Schools, Housing, and the Reproduction of Inequality

• In Event: Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools: Mechanisms in the Reproduction of Educational Inequality

Abstract

The promise of school choice has come to dominate American education. Nevertheless, approximately 70% of American children enroll in the public schools in their catchment area, and research on how parents choose public, suburban schools remains limited. In recent years we have witnessed a growth in the availability of test scores and other information. Some have presumed that middle-class parents engaged in conscious, deliberate efforts to select the school.

In this paper, drawing on in-depth (i.e., two hour) interview with parents in 46 families, I focus on the process of how white and African-American suburban parents make residential decisions which, in turn, become a school choice decision. (The families generally lived in three nearby school districts to a large urban area; one district was widely reported to be “the best’ district in the region; the other districts were less affluent. Parents usually had children 3 to 7 years of age; they were recruited from one elementary school in each district, local daycares, and through a “snowball” sample from previous interviewees. The sample includes 25 white families, 18 native-born African-American families, and 3 interracial families. Two thirds of the families have a college degree or an advanced degree; the remainder have less education.

I had anticipated that middle-class and upper-middle class parents would have a somewhat different process compared to working-class families. My results, however, suggest that the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents’ process was surprisingly informal and truncated rather than formal, systematic, and developed. The results suggests that middle-class and uppe-rmiddle class parents’ transmission of privilege in the form of access to high-quality schools has a seamless, passive quality to it rather than an active, deliberate, focused pattern of “concerted cultivation” (Lareau, 2011). As I show, middle-class and upper-middle-class parents did not generally reach these high-quality schools after doing systematic research of test scores, touring schools, and doing active comparisons. Instead, they simply asked trusted people in their network where they should go. Other research suggests that middle-class parents in the city worried endlessly about the selection of a school. But in the suburbs, the high levels of economic segregation of neighborhoods meant that as parents were steered (through friendship networks) to different school districts, their children were placed in very different schools. With a few exceptions, most of the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents in the study exerted limited effort on the matter. Put differently, elite parents could afford to be nonchalant. Furthermore, although the districts were no more than twenty minutes apart by car, the parents of different social classes generally had not heard of the other districts or knew scant information about them. The paper suggests a profound level of social stratification in neighborhoods and school district. Rather than living in a shared space where parents consider, discuss, and participate in similar sets of neighborhoods and school districts, parents appear to be living in different “microclimates.”

Author

• Annette Lareau, University of Pennsylvania