A moving target: Black middle-class parents school strategies in a segregated city and suburb

ABSTRACT

Drawing from an ethnography, this paper evaluates the motivations of Black American and Black immigrant parents when selecting high schools for their millennial teenage children in a segregated city and suburbs of New York. Black middle class parents encounter racial exclusion in the areas of work and residence. However, more research is needed to understand how they negotiate segregated schools. Analysis of interviews with 60 Black middle class parents suggests that choosing schools reveals parents’ strategies of intergenerational mobility for their Black children. Urban parents believed that contact with a racially diverse student body was a key indicator of school quality. Black American suburban parents who chose their local school exhibited faith in the curricular diversity of public schools, while immigrant parents believed in the superiority of a private school education. This pattern exacerbated the economic vulnerability of immigrant families who pay high tuition costs in an already high tax suburbs. These findings demonstrate how racial inequity, class precarity, culture and space shape how Black families navigate the moving target of educating their children.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• segregation
• school choice
• Black families
• immigration
• suburbs
• cities
• New York

This article explores how Black middle class parents negotiate choosing high schools for their teenagers in the largest school district in the country, New York. New York has seen widescale neoliberal transformations in the past twenty years, challenging Black parents’ ability to provide a quality education for their children. For example, as more whites have moved back into NYC and cities nationwide since the millennium (Roda and Stuart Wells 2013; Goyette 2008) they have used redistricting as a weapon to exclude existing Black and Latinx students from schools. The Black middle class is in a peculiar position in this context. In Pulitzer prize winning journalist Nicole Hannah Jones’ New York Times article, ‘Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City’, she notes that New York City’s new affluent white parents curate diversity for their children by sending them to multiracial schools, however, these choices reinforce the racial segregation of schools. White affluent parents hoard power over the public school’s curriculum and culture to ensure that their children excel at the expense of Black and brown students. New York City’s middle class Black families are, then, stuck between a rock and a hard place when choosing schools for their children in a hyper-segregated, unaffordable city. While much of the work on school choice in New York focuses on the urban experience of low-income Black American families, this paper explores the challenges that Black American and Black immigrant middle class parents in urban and suburban neighborhoods encounter when selecting the ‘right’ high schools for their children.

This paper asks, when parents choose between public and private high schools, what are their motivations? What is the role of race, nationality, and space in this process? I find important differences across nationality and place, and that these nationality groups attach a diversity of meanings to their schooling options. They, therefore, activate unique strategies for navigating their class mobility and racial exclusion in a mammoth education system. The strategies that parents adopt are in the interest of their children’s long term success, demarcating what I call racialized strategies of intergenerational mobility. In the following section, I discuss the social constructions of good schools by Black American middle class parents, how they navigate urban versus suburban educational inequity, and outline the strategies they employ to ensure the transmission of their class status to their children through education.

Literature

Moving on up?: schooling in Suburbia

The white middle class ‘chooses schools with their feet.’ They have historically sought out suburban school districts that are whiter and more affluent than those in cities (Holmes 2002; Reay, Crozier, and James 2011). However, the increasing suburbanization of Black people and immigrants (Lacy 2016) creates a new spatial environment to explore school choice. There is a gap in the general understandings of how the Black middle class negotiates the school choice market in suburbia. Lacy (2007) and Pattillo’s (1999) work suggests that residential context matters for the cultural repertoires and decision making of Black middle-class families. The mass outmigration of the Black American middle class to older, inner-ring, and new suburbs calls for an examination of the quality of the schools available to their children, how they differ from the urban high schools they are leaving behind, and how families interpret and utilize them. In New York, more than half of the Black population call the suburbs home (Frey 2011).¹ The rise in Black American suburbanization is the result of their increased educational attainment and economic progress since the 1960s. They have encountered backlash from suburban whites seeking to reproduce Jim crow suburbs and reverse racial progress in school and neighborhood integration (Allen 2009; Boger and Orfield 2005; Garland 2013; Gary and Eaton 1997).²

The problems of unequal urban public schools follow Black families as they migrate out to suburbs in search of a better life (Diamond 2006; Lewis-McCoy 2014; Orfield and Frankenberg 2014). As a result, middle-class Black parents in suburban areas may have similar strategies of shuttling their teenaged children to better-performing high schools Civil Rights Struggle urban residents, albeit in a more limited suburban school choice market. Some have used suburbanization as a tool for accessing ‘better schools’. Others are simply able to afford private schools. Lacy (2007) finds that middle-class Black American families in Prince George’s County, Maryland, moved to the suburbs seeking better schools and quality of life for their children. Yet, some encountered troubled school systems. Thus, a set of middle-class suburban Black parents have similar high school options, challenges, and opportunities as urban residents. The different strategies they employ to mitigate the setbacks of a racially and class unequal school system is the focus of this paper.

