The Concept of Parental Accountability in a School Choice Market

• In Event: School Choice Policy and Politics Around the Globe: Sociological Contributions

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the ways in which stakeholders understand and cope with what I characterize as the pressures of parental accountability fostered by the long-standing public-school choice market in Arizona. Accountability is a foundational concept for school choice reforms (Garn & Cobb, 2008; e.g. Author, 2018). Yet little qualitative research has specifically examined stakeholders’ experiences with school choice in an increasingly complex “accountability” environment. Complicating matters further, individuals perceive accountability and school choice policies in many different ways, and their interpretations are patterned by both personal and collective concerns (e.g., Ball, Bowe, & Gewirtz, 1996; Jennings, 2010). Garn and Cobb (2008) have identified four models of accountability embedded in the school choice movement: bureaucratic, performance, market, and professional. Yet, school choice policies and programs can also place pressure on parents that they experience as a form of accountability. Here, I introduce the notion of parental accountability as an important extension to Garn and Cobb’s (2008) model as it relates to school choice reforms.

Existing sociological studies that add to our knowledge and theoretical understanding about some parents’ choice processes have contradictory findings, and these strong contributions to the literature highlight complicated aspects of middle- and upper-class parental choice (e.g. Altenhofen, Berends, & White, 2016; Lareau, 2014). In this paper, I first examine relevant sociological literature and then under-developed and problematic theoretical assumptions related to parents’ participation in facilitating an invisible hand of the education market via school choice. Next, I rely on empirical findings from interviews that were a part of ethnographic research over a nearly two-year period in a metropolitan area of Arizona, a state with long-standing school choice policies and programs. I illustrate how parents in one district public school and in its surrounding community dealt with mounting social and cultural pressures that they faced as competition between both public and charter schools in their neighbourhood increased. Findings revealed an understudied phenomenon — that is, that parental accountability pressures are an important component to school choice that often trump other factors related to meaning- and decision-making. Parents do not always follow market logic. The pressures that are placed on parents in a mature education market are laden with both faulty assumptions and contradictions related to access, individual versus public priorities, and permanence of choice.

Author

• Amanda U. Potterton, University of Kentucky