Schooling in suburbia: the intersections of race, class, gender, and place in black fathers’ engagement and family–school relationships

ABSTRACT

Few studies have explored the engagement of fathers in children’s schooling. Understanding the role that black fathers, in particular, play in their children’s education is both important and timely given the persistent opportunity gaps faced by many black students in the US and the influential role that black fathers can play in their children’s academic success. This paper thus explores the experiences and educational engagement strategies of a socioeconomically mixed sample of 16 black fathers in a predominantly white suburb in the US. The research findings challenge dominant portrayals of black fathers as largely absent or uninvolved in their children’s education, and illustrate the importance of understanding the intersections of race, class, gender, and place in studies of parents’ engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational engagement
• black fathers
• intersectionality
• racism
• social class
• suburbs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Linn Posey-Maddox is an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Posey-Maddox’s research and teaching interests are focused on urban education; education and urban policy; families and schools; and qualitative research methods. She is the author of When Middle-Class Parents Choose Public Schools: Class, Race, and the Challenge of Equity in Public Education (2014, University of Chicago Press).

Notes

1. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provides financial support to local educational agencies and schools with high percentages of children from low-income families to assist students in meeting state academic standards.

2. Racial microaggressions are subtle forms of racism that are frequently automatic and unconscious and yet take significant psychological and physiological tolls on people of color (Huber and Solorzano 2015).

3. Pseudonyms are used for the names of locations, organizations, and participants.

4. Cohabitating partners were given the choice of interviewing together or separately. Four fathers participated in a joint interview with their wives.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Graduate School, University of Wisconsin-Madison.