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Abstract
We draw on recent developments in the sociology of race and ethnicity and theories of the duality of social structure to explain how the formation of ‘educational identities’ interacts with racial stratification to shape the school choices of highly educated whites in the United States. Analysis of the 1996 National Household Education Survey shows that the racial composition of schools plays an important role in the schooling choices of highly educated whites. As the per cent black in a residential area increases, whites are more likely to select alternative, higher-percentage-white schooling for their children. Importantly, this effect is amplified for highly educated whites (but not highly educated blacks). Ironically, then, despite many positive effects of formal education on racial attitudes, increased education for whites leads to greater negative sensitivity to blacks in public schools, which may in turn have the unintended effect of increasing school segregation and racial inequality.
Acknowledgements
Authorship of this article is equal. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and George Yancey for their helpful comments.
Notes
1. Sewell explains that schemas are virtual in the sense that they ‘cannot be reduced to their existence in any particular practice or any particular location in time and space’ (1992, p. 8).
2. We divide our presentation into sections on schemas and resources for analytical purposes only. In social life, these are aspects of social structure are not in fact so easily separated. In the following sections, we point out where the analytical distinction breaks down.
3. One anecdote is illustrative: the apparently increasing use of the phrase, ‘educated classes’, in newspapers and radio news programmes may reflect the increasing role of education in US stratification.
4. For the moment, we ignore the fact that this educational social structure is both a resource, in the sense that it is concretely embodied in the location and appearance of schools and in a well-known hierarchy of schools in a given urban or rural area (even to the point of being written down, in the case of college admission officers (Stevens Citation2001)), and is also the enactment of the widely shared sets of equivalences (i.e., schema) in American society between white and black, higher and lower, mind and body, safe and dangerous, and good and poor.
5. Similarly in whites’ evaluation of neighbourhoods, it is well known that the presence of African Americans is believed by whites to reduce home values, as well as the overall status of a neighbourhood (Massey and Denton Citation1993; Farley and Frey Citation1994; Harris Citation1999).
6. Sewell (Citation1992) is not clear about the relation between the concept of identity, the sense of who you are, and the concepts of schema and resource. Perhaps the best way to conceive of identities is as social structures that are formed through the interaction of schemas and resources. In this article, however, we emphasize the aspects of identity that correspond with Sewell's concept of schema. Educational identities, in our view, are a particular configuration of assumptions, habits of speech and gesture, conventions, aesthetic norms, and recipes for group action – all of which Sewell mentions as examples of his conception of schema.
7. See Emerson, Yancey and Chai (Citation2001) on the association among whites between having children, and unwillingness to consider buying a house in an area that has a high percentage of blacks. This appears consistent with the claim that whites are concerned that their children not interact with low status blacks.
8. In the 1996 National Household Education Survey, blacks with more than a college education live in zip codes that are on average 34 per cent black, while blacks with less than a high school education live on average in zip codes with 48 per cent black.
9. In separate models (not shown), we found that this applies to the interaction of education with per cent white in the neighbourhood as well. That is, there is no evidence in the black sample of an interaction effect between education and per cent white on school choice.
10. Attitude and behaviour are tenuously linked (Schuman and Presser Citation1976), and this is in part due to the fact that everyday life practices follow not from resources or schemas alone, but the interaction between them. The association between attitudes and outcomes (such as the level of segregation) is highly complex and typically weak (Jaynes and Williams Citation1989; Clark Citation1992; Farley and Frey 1994), and can even be contradictory (Jackman and Crane Citation1986; Massey and Gross Citation1991).