Maintaining Their Advantage: How Parents Re-Create and Reproduce the Boundaries in a Diverse Public School

• In Event: Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Inequality and the Racialization of Education

Abstract

This study examines the ways that “advantaged” New York City parents make sense of their child’s placement within a demographically changing elementary school with a self-contained Gifted & Talented and General Education program. Because the 41 parents I studied had similar degrees of advantage, but their children received different placements in the gifted-nongifted hierarchy within this school, I learned what parents with resources and valued cultural capital do when their children are not placed in the appropriate program for someone like them. Findings indicate that a parent’s sense of the “place” where their children belong can shift and become redefined as a growing number of White, advantaged parents choose the Gen Ed program when that was their only option.

Author

• Allison Roda, Rutgers University - Newark