Choosing Schools in Arizona's Mature Education Market: Evidence From Stakeholders in a Community

• In Event: 69.056 - Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: 69.056-7 - The Interplay of Structure, Culture, and Agency in School Choice Policies and Practices

Abstract

Objective
Arizona’s Republican-dominated legislature has been expanding the array of market-based school choice programs available to students and families for over 25 years. Over 600 charter schools operate in the state, and for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) oversee a growing number of the charter schools (Miron & Gulosino, 2013). In 2013, Arizona enrolled the second highest percentage of public school children in charter schools after Washington D.C. (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). Using ethnographic methods, this paper examines how stakeholders in Arizona’s mature school choice market perceive and engage with a district-run public school and its surrounding community (including its charter schools), how they understand school choice policies, and what factors influence families’ school choices.

Theoretical Framework
To understand education policies such as school choice “on the ground” (Dumas & Anderson, 2014) we need to start with people's activities and interactions in the everyday settings of school life and consider how these are shaped by structures, culture, actions, and events in other contexts (Datnow et al., 2002). In a market-based school choice system, stakeholders can take action as agents by leaving traditional district or charter schools. Hirschman (1970) describes this consumer-based type of exit as a withdrawal of voice. Also, individuals and groups can disrupt commonly held narratives about education structures and policies, offering and acting out counter-narratives about the effects of market-based theory in public education.

Data and Methods
I analyzed 25 interviews conducted as a part of a larger ethnographic study with stakeholders, including parents, school leaders, administrators, and involved community members located at a district public school and at competing charter schools (Maxwell, 2013). Qualitative data analysis was conducted concurrently with data collection, through a reflexive and reflective process of reading and re-reading interviews transcribed “verbatim”, fieldnotes, and analytic memos and through multiple cycles of coding (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011; Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014).

Findings
Stakeholders’ school choice practices are fluid, and continually co-constructed and re-constructed as they are perceived and acted out. For example, a group of parents and teachers actively organize to challenge citizens about dominant narratives related to privatization of public schools in Arizona. They have called into question the increasing presence of two high-profile charter school management organizations in the area. Yet, when conflict occurred inside the school, stakeholders were faced with a range of options and many chose to leave. Other parents have switched their children’s schools multiple times a year as they search for the best fit, and they share strong emotions of love and worry when describing the process.

Significance
Maranto, Laczko-Kerr, and Vasile (2015) observed that, “…Arizona charter schools offer the closest American equivalent to a long term, state-wide public education market. Yet, few academics have studied Arizona charter schools, perhaps since the reality of school choice on the ground confounds those seeking easy answers” (p. 2). There are not yet any in-depth ethnographic descriptions of Arizona’s education market “on the ground” (Dumas & Anderson, 2014). This paper aims to help us fill this gap.

Author

• Amanda U. Potterton, University of Kentucky