What's Best for My Child, What's Best for the City: Values and Tensions in Parent Gentrifiers' Middle and High School Selection Process

• In Event: Maintaining or Interrupting Inequities: Qualitative Studies of Gentrification, Race, and School Choice

Abstract

Urban neighborhoods across the United States have experienced rapid physical, demographic, and cultural transformations. As a growing number of White and middle-class residents move into and raise families in gentrifying communities, researchers have turned their attention to what neighborhood change means for urban public schools. Recent studies of “school gentrification” (Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, & Cucchiara, 2014) have found that parent gentrifiers are willing to enroll their children in urban public schools, especially when their children are in elementary school (Cucchiara, 2013; Kimelberg, 2014). The field, however, knows much less about how parent gentrifiers approach school selection as their children approach middle and high school.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of 20 parent gentrifiers’ school selection processes in Washington, DC designed to answer the following questions:: 1) What values inform parent gentrifiers’ middle and high school selection processes? and 2) How do parent gentrifiers construct their choice set and select middle and high schools for their children?

The study draws on interrelated theoretical and conceptual frameworks to analyze parents’ motivations and school selection processes. Cucchiara and Horvat’s (2014) “school choice as consumption” provides a framework to examine parents’ choices beyond rational choice models and account for the influence of parents’ values, identities, and the meanings attached to choices in the school selection process. Bell’s (2009) conceptualization of choice sets, which are defined as the set of schools that parents are willing to consider, provides a framework to understand the steps parents take to select a school and, if necessary, correct course if the chosen school does not work for their children.

Findings from this study reveal that parent gentrifiers’ school selection processes represent a critical juncture at which parent gentrifiers weigh their commitments to the collective with their desire to do what they think is best for their individual children. Parent gentrifiers, for example, espoused commitments to public education as well as an explicit commitment to sending their children to neighborhood schools. They constructed choice sets that weighed secondary schools’ demographics, location, pedagogical approaches. Although parents expressed commitments to their neighborhood schools, the majority of parents enrolled their children in schools outside of their neighborhoods, which they believed would best suit their children’s academic and social needs. Findings from this study extend the field’s understanding of parent gentrifiers’ schooling decisions beyond elementary school. The study reveals the potential limits of middle-class parents’ investment and engagement in urban public schools. Although parent gentrifiers may be willing to try their neighborhood elementary schools, the findings from this study call into question whether these families will continue to enroll and invest in these schools as their children progress through school. This exit from neighborhood secondary schools has the potential to maintain or exacerbate inequities as parent gentrifiers invest in a limited set of urban schools. In concert with the existing literature, the findings from this study provide critical insights into the possibilities and challenges of gentrification for urban schools across the K-12 continuum.

Author

• Alisha Butler, Wesleyan University