There’s a pretty robust body of research on what happens to schools when neighborhoods gentrify, and the general finding is: not much. Or rather, not the thing you’d naively expect.
A Stanford study by F. Chris Pearman found that gentrification was actually associated with declining enrollment at neighborhood schools, with the largest drops occurring when the gentrifiers were white. In Denver, gentrifying neighborhoods saw a 23% enrollment decline between 2006 and 2016 as white families used school choice mechanisms — charters, magnets, out-of-boundary transfers — to avoid their zoned schools. A Chalkbeat analysis found that in gentrifying areas nationally, white parents enrolled their kids in schools with 19% fewer poor students and 14% fewer Black and Hispanic students than their assigned neighborhood school.
The basic dynamic is straightforward and kind of depressing: white families move in, housing prices rise, the neighborhood changes, but the schools don’t. Or they change only in the sense that lower-income families get priced out and enrollment declines.
New York City is the partial exception, where gentrifying schools saw a 40% increase in white enrollment between 2000 and 2014. But even in New York, that was concentrated in specific neighborhoods — it wasn’t a district-wide transformation.