CFP: Education Policies for School Desegregation

EPAA/AAPE Call for Papers

Education Policies for School Desegregation: Impacts, Effects, and Challenges

Guest Editors: Adrián Zancajo (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Sheila González Motos (Universitat de Barcelona)

Education Policy Analysis Archives/Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas/Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas (EPAA/AAPE; ISSN 1068-2341) announces a call for papers for a special issue, Education Policies for School Desegregation: Impacts, Effects and Challenges.

Over the past two decades, school desegregation policies have gained momentum across various countries. Once primarily a U.S.-centered debate, school segregation has become a critical policy issue in numerous educational systems. In response, national and local educational authorities have adopted different measures to promote a more balanced distribution of different groups of students—such as socially disadvantaged, ethnic minorities, or migrants—across schools. These initiatives include, among others: controlled school choice systems; priority access criteria; redrawing catchment areas; targeted vouchers; formula funding schemes; information policies; magnet schools; opening, closing, and merging schools; and regulating school admissions.

Despite their growing relevance, the effectiveness of school desegregation policies and interventions remains a debated issue. While some policies have been able to achieve significant reductions in school segregation, in others, the impacts have been moderate or negligible. Several factors can shape the impact of these policy interventions on school segregation, including residential segregation levels, social groups’ schooling preferences, responses from non-targeted families (e.g., white flight or shifts to private schooling), and the design of policy instruments. National and historical configurations of education systems play a crucial role in shaping desegregation dynamics. In some contexts, how education systems are structured and regulated is seen as a driver of school segregation, prompting calls for policy interventions, whereas in others, similar policy instruments are mobilized as a tool for fostering social diversity in schools.

The evidence remains fragmented, which generates a lack of knowledge on the extent to which and how desegregation policies and specific instruments interact with the context and impact the reduction of segregation, limiting policymakers’ ability to design effective interventions to mitigate school segregation. This special issue seeks empirical contributions that systematically analyze the impacts and effects of school desegregation policies, employing robust methodologies and directly engaging with the education policy literature. This includes multidisciplinary approaches, drawing on different fields that can inform the debate about the role of education policies in fostering school desegregation.

Submissions should offer original data, providing insights for policymakers and other educational stakeholders. By bridging conceptual, methodological, and geographical perspectives, this special issue aims to fill the existing gap, providing evidence-based guidance for designing policies that promote more inclusive and equitable educational systems by reducing school segregation.

Manuscripts are expected to cover, but not be limited to, the following topics:

• Impact of desegregation policies on the distribution of students among schools, including heterogeneous effects across territories and among social groups.
• Impact of desegregation policies on other educational or social outcomes (performance, student well-being, labor market, civic engagement, etc.).
• Schools' recontextualization of school desegregation policies.
• Families and students’ enactment of school desegregation policies and instruments.
• Case studies or comparative analyses of the adoption of school desegregation policies.
• Opposition and resistance to school desegregation policies.

Submission Information: Interested contributors are invited to submit brief 300-word abstracts aligned with the special issue theme for review by December 8, 2025. Abstracts should be submitted electronically through the EPAA website, in the section Education Policies for School Desegregation, and follow the Journal’s submission guidelines.

Abstracts will be accepted in English, and all articles will be evaluated through a double-blind process. More information about the EPAA/AAPE guidelines can be found at https://epaa.asu.edu/index.php/epaa/about/submissions.

Timeline:

• Abstract submission deadline: December 8, 2025
• Editorial decisions on abstracts and invitation for full manuscripts: December 22, 2025
• Reception of full manuscripts: April 15, 2026
• Revised manuscripts deadline: September 30, 2026
• Anticipated publication: December 2026

If you have any questions about this call for papers, please contact Adrián Zancajo (adrian.zancajo@gmail.com) and Sheila González Motos (sheila.gonzalez@ub.edu).