“It’s a Chance, Not a Choice”: How Longtime-Resident Black Parents Navigate School Choice and Gentrification

• In Event: Intersections of Race and Class in Urban School Choice

Abstract

Expanding school choice is an increasingly popular policy tool in cities undergoing gentrification, a process of municipal change through targeted public-private investments and affluent newcomers moving to previously disinvested neighborhoods (Finio, 2022). Arguments that school choice and market-based principles will improve school quality in gentrifying communities rest on four assumptions. First, parents make rational, value-maximizing decisions in a minimally restrictive educational marketplace (Apple, 2006). Second, exercising school choice enables historically marginalized families to “escape” low-performing neighborhood schools (Scott & Holme, 2016). Third, decoupling schooling and housing decisions will attract businesses and affluent residents to gentrified areas, thereby increasing the city’s global power and prestige (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Pearman & Swain, 2017). Fourth, the social, economic, and cultural capital of newcomers—parent gentrifiers—will transform urban schools (Posey-Maddox, 2015). Existing school gentrification literature has centered on parent gentrifiers’ and given short shrift to the ways Black longtime-resident parents, who resided in gentrifying neighborhoods before redevelopment, experience school choice.

This study addresses that gap by examining the ways race, place, and power (Lipsitz, 2007) shape longtime-resident Black parents’ school choice-making in Washington, D.C., a critical site of gentrification and market-based education reforms (Butler, 2021; Glazerman & Dotter, 2017). Using a critical space and place perspective to operationalize “place” as a unit of analysis and understand how longtime-resident Black parents navigate gentrification and school choice has important implications for education policy, given the prevalence of school gentrification in historically Black communities nationwide (Pearman & Marie Greene, 2022). Parents were eligible to participate if they self-identified as Black or African-American, had at least one student enrolled in a city charter school or traditional public school during the 2019-20 or 2020-21 school years, and moved to D.C. before 2001 when city leaders accelerated efforts to attract affluent newcomers (Turner & Snow, 2001). Specifically, through semi-structured retrospective interviews with 19 Black longtime-resident parents, this study asks:

1. How do Black longtime-resident parents make school choices in a gentrified city?
2. How do their experiences and perceptions of gentrification influence their choice-making and schooling experiences?

Parents choice sets reflected an array of school and neighborhood considerations and their racialized notions of place. The weights that parents assigned to these characteristics for selecting schools reflected broader racialized compromises that parents made in their elusive and ongoing search for schools that would be academically, physically, and socially safe for their children. Ultimately, parents’ school selections reflected internalized messages about the inequitable distribution of high-quality schooling options in DC and the fear that the city’s educational marketplace offered “a chance, not a choice.”

The analysis in this paper interrogates the disconnect between school choice theories of action assuming all families have relatively comparable “freedom” to choose and the spatially racialized and racially spatialized trade-offs bonding longtime-residents’ choice-making. The findings are also a cautionary tale of what happens when a city relies on school choice to promote equity without attending to the personal, structural, and symbolic factors constraining how less advantaged “consumer”, enact agency in the marketplace and access quality educational options for their children.

Author

• Bradley Quarles, WestEd