"I Actually Didn't Have No Choice...": Black Parents' Constrained Schooling Options

• In Event: 25.070 - No Choice Is the Right Choice: Understanding Black Parents' School "Choices" and Engagement

Abstract

Research on Black parents’ engagement and choice in schools has focused largely on Black parents in traditional public schools with white school actors, with few studies exploring Black parents’ decision-making within a culturally affirming school environment with a predominantly Black school staff. This paper examines the experiences of Black parents in an African American Immersion School that is almost entirely Black-staffed; has an almost all-Black student body; and is nestled in a neighborhood surviving poverty in a segregated Midwestern city. Semi-structured interviews with 10 Black parents and four Black school staff and participant-observations at family-school events revealed that the pioneering African American Immersion school in the city was once a choice school for Black parents but over time their decision-making to attend, stay, or leave the school was shaped by structural factors that positioned the school as an undesirable space. The theoretical frame undergirding this paper is anti-blackness (Dumas, 2016: Dumas & ross, 2016).

Long-time Black parents that saw the school as a “family tradition” highlighted how it had changed for the worse over years. They shared being invested in the school and wanting their children in a school that emphasized African American culture. Newer Black parents at the school, however, spoke about how the African American Immersion curriculum did not draw them toward the school and how this curriculum was not central for their children’s learning. Instead, they chose this school because of its neighborhood convenience. While some parents saw value in attending this African American Immersion school, a few longed for their children to be in more diverse school settings. These desires to be in diverse school settings were not explicitly related to accessing resources and social mobility; while some brought up seeing value in their children learning from others with different backgrounds, most Black parents shared culturally-deficit perceptions of Black families.

I argue that in this schooling context Black schools and Black families are constructed in ways that reinforce and perpetuate antiblackness. The anti-blackness within the school, district, city, and state contextualize the experiences that Black parents faced at the school over the years. More pointedly, this paper argues that Black institutions, especially those that are in neighborhoods that are surviving poverty, are not given adequate resources, exacerbating the tensions that take place in a predominantly Black school. This paper sheds light on the complicated tensions in predominantly Black school settings that are devalued as educational institutions, divested from financially, and perceived to be “bad schools.” Further, this paper illustrates how Black parents that are similarly positioned along class lines use master narratives that historically and consistently frame predominantly Black schools and spaces as being deficient. The goal of this paper is to interrogate the complexities of an all-Black schooling space to better understand how these negative perceptions of Black schools are internalized by both Black parents and Black staff. Implications for Black families’ school choice and all-Black educational spaces are also discussed.

Author

• Rachel A Johnson, University of Wisconsin - Madison