Choosing homes without choosing schools? How urban parents navigate decisions about neighborhoods and school choice

ABSTRACT

While many assume that families engaged in a housing search decide where to live at least in part based on the schools, there is surprisingly little research on how schools actually matter in the residential decision-making process. Drawing on interviews with a socioeconomically diverse sample of 110 parents in Chicago, we explore the connection between housing and schools. For the vast majority of our sample, schools did not loom large during their housing search. Instead, working families are faced with a range of competing demands and constraints making the housing search so challenging that even families who factor in schooling do so in ways that are neither direct nor straightforward. We conclude that while some past research suggests that urban school choice facilitates the decoupling of housing and school decisions, our data show that the “freedom” that derives from school choice can be more imaginary than real for many families.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Deanna Christianson for her important contributions to the development of this paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback that pushed us to strengthen our arguments. These data were collected through a research methods practicum at the University of Illinois at Chicago; the energy and efforts of the graduate students in this course were instrumental to the project, and we extend our thanks to each of them. Funding for the data collection was provided by the Department of Sociology, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, all at UIC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is important to recognize that while we often talk about housing and school “choices,” for many parents, real choices are not available at all or are very hard to access. Not only is the information that people need in order to make choices differentially available, but choices about schools and housing are often tied up with the realities of such things as where parents work and where childcare is available (Lareau & Goyette, 2014). And there is, of course, the larger issue of economic differences are crucial drivers of both housing and school options.

2. Interestingly, as studies dating back to the 1970s have also shown (Hempel, 1970), there is a difference between what people report as the most important neighborhood characteristics, and what they are willing to compromise on: just 4% of the total sample reported that they compromised on school quality when they made their most recent home purchase (National Association of Realtors, 2019).

3. Even though Chicago Public Schools were not used as recruitment sites, 68% of our respondents attended non-charter public (CPS) schools.

4. We purposefully did not center schools as our primary recruitment sites. Instead we used a neighborhood-based recruitment strategy focusing on places in communities like parks and libraries where we were likely to find parents of school-aged kids. This way we hoped to find parents who lived in the neighborhood independent of where they were sending their children to school.

5. We sought proximate neighborhoods to make on-the-ground recruitment efforts more efficient while also aiming to recruit respondents who were familiar with the other neighborhoods in the study.

6. Note that our study focused on north Austin; south Austin tends to have higher levels of concentrated poverty than north Austin.

7. As with much social science interview-based research, we are collecting parents’ retrospective accounts of their decision-making process. While such accounts are never 100% accurate renderings, we believe they are still useful for our purposes. Respondents’ accounts capture what we were most interested in, which is the way they are making sense of process and decision-making—that is, what mattered to them and what persists as important in their understanding of the process. We explored whether there were inconsistencies in respondent narratives by asking them separately about the two decisions (housing and schooling) at several different moments in the interview. This allowed us to “double-check” their explanations and to see if they were offering similar explanations throughout. In this way, it helped that these were not abstract conversations about what might possibly matter in an imagined process but instead were descriptions of how they actually ended up in their current home and how their child ended up in their current school. We also compared our findings to the available literature and found considerable parallels.

8. Small sample sizes, and the fact that race and class are so tightly linked in our study’s sample (e.g., we had no White participants who were classified as low-income, while 56% and 42% of Blacks and Latinx, respectively, were classified as low-income; conversely, 65% of our White sample was classified as middle-class and just 18% and 16% of Black and Latinx participants were so classified), make it impossible to draw conclusions about possible racial differences in these results. For example, while Whites are substantially less likely than Blacks and Latinos to be No Role searchers, this may be due entirely to the class distribution of the racial groups. Because of small cell sizes, it is not possible to discern clear patterns from a three-way classification of our sample (race by class by searcher type).

9. As noted above, there is a strong relationship between social class and homeownership, such that most of the low-income parents were renters, most of the middle-class parents owned their homes, and the working class was evenly divided. However, tenure status did not stand out, independent of social class, as driving the patterns in any particular way.

10. It is important to distinguish this group of respondents from those who decided on housing with the full intention of engaging in school choice. This group, the Parallel Searchers, is discussed next.

11. Note that these parents are not necessarily rejecting all neighborhood schools; just those located in the area where they moved. These same respondents may have been happy to put their children in their neighborhood school if it had been different—for example, a better-resourced neighborhood with well-resourced schools. To some extent, the pattern we observe in our data may be a function of the nature of the neighborhoods in our sample where there were good, but not top-rated, schools; we address this in more detail, below.

12. In the two cases where this is true, the pre-Kindergarten was attached to an elementary school.

13. There are interesting patterns about the assumptions people make that schools in a particular neighborhood will be “better.” For example, survey-based experiments (Bonam et al., 2016; Krysan et al., 2008) reveal that people often make assumptions about the quality of a school based on its racial composition (this was true for both White and Black survey respondents), and other studies have shown that as a school’s racial composition changes, Whites in particular evaluate schools more negatively (Billingham & Hunt, 2016; Goyette et al., 2012). Although we cannot test this hypothesis about the relationship between school racial composition and perceptions about school quality directly in our study, the “taken for grantedness” about school quality expressed by some of our Mixed Bag Searchers, is consistent with this research.

14. Arguably, we are minimizing the impact because we have focused only on schools within the city of Chicago. Suburban districts in the collar communities also inside Cook County (where Chicago is located) have far higher per-pupil budgets funded through local property taxes that, if considered, would demonstrate just how extreme inequities in school resources and quality are in the state (Henricks et al., 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maximilian Cuddy

Maximilian Cuddy is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation research examines how the politics of race and class shape schools and neighborhoods.

Maria Krysan

Maria Krysan is Professor of Sociology and Senior Scholar at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She focuses her research on racial residential segregation and racial attitudes and her most recent, award-winning, book (coauthored with Kyle Crowder) is Cycle of Segregation: Social processes and residential stratification (Russell Sage Foundation, 2017).

Amanda Lewis

Amanda Lewis is Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy and LAS Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on how race shapes educational opportunities and how our ideas about race get negotiated in everyday life. She is the author of several award-winning books including, with coauthor John Diamond, Despite the best intentions: Why racial inequality persists in good schools (Oxford University Press, 2015).