The Final Choice: School Choice Strategies at the Intersections of Disability and Race

• In Event: Situating the Paradoxes of Market-Driven Educational Policies Within a Human Right to Education Framework

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 secure schools for their children in the education marketplace.
Theoretical framework
We use an intersectional approach to school choice (Author, 2019 & 2020) to understand how parents of students with disability engaged with school choice policies. This lens is informed by intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 2000), which accounts for how structural forms of ableism and racism interact shaping parental experiences with school choice.
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
We found parents engaged in five strategies to secure placement in a school of their choice: accepting the IEP team school recommendation, securing placement through sibling, testing, changing IEPs provisions, and litigation. Structural factors at the intersections of disability and race afforded and/or constrain parents’ capacity to secure placement in a school of their choice. 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 IEP’s provisions to qualified 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.

Authors

• Federico R. Waitoller, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Chris Lubienski, Indiana University