A Black (diasporic) middle class

Scholars have revealed the growing economic and educational inequality between low income and middle income, and urban and suburban Black Americans. The experience of Black middle class immigrants of navigating racially segregated educational systems is less clear. In addition to the rise of the Black American middle class in suburbia since the 1960s, the migration of Black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa is reshaping the relationship between race, schooling, and mobility. In New York City, the Caribbean and African Black immigrant populations constitute 23.6% of the foreign-born population (723, 717) (Lobo and Salvo 2013), not counting their American-born children. Historically, Black American middle-class enclaves of Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and the suburbs of New York have housed Black immigrants in significant numbers (Haynes 2008, Crowder and Tedrow 2001; Lobo and Salvo 2013).

Immigrant parents often migrate to New York to provide their children with better opportunities and education (Clerge 2019; Kasinitz et al. 2008; Alejandro and Rumbaut 2001; Portes and Zhou 1993; Vallejo 2012). First-generation Black middle-class immigrants often arrive in the United States with high levels of human capital, many entering into middle-class occupations as teachers, nurses, or other skilled workers (Mederios-Kent 2009), and join the Black American middle class in the pursuit of intergenerational mobility. Others attain middle-class status over time through entrepreneurial activities in their ethnic communities, or by gaining degrees in their city and state universities (Clerge 2019). Their middle class occupations and earnings have helped them buy homes, suburbanize, challenging traditional models of Black immigrant residential settlement as urban (Clerge 2019; Hanlon 2009; Li 1998).³

The suburbanization of a diasporic Black middle class has implications for their schooling options. The suburbanization of Black Americans and Black immigrants suggests that high school choice decisions are more complex than ever before. In Kasinitz et al.’s Inheriting the City (Kasinitz et al. 2008), the authors find that the children of Black immigrants attend similar schools and have the same educational outcomes as Black Americans. As a result, these ‘new-Black American’ middle-class parents encounter similar challenges as their native-born Black counterparts. What is unclear, however, is how the different nationality and cultural histories of these groups may shape their approach to choosing educational institutions for their teenaged children. These cultural repertoires may be similar to Latinx families, who research or choose independent schools at significantly lower rates than native-born Black and white families (Gastic and Salas Coronado 2011; Planty et al. 2009). However, the intersection of race and class convolutes the validity of this comparison (particularly since a segment of Black immigrants are Afro-Latinx). I build upon the culture of mobility model (Neckerman, Carter, and Lee 1999) of Black American and Immigrant adults practices of expressing their middle class status. Their school choices reflect their desire to pass on their class status to their children through education amid a segregated school system, a process I call racialized strategies of intergenerational mobility. Therefore, an exploration of how these Black diasporic groups view and act in the school choice market is necessary for understanding how varying sets of parents navigate the school choice market in multiracial and multiethnic cities and suburbs.

Context: An Urban-Suburban research design

The data used in this paper emerges from the Black Ethnic Middle Class Project-New York in Queens and Long Island, a multi-sited ethnography Black middle class places. New York is one of the most segregated cities in the country with a long history of Jim Crow neighborhoods and schools (Crowder 1999; Wiese 2005; Wilder 2000). Middle class is defined by income, education and homeownership. To be considered middle class, a parent had to have a median household income at or above that of their neighborhood area: at least $70,174 for Cascades; and $82,315 for Great Park,⁴ completed some postsecondary education or training, and owned their home.⁵

Parents resided in Queens County and Nassau County.⁶ Cascades is a segregated Black urban multiethnic neighborhood in Queens. At the time of study, Cascades was 71% non-Hispanic Black and 3.6% non-Hispanic white, with approximately one-third of its population being foreign-born. The suburban comparison site, Great Park, was a multiracial area. Great Park was racially integrated, with Black people comprising 29% of the population, whites 35%, and one-third of the population being foreign-born (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2010). Great Park comprises demographically similar areas. In 2010, Cascades had a median household income of $68,890, and Great Park, $80,639, well above the New York’s median income of $60,169 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2010). Because of its suburban location, Great Park has some of the highest property taxes in the country.

