The Impacts of Discretionary Spaces in Schooling

• In Event: 394 - Section on Sociology of Education Paper Session. Evaluating Educational Programs and Policies: Challenges and Successes

Abstract

Public school organizations and practices have changed in many ways, offering more accommodations to different kinds of students and more opportunities for parents to participate in their children’s schooling, often in the names of bolstering equity and parent-school relations. We use the term “discretionary spaces” to denote a series of curricular offerings and programs that offer a series of relatively new points of parental decision-making, and test three sets of hypotheses about their effects on educational processes and outcomes. ‘Reproduction theory’ would see these spaces as providing new, if unanticipated, mechanisms of stratification. ‘Equalizing approaches’ would see them as expanding learning opportunities for disadvantaged students and reducers of achievement gaps. ‘Partial Compensation’ approaches would suggest that discretionary spaces can help disadvantaged families, but that equalizing outcomes could be undermined by advantaged families who might best exploit those spaces. To test these hypotheses, we draw on quantitative data generated from three summer learning programs in Ontario, Canada. These programs are strategic testing grounds because they are relatively new, are designed to help struggling children, are tuition-free, and are open to all families. Our findings tend not to support Reproduction theory, and instead support elements of the equalizing and partial compensation theories. These programs recruit disproportionate numbers of disadvantaged students and tend to reduce achievement gaps, though in some instances children with highly educated parents tend to perform better in summer programs. We discuss our findings in context of other emerging discretionary spaces in schools and broad trends in school outcomes.

Authors

• Janice Aurini, University of Waterloo

• Scott Davies, University of Toronto

• Cathlene Hillier, University of Waterloo

• Emily Patricia Milne, University of Waterloo

• Michael Holland, University of Waterloo