Exploring Advantaged Parents' Perceptions of School Choice Policies for Other People's Children

• In Event: 77.057 - MTCC Roundtable Session 35
  In Roundtable Session: 77.057-3 - Conscious Consumers? Parent Perceptions of Choice Across Race, Class, and Gender

Abstract

This paper explores advantaged parents’ perceptions of the implications of school choice policies for historically underserved students in New York City even as they engage in educational opportunity hoarding. We examine the extent to which advantaged parents identify inequities in school choice policies, their understandings of the sources of such inequities and how they respond. We find that advantaged parents were dismayed by the uneven distribution of educational opportunity in New York City—a problem they believed to be exacerbated by school choice policies. Yet, they did not attribute persistent disparities in access to their own actions; rather, they identified issues of scarcity of high quality schools and the complexity of school choice procedures as driving factors.

Authors

• Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, Seton Hall University

• Allison Roda, Molloy College