Schools

Great Park and Cascades are middle-income communities; however, their high schools do not reflect the socioeconomic status of residents. Research participants reported that they wanted their children to excel academically, yet their neighborhood schools were segregated and unequal (O’Day, Bitter, and Gomez 2011; Shedd 2015). High school options in Cascades and Great Park varied. Cascades is situated within the boundaries of where New York City’s 8^th graders participate in the High School Choice Application program, meaning that eighth graders can apply to up to nine schools outside of their school district. They can also apply to charter, magnet, and private (Catholic and secular) high schools throughout the five boroughs. In Great Park, high school choice was limited to two local public schools, and students were assigned to one of these based on zoning policies. If one was dissatisfied with one school, they have one other school to petition for entry, or they could opt into private school. Cascades and Great Park had significant numbers of economically vulnerable students. Queens County’s is 18% Black (see Table 1), however, Cascades High is 80% Black. Roughly seventy percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch. Great Park’s high schools enrolled approximately 4,000 students in 2011–2012,⁷ 40% of whom are Black and 40% of whom are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.⁸

Table 1. Demographics of Cascades and Great Park (2010).

	Cascades		Queens County	Great Park		Nassau County
White (NH)	5,314	3.6%	28.6%	26,284	35.0%	67.0%
Black (NH)	105,198	71.1%	18%	21,794	29.0%	10.5%
Asian (NH)	14,363	9.7%	22.9%	2,974	4.0%	7.4%
Hispanic/Latinx	16,072	10.9%	27.0%	22,038	29.3%	13.7%
Foreign-Born	63,191	42.7%	48.1%	23,082	30.7%	20.7%
Below Poverty Level	7,646	7.1%	12.6%	2,508	6.7%	9.2%
Median Household Income		$68,890	$55, 291		$80,639	$93,613
Black		$71,397	$56,453		$90,240	$78,092
White		$58,718	$55,813		$80,800	96,930
Owner Occupied	31,894	72.3%	45.5%	18,572	75.5%	82.1%

Source: ACS 2010–5 year estimates

Methods

Between January 2008 and March 2012, I participated in the community life of Cascades and Great Park. I volunteered as a daycare worker,⁹ a grant writer, and mentored high school student groups. These spaces created opportunities for observing the culture of these neighborhoods and their educational institutions. Residents frequented these sites for worship, tutoring, and extracurricular activities for their children. I gained entry into these organizations by scheduling meetings with directors or workers who gave me permission to both volunteer and recruit interviewees. Following the Institutional Review Board protocol, informed consent for all interviews were obtained.

I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews investigating participants’ attitudes toward local public schools as an instantiation of their cultural identities. Across the two communities, 60 Black middle-class parents of teenaged children in high school participated, 30 in Cascades and 30 in Great Park. Of this group, 20 were Black American, 20 were Jamaican, and 20 were Haitian. Interviews lasted one to three hours, with some leading to extended ethnographic observations.¹⁰ I am a second generation Black Haitian immigrant. During interviews, I concealed my nationality background to avoid interview bias. I suspended this approach in some interviews with Haitian interviewees, whom were more receptive to interviews when they learned I was of Haitian descent. My Black racial identity and social class as a PhD student served as a source of access to multinational Black middle-class families.

Following the interview processes outlined by Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2006), the interview schedule consisted of demographic questions about race, internal and international family migration patterns, household income, and family structure. I then asked participants questions about their identity, class origins, neighborhood and schooling experiences.

