Who’s Gonna Be There?: How Black Parents Use School Choice to Move Beyond Diversity

• In Event: 30420 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Race and Education, K-12 Challenges

Abstract

The project to integrate schools in the United States since Brown vs. Board of Education has been widely accepted as beneficial for Black families (Hallinan, 1998; Linn & Welner, 2007; Mickelson, 2018). Holding that separate schools could not mean equal, Brown intended to create a more just educational system. If school segregation indicates a racist society, integrated schools should represent progress toward an equitable one. However, we know that schools are more segregated today. As a result, diverse schools are seen as beacons of school integration. Access to diverse schools is taken as evidence that Black students have better educational opportunities than their counterparts in majority-Black schools. Why then, would some Black parents reject the option of diverse schools? In this paper, I discuss content analysis of a new school formation process and semi-structured interviews with parents living in Evanston, IL as they consider whether to enroll their child in a new school set to open in 2026 in the historically-Black Fifth ward neighborhood of Evanston. In 2012, a majority vote against the new Evanston school demonstrated tensions between diversity ideology and the conditional treatment of Black inclusion. However, interview data demonstrates parents' speculations about population growth and neighborhood racial change underlies how the 2012 vote against the new school flipped years later in 2021 in support of opening the new school, despite controversy.

Author

• Jennifer Etienne, University of Chicago