Building Expectations and Keeping Customers Happy: How Charter School Leaders Recruit and Retain Families

ABSTRACT

Using qualitative data collected in three charter schools over the course of 14 months, this article analyzes how involvement expectations played a role in charter school recruitment practices and shaped personnel-parent relations. Through various recruitment strategies, personnel built involvement expectations among prospective parents, treating them as valued customers whose happiness carried consequences for funding. Personnel drew on parents’ financial networks, neighborhood connections, and social media contacts to recruit families, as for-profit charter school budgets rely on the recruitment and retention of parents who can volunteer, serve on committees, provide transportation, court donors, and recruit similar families.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• sociology of race
• gender and class
• family

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the workplace literature, scholars often use the term supply-side to refer to the pool of job seekers and their characteristics and skills, while they regard job availability, location, and pay, and employers’ actions with regard to hiring, as demand-side factors (McNamee and Miller 2014). This contrasts the language used for this study and the sociology of education literature, for which demand-side analyses refer to parents’ preferences and choices, while schools embody the supply-side factors such as available transportation, method of recruiting and selecting students, disciplinary approaches, and uniform requirements (Berends 2015; Saultz, Fitzpatrick, and Jacobsen 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Virginia Riel

Virginia Riel is a lecturer at North Carolina State University.  Her research focuses on inequality and education, with her dissertation examining recruitment practices in charter schools.  Other recent projects explore racial microaggressions in school, tracking, and the spatial organization and disciplinary treatment of students in school by race.  Her work has appeared in Sociology Compass, Race Ethnicity and Education, Virginia Law Review, and The Journal of Negro Education (forthcoming).  She holds a B.A. in Sociology and American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.S. in Sociology from North Carolina State University, and, as of May 2020, a PhD. in Sociology from North Carolina State University.