I also interviewed school officials (6 in Cascades and 4 in Great Park) such as principals, teachers, and security guards to understand the challenges that their schools faced. Data analysis followed an iterative process by which I evaluated themes, meanings, and reflexivity that emerged from interviews. Transcribed interview data led to analytical categories of high school selection and perceptions and their relationship to race, class, and ethnicity. Through focused coding (Hesse-Biber and Leavy 2006), I built and clarified concepts around selecting one’s neighborhood public school, and perceptions of private, magnet, or non-neighborhood public schools.

Findings & discussion

Urban parents

Local schools: ‘not going to cut it’

Middle class families in Cascades negotiated New York City’s public educational labyrinth with trepidation and hope (Stulberg 2008). A subset of Cascades parents were reluctant to send their children to Cascades High. Their local high school was in a desirable residential location of Queens. However, like the neighborhood, the high schools are racially segregated. Parents perceived Cascades High School’s racial isolation as an impediment to the schools quality, with many parents seeing it as structurally inferior to White schools in other parts of Queens. Many parents reported that their local public high school was heavily policed, had low academic performance, and troubled social-learning environments which impeded their children’s learning and success. Tony, 52, a small business owner in Cascades shares:

As you can see these schools now, they are patrolled like it’s a prison now. The students gotta take off their shoes, their belt, and all sort of things to get into school. That’s not cool. That’s not a good learning environment for kids. I know that they do got bad kids but if you check all the record of all the shootings and stuff, it is in the white neighborhood. They still not putting a prison inside there. And all the security guards and all the cops, it doesn’t make sense. Come to a whiter town on Long Island, it’s smooth sailing for the kids. They got bus picking them up until they are at a certain age, so it’s good.

Black middle class parents’ use of racial composition as a proxy for school quality when assessing high schools demonstrates the significance of racism in how they imagined educational opportunity. Cheryl, a 50-year-old Black American business administrator, for example, noted that she sends her twins to interracial public schools in the predominantly white and Asian areas in Queens because they have higher learning standards and resources for students.

I wanted my kids to go to a school in North Queens. The schools over here were not going to cut it. My kids’ school is a mix of white and Asian middle-class families. There are not many Black students and the schools are better there.

Parents and their teenagers used New York’s open admission policy to bypass the social problems of surveillance and low resources at Cascades High. The majority of Cascades parents shuttled their teenagers to charter, magnet schools. Another set of parents bypassed public high schools altogether, and sent their teenagers to private Catholic or independent schools in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. While public school parents argued that less racially isolated schools received more resources, and were better quality, Cascades parents with children in private school saw public schools in general as being a ‘risky’ choice for their children’s long term success.

Socialization school: ‘in real life, they won’t only interact with Blacks’

Parents who selected private high schools (see Table 2) articulated socio-cultural rationales for their selections. Specifically, they cited interracial contact with affluent white students as a key advantage of private high schools. These parents were invested in their children building cross-racial skill sets to help them become more competitive candidates in the college application process, in college, and the job market. Parents believed that knowing the language, culture, values, and behaviors of white gatekeepers, gave their children a competitive advantage over other students who operated in only Black spaces (Lacy 2007). Parents defined the ‘real world’ as a place where Blacks and Whites interacted in everyday life. Despite living in a predominately Black middle class place, strategies for their children’s socialization were shaped by parents desires to expose their children to the practices of the dominant white world. Mrs. Roberts, a Jamaican-born Cascades resident in her 50s, sends her children to predominately White private schools. When I asked her about her daughter’s experience, she said:

She doesn’t have to be in a predominantly African American setting because they have to mix. They are about to go out in the world and you have to learn to live with other people. You have to learn from now how to work with them. At least she’s there now; predominantly white, so you know their likes and dislikes; you know how they behave and you know how to deal with them. I think that is good start for you; I think that is good.

Table 2. School choices: public neighborhood school versus non-neighborhood school choices.

	Cascades	%	Great Park	%	All	%
Neighborhood Public School	15	50	20	66	35	58
Outside Public School (Magnet/Charter School)	6	20	3	10	9	15
Private/Catholic School	9	30	7	24	16	27
Total	30		30		60

Mrs. Roberts understood that she was raising her children in a Black neighborhood, but in a White country. Therefore, she desired for her daughter to attend predominantly white colleges and workplaces in order ‘to mix’ as a strategy of mobility and success.

