School Choice and the Politics of Parenthood: Exploring Parent Mobilization as a Catalyst for the Common Good

• In Event: Tensions Between School Choice and Neighborhood Schools in the Changing City

Abstract

Public education in the U.S. was supposed to be the “great equalizer” by providing access to educational opportunities for all families regardless of race or class, yet, as Hochschild and Scovronick (2004) suggest the system also embodies a central paradox between the desires of parents concerned for their own children’s needs versus the societal goals of greater equity and the common good. It has been argued that school choice values the individual consumer over the collective good because it further advantages the most privileged families in the system (Ball, 1993; Jessen, 2017). A growing body of literature, however, has examined ‘against the grain’ school choice decisions made by middle class gentrifiers who choose diverse schools (Cucchiara & Horvat, 2014; Reay et al., 2007). My study on parental attitudes about their local public school builds upon this prior work by examining the role of social activism on parent’s school choice decisions.

This is a qualitative case study of the debate over neighborhood schools and school choice among parents in a gentrifying, yet highly diverse New York City neighborhood that I call “Prospect Point”. In particular, I examined the grassroots mobilizing efforts of a pro-neighborhood school advocacy group, comprised mostly of self-described gentrifier parents, whose mission is to educate the community about the positive benefits of supporting diverse public schools and working against privatization forces that seek to dismantle them. Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 40 gentrifier parents who opted in (N=35) or opted out (N=15) of their local public elementary schools (See Table 1).

Initial findings show that on average, about 33% of Prospect Point elementary school parents opt out of sending their children to their local schools in order to attend charter or gifted options outside of the neighborhood (The New School, In Progress). Given this outflow of parents and resources, the majority of gentrifier parents who opted into the local schools view their choice as a politically charged decision, and credit the parent advocacy group as having influenced it. Similar to the ‘buy local’ shopping slogan, there was a general consensus among opt-in parents to choose local schools, as well: “What's happening right now is you get offered all of these things, and I guess I could have said I don't like any of these options, but [my local school] is a perfectly good school and it did offer a bilingual program for us so those are the priorities [Bilingual opt-in mother]. Parents who opted out, on the other hand, tend to have progressive views of their diverse neighborhood, but more individualistic goals when it comes to their own child’s education. One biracial mother described her choice to opt out, “when you’re surrounded by anxiety [about the school choice process] you can lose your moral compass.”

In Prospect Point, the neighborhood school and school choice movements are deeply polarizing for parents. This work has important implications for the transformative role that parent mobilization can play in the future of public education and our democratic society.

Author

• Allison Roda, Molloy College