Marketing New Haven Schools to Suburban Parents

• In Event: 77.057 - MTCC Roundtable Session 35
  In Roundtable Session: 77.057-3 - Conscious Consumers? Parent Perceptions of Choice Across Race, Class, and Gender

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, many of the nation’s largest school districts have implemented school choice schemata, institutionalized systems whereby students may attend public, charter, and/or parochial schools within or across political jurisdictions paid for using public funds, regardless of the students’ home address. This paper examines how New Haven, Connecticut, a small city that has successfully implemented an interdistrict magnet school (IDMS) choice scheme despite mediocre test scores, advertises to suburban parents. It highlights how the district employs diversity, science, technology and the arts to encourage suburban participation while simultaneously silencing the voices of and erasing images of Brown and Black boys from the district’s advertisements.

Author

• Errol C. Saunders, Teachers College, Columbia University