New York is not a Black-white city, but a multiracial, global city. Therefore, Cascades parents also expressed a preference for high schools with larger Latinx and Asian student. Mrs. Evans, a Black American woman in her 40s, for example, placed added value on racially integrated schools that reflected the diversity of New York’s residents. Mrs. Evans reflected on the composition of her daughter’s Catholic school:

It’s predominantly white at St. Antoinette, but you still have your group of African Americans, Indian, Chinese, a mix. So she is mixing with everybody.

Black Americans and Black immigrant parents shared that they wanted their children to have peers who were Whites, Black, Latinx, and Asian. Mrs. Evans believed that her daughter’s exposure to non-Blacks gave her a competitive edge. Cascades parents are conscious of the complexities of New York’s colorline and choosing the ‘right’ schools is one of the strategies they use to help their teenagers become socially successful in a racially unequal world.

Suburban parents

Segregated suburbia

How did suburban parents approach selecting high schools for their children? Buying a home in the suburbs of Long Island is a meaningful act of socioeconomic mobility for New York’s Black families. Thousands of Black families have moved from Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx to Long Island suburbs since the 1960s. Buying a suburban home was the materialization of the ‘American Dream’ or the ‘West Indian Dream’ for many. For Black Americans and Black immigrants alike, moving to Long Island meant that they would not only purchase a larger home for their family, but providehigher quality education for their children. Jean-Dominique, a 49-year-old Haitian immigrant and engineer shared the incentives attached to moving to Great Park. He shared:

In Great Park, one of the reasons I moved here, it was about the school district. They have a very good record about Great Park when it comes to school quality.

Jean-Dominque, like many suburban participants, moved to Long Island to give their children better public educational options than they believed New York City could provide.

On Long Island, Great Park schools increasingly racially mixed setting were stigmatized as poor performing by whites inside and outside of the area. As a result, Great Park White residents pulled their school-aged children out of Great Park High School. Mrs. Hughes, a Black American librarian in her 50s, observed: ‘One year, it’s like the White students just started leaving the school system. They still live in the area, but their parents pulled them right out. This was especially for the seventh grade and up’. Similar to a phenomenon called the ‘new white flight’ (Lung-Amam 2017), a response to the in migration of Asian families in a California suburb, Whites in Great Park sent their children to private school, or altogether exited the neighborhood for whiter suburban school districts.

The ‘good school’ veil: ‘our suburban public high school is as good, or better than any’

Unlike Cascades families, more than two-thirds of Great Park suburban parents sent their teenagers to their local public high school. The majority of these parents were Black American. Most Great Park parents suburbanized in order to access better quality neighborhoods and schools unavailable to them in the city. Black American Great Park High parents found what they believed to be the best of both worlds: a strong curriculum and a diverse student population. These parents vocalized that they conducted research before deciding what schools would be best for their children. For example, Mr. Jefferson, a Jamaican-born engineer in his 50s, stated:

I send my son to [Great Park High School] because the opportunities that he has there aremany. He is into basketball and they want to invest in him and told me this from thebeginning. They send him to camps, and all that. It’s also a good learning environmentand will set him up well for college.

Mr. Jefferson believes that Great Park’s strong academic curriculum and sports program will prepare his son well for a successful future. These Great Park parents defended their selection of their local public school. Similarly, Candace, 50, a Black American realtor and mother of two, spoke highly of the neighborhood high school. She stated: ‘[Great Park High School] compares to any of the best’. She acknowledged, however, that people had warned her to stay away from the school, highlighting the turnover of administrators as a problem. Parents often highlighted that racial discrimination was a key reason why Great Park High wasn’t considered a ‘good school’. Candace stated:

I think because you have so many Latinos and because you have so many Blacks there, (people think) it’s a bad thing … They have AP classes. They have the authentic research program. Which is a wonderful thing and my daughter is into math and science so for her that is the best. And my son was into music and arts and he found his niche there and he blossomed. So I think it compares to any school.

Candace was a strong proponent of Great Park High’s curriculum, but also believed that parental participation in their child’s learning was key. She stated: ‘As long as you are a parent who is involved with your child and their education, I think they’ll do okay in the worst situations’.

