look at the effect of school busing on racial attitudes. He knows where busing was inrtoduced and when at the county level but is having the hardest time finding a dataset (whether a recent one or historical one) that has information on (a) racial attitudes (b) age and (c) in which county people went to school. (c) is the hard part.

Do you know any data he could use that does the trick? GSS has lots of great qs but not c!

Any ideas?

9 thoughts on “School county data request

  1. The Census Bureau’s Tiger Shapeline files for school districts include FIPS county numbers. The same data – less the geometries – can also be obtained from the common core of data files released by NCES.

  2. I think you would be hard pressed to get anything at that level of detail using publicly available data sets. The are deliberately designed to prevent this kind of analysis unless you have special access. That said, you could look at High School and Beyond and see if it would be worth it to explore getting access to the linked data. It’s a stringent process though, and you would need to set up a secure research facility unless you were able to piggyback on someone else’s facility and they have extra spaces left on their federal agreement.

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