Parents of Students With Disabilities Choosing Schools: A Spatial and Intersectional Analysis

• In Event: Place, Geography, and Geographic Information Systems in Educational Policy and Politics

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

This study examines how parents of students with disabilities consider and select schools for their children. The purpose of the study is to understand the roles of race, disability, and the developmental stages of a child, all in urban space, in shaping parents’ school selections.

Theoretical framework

We fuse critical notions of space (e.g., Lefebvre, 1991) with critical notions of disability and race (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013). This framework allows theorizing about how parents’ selection of schools is shaped by their perceptions and lived experiences of structural and individual factors at the intersections of race, disability, and urban space. We conceptualized space as a dialectical unit that encompasses traditional material views of space and ideal views of place.

Methods and data sources

The study employs a mixed-methods approach that integrates the cartographer’s birds-eye view of space with the ethnographer’s on-the-ground respect for subjects’ perceptions. It includes two sets of interviews with 10 parents of students with disabilities: 5 parents transitioning their children into kindergarten and 5 parents transitioning their children into high school. The first round of interviews was conducted when parents were researching schools, and the second after they had secured a placement. We asked them to identify on a map the schools that they considered for their children and their perceptions of the schools and areas around them. We collected data on neighborhoods and schools for each of the schools parents considered, as well as for all other unmentioned schools within a given radius from the parent’s home and selected schools

We use an inductive approach, building grounded theories of parents’ rationale for selecting (or not selecting) schools and their perceptions of the factors they considered (Charmaz, 2014). We code the variations in how and when geography matters in relation to parents’ perceptions of factors considered when selecting schools.

Results

Parents of students with disabilities constructed a menu of school options, choice sets (Bell, 2009), that they perceived as viable when making school selections according to areas in which they live and their perceptions about schools and neighborhoods. Structural factors imbued in parents’ geographical location, race, and disability, and their children’s developmental stage interacted, shaping parents’ school decisions. High school parents had more experience with the district and with special education services and were able to construct larger choice sets than parents transitioning their children to kindergarten.

Significance

School choice has been popular in current U.S educational policymaking since the 1990s, particularly for urban areas. Unfortunately, research on how parents of students with disabilities (SWD) engage in school choice across races and geographical locations is almost nonexistent. Our findings serve to help us understand the impact of school choice beyond the narrow academic outcomes measured to provide a more nuanced understanding of how these policies unequally affect families of students with disabilities across racial lines.

Authors

• Federico R. Waitoller, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Chris Lubienski, Indiana University

• Yusuf Canbolat, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Jin Ah Kim, Indiana University - Bloomington