Jens, a 51-year-old Haitian engineer believed that sending his children to a private high school was a ‘waste of money’. Like many parents, finances were an important consideration in their decision-making process. However, a set of parents who sent their children to Great Park High did so because they had faith in the instruction provided in public schools over private schools. For example, Great Park parents often compared the linear curriculum of private schools to the more holistic agenda of their neighborhood school. Rose, a Black American teacher in her 40s and mother of two, explained why she selected Great Park High for her son:

I think they receive a solid education there. I sent my son to a private school when he was in fifth grade, but I took him right out because he had unlearned all the things he learned from the public school here. I had to do a lot of work to bring him back. And when we were considering high schools, we thought about private schools. But my son is someone who does his schoolwork and is smart, but he also enjoys sports. I believe doing sports make us all well-rounded people and gives him a chance to release a certain energy. But the private schools have poor sports programs and I knew that he wouldn’t be happy there. At Great Park, he is doing well in different areas.

When you raise a child, you have to raise the whole child, not just their mind, but the body as well.

A sizeable number of parents who chose Great Park High did so because their children were athletic, and Great Park was known for being a conduit to top sports programs at various leading universities across the country.

Great Park parents wanted their children to be ‘global citizens’ and ‘competitive for college’. Parents, like Rose, argued that sending their children to suburban public schools actually gave their children a competitive edge as long as they remained involved in their development. Great Park parents who opted into their local public high schools argued that these settings provided the richest resources to their children. They considered their children’s non-academic performance to be just as important as their academic achievement and highlighted the importance of both their children’s cognitive and non-cognitive growth.

Ball et al. (2013) found that social mix is an important school characteristic for Black-British parents when deciding on the best educational environment for their children. Across the pond, however, Black American middle class families in the suburbs pull back the veil that equates racial mix with quality education and base their definitions of good schools for their children on the well roundedness of curricular offerings and the learning benchmarks crossed by their children. Therefore, among Black American families, student composition becomes less of a defining factor in choosing schools in suburbia. While Great Park Black American parents valued exposing their children to diversity in school, many had different criteria for assessing the quality of Great Park High compared to Black immigrants.

Costs of the dream: transnational perceptions of public vs. private education

Haitian and Jamaican immigrant parents in Great Park largely had similar approaches to high school choice. Immigrant parents, however, believed that private school was the ticket to success for their teens. Black immigrants demonstrated strict aversions to public schools in general. Some Black immigrant parents preferred a private education for their children because it afforded them greater control. Ricardo, 54, medical profession in Great Park, shares:

When talking about raising children and a family in New York, well I’ll tell you why I send my children to a very expensive school. I do not do this because the school is that great academically. I do it because you’re getting the full parent-teacher interaction that you think you deserve, no matter what your mindset it.

Ricardo and other parents selected private school for their children because it allowed them to exercise client-based appeals to teachers and administrators on their children’s behalf. Selecting private schools allowed them to treat their child’s education like a financial transaction. They, as the client, had more control over how teachers treated their children and what educational resources they received.

Private school preference was a transnational strategy of class mobility among immigrant parents. Claudette, a 48-year-old, Haitian registered nurse in Great Park who sends her son and daughter to a private high school, expressed similar sentiments about the public and private school binary.

Back home in Haiti, I send my child to public school? Never, mm, mm, not me.

I send my children to private school, that’s it. Now they are going to go to college in the city next semester. That’s it.

Dmitri, a Jamaican business owner in his 60s stated:

See, in Jamaica, private schools are better than the public. It’s how it’s always been. The private school kids get the best jobs, they go further in life.

Claudette is clear that her selection of private school is a part of a transnational set of class-based beliefs. Therefore, the culture of intergenerational mobility is shaped by shared class-related educational understandings that are often overlooked when examining how Black parents negotiate unequal schools. Jamaican and Haitian parents pressed towards private school when they suburbanized, because they carried the politics of class and education from their home countries. This repertoire reinforced the ways in which race, class, and nationality intersect when Black families encounter New York’s complex educational system.

Black immigrant parents in Cascades, for example, were also acutely aware of racial inequality, and sought to mitigate their children’s exposure to hypersegregated public schools in their area. When possible, they shuffled their children to private schools, not only because of class anxieties here in the U.S., but also in their home countries. They had a shared cultural understanding that private schools were superior to public schools, a belief rooted in the class and educational structures of their home countries.

