Local Parents of Color in the Gentrified City: School Choices and Place Attachments

• In Event: Qualitative Studies of Gentrification, Race, Inequality, and School Choice

Abstract

The school choice literature finds that parents’ choice sets vary based on their social class, where long-term resident families’ school choices are tied to the practical and immediate, and middle-class families choice of school is dominated by the ideal and the advantageous (e.g., Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, & Cucchiara, 2014; Stillman, 2012). While research on parent gentrifiers confirms this finding and provides anecdotal evidence about how other parents make educational decisions, few studies have centered parents of color and longtime resident parents to examine how and to what end they choose schools for their children. This paper elevates the perspectives of these undertheorized stakeholders through interviews with local parents of color and longtime resident parents in Washington DC about how they make educational choices (i.e., school selection and level of parent engagement) in the city’s rapidly gentrifying school choice marketplace.
To make sense of these experiences, I draw on an increasing body of transdisciplinary scholarship, Critical Race Spatial Analysis, that leverages critical spatial studies and critical race theory to interrogate how race and space are concomitant of and implicated in social processes like education (e.g., Delaney, 2002; Kobayashi & Peake, 2000; Velez & Solarzano, 2017). Specifically, CRSA serves as a heuristic to interrogate the potential incongruence of a school choice marketplace that relies on notions of ‘efficiency,’ ‘effectiveness,’ and ‘fairness,’ while creating a caste of customers that privileges parent gentrifiers as ‘valued customers’ (Cucchiara, 2008, 2014). In full, this study sought to answer three research questions: How do these parents make school decisions for their children in gentrifying neighborhoods? How does geography structure their decisions (e.g., relationship between perceptions of neighborhoods and perceptions of schools)? How do other factors (e.g. marketing, perceptions of public I charter school quality, social networks, social capital, race/ethnicity of student body, pedagogy, transportation) shape their decisions and preferences (neighborhood schools vs. selective enrollment schools; public vs. charter)? Findings illuminate two central contributions to the gentrification and public education policy discourse. First, highlighting the constellation of geographical, cultural, and pedagogical factors that shape how local families select schools is critical to implementing policies that enable all families to make informed decisions about their children’s education and to support equitable access to a high-quality education. Second, this study interrogates an increasingly dominant theory of change in gentrifying cities that relies on parent gentrifiers and privately-run companies for school improvement, and frames ‘the free market’ and socially mixed neighborhoods, rather than government intervention, as the key to reducing neighborhood poverty, improving housing, and fostering educational opportunities for underserved students.

Author

• Bradley Quarles, University of Maryland College Park/WestED