Striving for Happy: Privileged Parents and the Social-Emotional Purposes of Schooling

• In Event: Expanding School Choice Narratives: Parents, Teachers, and Rural, Suburban, and Urban School Choice

Abstract

White and privileged parents in spaces of urban school choice have commonly been represented as primarily concerned about social mobility (Roda & Wells, 2013), often leading them to engage in “opportunity hoarding” by choosing schools for their children that either explicitly or implicitly exclude the less advantaged (Cuchiara & Horvat, 2009; Sattin-Bajaj & Roda, 2020). In contrast, we identify a different category of privileged parents who are less concerned about their children’s academic success and instead seek to maximize the happiness or social-emotional health of their children. Their own educational and financial privilege combined with their views of education and educational philosophy leave these parents less concerned about “getting ahead” long term than about their children’s experiences during childhood and adolescence. The project uses a qualitative meta-analysis (see Posey-Maddox et al, 2021), combining relevant interviews from five studies of parents and school choice conducted by the research team between 2013 and 2021. These studies span several boroughs of NYC, Hartford, CT, and a gentrifying city in NJ. Although each of our studies included a diverse parent sample, for this analysis, we focus on parents oriented towards happiness within a subset of advantaged (middle- and upper-middle class) parents. The variation in cities, school choice contexts, and time helps to demonstrate the endurance and frequency of the phenomenon that we describe.

Whilst the striving for happy parents provide an interest convergence (Bell, 1980) with the school integration movement, their commitment to integration efforts can be fairly superficial, in contrast to politically invested “opt-in” parents (Roda, 2018). Parents seeking a school environment that will support their children’s social and emotional development, even if they are less concerned with social mobility still view education as a private rather than a public good. Parents’ concerns with their childrens’ social comfort may make them willing to move as part of a group of like-minded parents, creating both opportunities and obstacles to school integration.

Authors

• Mira C. Debs, Yale University

• Judith R. Kafka, Baruch College - CUNY

• Molly Vollman Makris, Guttman Community College CUNY

• Allison Roda, Molloy College