Do charter schools’ ideologies reproduce social inequalities? A computational analysis of stratification through organizational identity

• In Event: 3429 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Charter and Private Schools

Abstract

Research shows that charter schools, while touted as a market-based solution to structural inequities, are more segregated by race and class than are traditional public schools. I investigate an under-examined mechanism for this segregation: Charter schools project identities corresponding to parents’ race- and class-specific parenting styles and educational values. In particular, I analyze charter schools’ identities along the two contested axes of inquiry-based learning and formal discipline, looking especially at their sociodemographic contingencies. To operationalize these two ideologies, I use count-based dictionary methods and word embedding models to detect the emphasis on each ideology for the websites of all charter schools operating in the 2015-16 school year. I then estimate mixed-effects models to regress ideological emphasis on school- and district-level poverty and ethnic composition. I thereby transcend persistent methodological problems in the study of charter-school identities (due to inconsistent hand-coding of data limited by geography, history, and validity) by collecting contemporary, valid, and population-wide data, as well as by blending induction (through text analysis of identities) and deduction (through statistical testing of hypotheses). This project contributes to literatures on school choice, educational stratification, and organizational identity.

Author

• Jaren Randell Haber, University of California, Berkeley