The culture around sending their children to private schools persisted even after parents suburbanized and had access to a relatively better public school than what they were leaving behind in the city. Jimmy, 50, a Haitian-born Great Park resident, noted that he perceives the public school in his suburban area as underfunded precisely because it is majority Black and Latinx:

My daughter’s private school is, I would say, 90 percent Caucasian. And my son, who is in [the neighborhood public school] it’s about 25 percent Caucasian. I worried about that, yes, I was. I feel that when the school is predominantly Black, fewer resources are available in the school. That’s the setting of the system.

Eulily discussed the transnational ideologies of private school superiority that are entrenched in her Haitian immigrant social network and informed her educational aspirations and school choices. Eulily, 45, a high-ranking nurse and Great Park resident, argued that her preference for private school is rooted in educational stratification in Haiti:

Like where I live, if I had the money, and coming from Haiti, I will always have the tendency that our kids should go to private school versus public school. We always compare like public school as poor people school. That’s our mentality, you know. Even though we know from back home the private system is better than the public system, because of reputation, we don’t want to be labeled as poor people. Some Haitians will go to the extreme to put their kids in private school in this country. I have a friend of mine, she is a nurse; she’s not making that much money. She has four kids in private school, yeah, $40,000 per year for them. She is working so hard, she can’t sleep at night so she can work to pay for the school tuition. But I understand. She lives in Brooklyn. Where she lives it’s always bad, you know. But right now, to tell you the truth, if I had the money, I would put my kids in private school.

Eulily expressed transnational class sensibilities that inform how her networks of Haitian parents navigate high school systems in their cities and towns. She moved to Great Park to obtain a larger home, only to find that the schools had a bad reputation among Whites on Long Island. Reluctantly, she sends her eldest teenaged daughter to Great Park High because she cannot afford private high school tuition.

Eulily’s situation points to a key economic strain Black parents negotiate. Great Park parents paid the nation’s second highest property taxes – on average, $9,080 per year (Harris and David Moore 2013). Therefore, parents who bypassed their local schools were willing to pay these property taxes along with private school tuition to ensure their children’s educational success and social mobility. Many struggled to make ends meet. Pierre, a business owner in his 50s stated:

You think that I am middle class. But how do you ask how do I pay my bills? Well, I have two kids who both goes to Catholic schools. And guess what, look at my business. Because their school is so expensive, I had to let my secretary go two years ago. I can’t replace her. She was the heart of the business and did all of the advertisement for me.

Conclusion

The children of the Black middle-class are slipping into low-income positions in adulthood at higher rates than the white middle class. The lack of affordable, quality education is a key contributing factor of this intergenerational status change (Mazumder 2014; Sharkey 2014). In this terrain, many urban and suburban Black middle-class parents see placing their children into the ‘right’ high school as a high stakes decision. This shared understanding of the perils that middle-class Blacks face is the foundation on which the African American strategize intergeneration mobility. This paper has demonstrated that Black middle class parents have fractured beliefs and approaches for to how best educate their children in a segregated city and an integrated suburb. This paper revealed that Black American, and immigrant parents in New York make school choices that challenge educational inequity but also buy into it to help their children get ahead.

Three main findings emerged. First, urban parents actively sought private and public high schools outside of their segregated neighborhoods. They wanted their teenagers to go to integrated high schools because their local urban high school was segregated and therefore, unequal. Many Cascades parents who selected magnet, outside public, or private schools also expressed the shared understanding that exposing their children to school with larger white student populations was imperative. In addition, parents also valued their teenagers’ interactions with Asian and Latinx students, demonstrating that their mobility strategies included selecting schools that gave them the tools to navigate the increasingly visible tri-racial strata of white, honorary white, and Black racial system (Bonilla-Silva 2006).

