No Adults Allowed! Unsupervised Learning Applied to Gerrymandered School Districts

With more than 80% of public school students attending the school assigned to them by district, it is clear that school district boundaries play a critical role in determining the educational opportunities and resources provided to students. Unfortunately, as school district lines are constantly redrawn, historical and anecdotal evidence suggests that these boundaries are often artificially manipulated, or gerrymandered, into irregular shapes. Often, these manipulations directly result in deliberately exclusionary zoning processes that create artificial economic disparity or racial segregation between school districts. This leads to adjacent school districts with dramatically different resources and funding for educational programs, and thus to inequality among the education that public school students receive. Further, while congressional gerrymandering (in which county boundaries are drawn to benefit a particular political party over another) has been a much studied phenomenon, school district gerrymandering is far less welldocumented. However, categorizing and documenting these districts is an important first step towards equalizing funding and other resources across districts instead of having pockets of underserved students. This project will add to the existing body of knowledge on this topic, and hopefully serve as an introductory point to further studies.