Untouchable Carrots: Marketing School Choice and Realities in Hartford's Inter-district Magnet Program

• In Event: 70.066 - Roundtable Session 28
  In Roundtable Session: 70.066-15 - Investigating Public School Choice in Connecticut at State, City, and School Levels

Abstract

Why do schools designed to be racially and economically diverse struggle to maintain these enrollments? This question is more puzzling as where school choice lotteries separate racial residential patterns from school assignment. Existing studies of desegregation (Kruse 2005; Lareau 2014; Wells and Crain 1992; Wells et al. 2013; Wells et al. 2009), suburbanization (Dougherty 2012; Frankenberg and Orfield 2012; Lareau 2014; Lewis-McCoy 2014), school choice (Beal and Hendry 2012; Dougherty et al. 2014; Orfield, Kucsera and Siegel-Hawley 2012; Pattillo, Delale-O’Connor and Butts 2014; Renzulli and Evans 2005; Roda and Wells 2013; Smrekar and Goldring 1999) and school gentrification (Crozier et al. 2008; Cucchiara 2013; Posey-Maddox 2014; Stillman 2012) have focused on middle class parents as the explanation, either fleeing to the suburbs or gentrifying the city, yet have undervalued the important institutional role of districts and schools.

Following scholars who have identified patterns of school gentrification similar to neighborhood gentrification (Posey-Maddox 2014; Stillman 2012), I use the term gentrification pressure to describe a physical space, whether it’s a school or a neighborhood, that is racially or economically diverse, but risks losing its poorest members either from exclusion in the physical space, or from social disempowerment. Based on data from public Montessori schools, which have a long history of attracting diverse families, including an 18 month qualitative study of two public Montessori magnet schools in Hartford, Connecticut, interviews with 69 parents, principals, educators, and staff, as well as an original data set of 450 American public Montessori schools, this paper finds that schools and districts can play an important role in facilitating or resisting gentrification pressures through three primary processes.

This paper demonstrates the important role of institutional structures in maintaining racial and economically diverse schools, particularly in the context of “boutique” school choices. Schools and districts market schools through a complex and time-intensive “school-shopping” system that prioritizes collegiate ideas like “fit” while downplaying the real odds of admission. The Montessori curriculum can act as a further screening device by being hard to understand, and by downplaying academic achievement in favor of social and emotional skills. Second, school choice is represented as an equal process, but in reality there are tangible barriers for poor families. In the broader Hartford regional choice process, Hartford families are limited from picking schools of choice when they are required to choose, rather than having the option to choose, by the availability of transportation, full day programming and before and after school programs.

Author

• Mira C. Debs, Yale University