Second, suburban parents developed different strategies to mitigate the educational inequity their families encountered. One group of parents bypassed their local suburban school and sent their children to private, independent or Catholic schools. They did this in good faith for their children, however, oftentimes this created significant financial stress. Another set of parents dug their heels into the local public school system and exhibited faith in the holistic educational approach of the curriculum. These constructions of private versus public schools were articulated differently among Great Park native- and foreign-born Black parents. Suburban Black American families valued the emphasis on book learning as well as the arts, sports, and culture in public schools. Black American suburban parents often selected these neighborhood schools and defended their choices in the face of the schools’ poor reputations which they believed were driven more by white racial bias than objective assessments of school quality.¹¹ Third, Haitian and Jamaican parents who opted for private schools did so because they carried over a reverence for private school education from their home countries. This reflected transnationally informed schooling decisions (Bermudez 2010; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004; Wilson 2012), often making significant financial sacrifices to pay high cost tuitions for their children at the expense of household economic stability.

The findings in this paper expand our understandings of how racism, class, nationality, and suburban education are negotiated by the diasporic Black middle class. The Black middle class in New York choose schools in one of the most segregated city and suburbs in the country. They develop a myriad of creative strategies to ensure their teenagers go to the best schools. First, they assess the racial heterogeneity of neighborhood schools as a proxy for school quality. Second, they use their capital to access private schools when they perceive their local suburban schools are lower quality. Third, they harness the histories of race, class and education in the U.S. and abroad to make decisions about public versus private school options. Lastly, findings in this study reflect the historical moment in which the data was collected. Choosing among racially segregated schools in what many argue is a postracial, colorblind era was disconnected from the lived educational experience of Black families. This study took place during the Great Recession’s spiked unemployment rates and foreclosure crisis, which heightened the sense of familial vulnerability among respondents, and intensified the need to access high quality schools for their children.¹² Ultimately, the narratives of the urban and suburban parents in this study demonstrate the racial limits of suburbanization for the Black middle class, the heterogeneity of responses to the structural racism in New York’s school marketplace, and reinforces the reality that class mobility and suburbanization carry different meanings, resources and experiences for Black parents and their children.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of the US Hispanic population living in the suburbs increased from 47% to 59%, while the comparable figures for Asians rose from 54% to 62% and for Black Americans from 44% to 51%. Many of these shifts occurred in newer suburbs in the American South and West.

2. The 1968 Fair Housing Act and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandated integration in neighborhoods and schools, but they have been implemented unevenly and with resistance across American cities, suburbs, and rural towns (Massey and Denton 1993; Sharkey 2014).

3. See also discussion formation of Chinese middle-class neighborhoods in Monterey Park, California, known as ethnoburbs, by Li (1998).

4. In order to be interviewed, adults had to have household incomes at or above the median of their county: at least $70,174 for Cascades; and $82,315 for Great Park. These parameters for being middle class reflect local, regional and national structures of income inequality. I utilized the median household income of Queens and Nassau counties to create a threshold for the middle class threshold.

5. Middle-class status is regionally and household-specific, and a scholarly debate continues about what the appropriate indicators are for identifying who is truly middle class (see Marsh and Landry 2011; Lacy 2007; Landry 1987; Lareau 2003; Pattillo 1999; Sharkey 2014).

6. Both Cascades and Great Park are fictitious names, as are the names of schools and communities within the neighborhoods. All research participant names are pseudonyms.

7. East Great Park and West Great Park are separate school districts. Therefore, if a teenager is seeking a private school education, he or she has to attend East Great Park High School or West Great Park High School. In this analysis, I use East Great Park High School as the representative case for Great Park high because its socioeconomic characteristics and reputation match those of West Great Park. Unlike Cascades residents, Great Park residents had only one high school choice. If they did not want to send their children there, private school was the only other option. This demonstrates the rigidity of suburban school district boundaries in Nassau County. (Link removed for the purposes of anonymity).

8. NYSED.

9. pseudonym.

10. After the interviews, participants often invited me to family socials or church events, which took place in their homes, neighborhoods, or organizations. These events provided additional data about their middle-class lifestyles, comportments, attitudes, and behaviors.

11. It’s important to note that a set of Haitian and Jamaican parents desired for their teenagers to Catholic schools in order for them to receive religious instruction, and to grow spiritually connected to God and the bible teachings.

12. ‘More Black homeowners are underwater’ Washington Post, 1/24/2015: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/the-american-dream-shatters-in-prince-georges-county/