I Can Fill in the Gaps: Social Class Differences in How Parents Make School Choices

• In Event: 1211 - The Culture of Schooling

Abstract

Research documenting the importance of both school and neighborhood quality for children’s life outcomes continues to mount. Therefore it is imperative to understand how children are sorted into unequal social settings and how parents’ decisions influence this sorting. Existing literature suggests that middle-class parents go to great lengths to invest in their children’s education, while poor parents lack the resources to do the same. However, far less scholarship has focused on how working-class and poor parents choose schools. Through in-depth interviews with over 150 families from the Dallas and Cleveland metropolitan areas, we find that contrary to much of the existing research, working-class and poor parents demonstrate a striking degree of deliberate and concerted effort toward sending their children to the best schools possible. However, they must do so only after they have navigated unpredictable crises of housing, job loss, and other financial challenges. While middle-class parents we met chose to buy homes in specific neighborhoods because of school quality, working-class and poor parents rarely did so, instead needing to decouple their housing and school decisions. As a result, these families were more likely to engage in school choice as an ongoing process, continuously re-optimizing their decisions with school transfers, compensating for lower-quality schools with outside enrichment programs, and tailoring their decisions to individual children as financial constraints and needs shifted. While optimizing on some aspects of their children’s learning opportunities, these strategies ran the risk of increasing school instability for their children while failing to significantly improve school quality.

Authors

• Stefanie Ann DeLuca, Johns Hopkins University

• Jennifer Rene Darrah-Okike, University of Hawaii

• Kiara Millay Nerenberg, Johns Hopkins University