School Choice and the Politics of Parenthood: Exploring Parent Mobilization As a Catalyst for the Common Good

Abstract

A substantial body of research has shown how white, middle-class parents in urban school districts use school choice as a tool to pursue educational advantages for their children. The purpose of this qualitative research was to examine the debate over neighborhood schools and school choice among a diverse group of parents in a gentrifying, yet highly diverse New York City neighborhood that I call “Prospect Point.” My central focus was studying a parent advocacy group that supports neighborhood schools. Findings show that about one third of families living in Prospect Point choose to send their children to charter or gifted and talented (G&T) schools located outside of the neighborhood. Given this outflow of parents and resources via school choice, most of the gentrifier parents in the sample who opted in to the local schools viewed their choice as a politically charged decision, and they credited the parent advocacy group as having influenced it. As a group, they rejected the consumer model of school choice, which they believed put the local schools at a disadvantage and was the norm for their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic demographic. Opt-in parents in this context recognized their privilege, and their children’s privilege, in the school-choice process and actively sought to diminish it through their choice to opt in. This research has important implications for the transformative role that parent mobilization can play in the future of diverse, high-quality public education and our democratic society.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kimberly Moorhead, Lauren Fox, and the two Prospect Point member checkers for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article. A big thank-you to my graduate students, Signy Emler and Dorothy Drexel, for their assistance with coding the interview data. I would also like to thank my coeditors, Molly Makris and Ryan Coughlan, whose recommendations greatly improved this article. This research was funded by a Molloy College faculty research grant.

Notes

1 Pseudonym.

2 Citation was removed to ensure confidentiality of the neighborhood and participants.

3 Citation was removed to ensure confidentiality of the neighborhood and participants.

4 This percentage does not include, however, the number of students in the zone who opt out of their zoned school for private schools. There are two private schools in the Prospect Point neighborhood—one is a Catholic school and the other is an independent school. Therefore, the 33% opt-out number might actually be higher because it is not reflective of private-school enrollment.

5 The three bilingual programs available to English-language learners in New York City public schools include “transitional Bilingual Education: Instruction is in two languages. As English proficiency increases, the percentage of instruction in English increases; English as a Second Language (ESL): Instruction is in English with native language support; Dual Language: Instruction is 50 percent in English, 50 percent in another language. The program is designed for ELL and English proficient students” (http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/1617/english-language-learners-ell-and-bilingual-education-services).

6 All parents were given pseudonyms to ensure confidentiality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Allison Roda

Allison Roda is an assistant professor of education at Molloy College in the Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning Communities Ed.D. program. Roda’s research and teaching interests are focused on urban education policy, educational stratification, families and schools, and qualitative research methods. She is the author of Inequality in Gifted and Talented Programs: Parental Choices About Status, School Opportunity, and Second-Generation Segregation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Roda’s work has appeared in Teachers College Record, the Journal of Education Policy, and Quartz, and she has coauthored articles with Amy Stuart Wells in Review of Research in Education and American Journal of Education. The Century Foundation and the Hechinger Report have also published her works. Roda received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Education from Columbia University.