Quality Above All Else? Examining Whites’ School Choice Decisions

• In Event: 3429 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 26. School Choice

Abstract

The number of educational options available to families has grown substantially over the past 25 years, and this proliferation of school choice options raises important questions about how parents select schools for their children. Are whites’ school choice decisions racially motivated, or do they reflect a desire to avoid low-performing schools, many of which are majority poor and non-white? This article will conduct a test between the racial proxy and pure race hypotheses using a conjoint survey experiment on a national sample of white adults specifically designed to minimize social desirability bias and to isolate the effects of school quality, school racial composition, and school socioeconomic composition on the likelihood that whites will enroll their child in a particular school.

Author

• Rebecca Josephine Bielamowicz, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill