Parents of Students With Disabilities in the Education MarketSpace Objectives or Purposes

• In Event: Exploring Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Education and Inequity: Expanding Our Capacity to Build Equitable Educational Opportunity

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This study examines how parents of students with disabilities experiencing different social (i.e., race, disability, and class) and geographical locations learn about, consider, and secure schools for their children. The purpose of the study is to further understand the relationship between urban space development, parental choice, and intersections of structural forms of ableism and racism.

Theoretical framework
We built from Waitoller’s (2020) concept of education marketSpace. That is, an education market that is both a product of and a process of human activity. The education marketSpace is a dialectical unit wherein policies, practices, and discourses, fraught with the intersections of ableism and racism, contribute to the formation of urban and educational spaces. Such spaces shape parents’ experiences, perceptions, and emotions informing their school decisions, which in turn shapes the educational marketSpace.

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
Structural factors imbued in parents’ geographical location, race, and their children’s disability and developmental stage interacted, shaping parents’ sources of information about schools, rationalization for selecting schools, and their mechanisms to secure school placement. For instance, while White parents living in middle- and upper-class areas of the city have the social capital to learn about and enroll their children with disability in selective enrollment schools, Black middle class parents living in gentrified areas had to engage in more ingenious strategies such as changing their children’s IEP provisions to qualify for self-contained classrooms in their top choice school.

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.

Author

• Federico R. Waitoller, University of Illinois at Chicago