In Search of a Safe School: Racialized Perceptions of Security and the School Choice Process

ABSTRACT

Do school security policies affect how safe parents perceive schools to be, and do they influence parental choice behavior? We address these questions using data from a survey that asked U.S. parents to evaluate hypothetical schools whose security systems and student body racial composition were systematically varied, along with other school characteristics. Results indicate that parents identify schools with intensified security measures as less safe. Furthermore, parents are less willing to enroll their children in schools perceived as unsafe, schools with heightened security, and schools with high black enrollment. We discuss the implications of these findings for educational policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• sociology of racial and ethnic minorities
• social psychology; crime

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a University Research/Creative Projects Award provided by Wichita State University. An earlier version of this article was presented on August 12, 2018 at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Philadelphia, PA. The authors thank Eric Madfis, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for useful comments on previous versions of the article.

Notes

1 SMA did not provide information regarding the total number of people who were invited to participate in the survey, so we do not have data on the participation rate, and we are unable to compare participants against those who refused to participate. Initially, 1,479 people contacted by SMA agreed to participate. However, 220 of these individuals were excluded from the final sample for the following reasons: 103 people were disqualified because they dropped out after reading an informed consent document outlining the content of the survey; 20 people were disqualified because they self-identified as white in a targeted oversample of nonwhite respondents; 97 people began the survey but failed to complete it. SMA did not provide any data on these 220 individuals, so we cannot compare their characteristics to those of the final sample.

2 Because of an overriding interest in the impact of black students on parental perceptions of hypothetical schools, RRASS varied only the proportion of white and black students in the scenarios presented to respondents. All respondents were told that the school presented to them had a student body that was 10 percent Hispanic and 10 percent Asian. Thus, the schools described to respondents varied between schools that were 0 percent white, 80 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic, and 10 percent Asian and schools that were 80 percent white, 0 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic, and 10 percent Asian.

3 We estimated our models using alternative specifications to evaluate the robustness of our findings. These supplementary analyses included ordered logistic regression models that used all categories of the dependent variables, as well as binary logistic regression models using alternative cut points to create different dichotomous dependent variables. Except where noted, the results of these alternative specifications were all highly similar to the analyses presented here. These alternative models are available from the authors upon request.

4 Supplementary analyses indicated that black parents did differ somewhat from white parents in their responses to the vignette, but due to the small size of that category (N = 75), those findings are not statistically robust; for that reason, we have omitted them from the results presented here.

5 The hypothetical respondent whose enrollment preferences are presented in Figure 3 is a white woman who holds a bachelor’s degree and earns between $50,000 and $99,999. Characteristics of the hypothetical school and the respondent’s number of children are held constant at their means (see Table 1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wichita State University [University Research/Creative Projects Award #U1500].

Notes on contributors

Chase M. Billingham

Chase M. Billingham is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Wichita State University. His research examines stratification and segregation in American schools and urban neighborhoods.

Shelley M. Kimelberg

Shelley M. Kimelberg is the Director of the Social Sciences Interdisciplinary Program at the University at Buffalo. She is a sociologist who teaches and conducts research in the areas of urban communities, education, and social inequality.

Sarah Faude

Sarah Faude is the Director of Research and Evaluation for YW Boston. Her research focuses on urban racial inequality, with a particular emphasis on education.

Matthew O. Hunt

Matthew O. Hunt is Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. His primary research interests involve intersections of race/ethnicity, social psychology, and inequality in the United States. His work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Psychology Quarterly, and other publications.