Amid an Anti-Black Schooling Landscape: Racialized Risk Assessments in Black Families’ School Choice (Poster 10)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Friday 11:45am
  In Invited Poster Session: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research Poster Session

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how Black families navigate school choice within an anti-Black landscape, focusing on the racialized logics that shape their decisions. Using a sequential mixed-methods design, this study operationalizes racialized risk assessments to examine how families weigh traditional school quality metrics against racialized threats and assets related to their children’s safety, dignity, and humanity amid ongoing anti-Black violence. By centering Black families’ decision-making, the study challenges race-neutral narratives of school choice and advances a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding Black school choice. The findings inform the development of policy interventions responsive to Black families’ lived experiences, desires for their child(ren), and systemic barriers they navigate, ensuring solutions do not reproduce harm under the guise of choice.

Author

• De'Ja Wood, Vanderbilt University