Media Frames and Desegregation: Contextualizing Parents’ Magnet School Choices

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11. School Choice Processes

Abstract

Using parent interviews and an analysis of media frames used in the Hartford Courant from 2016 through 2021, this paper explores whether, and how, media frames are used in the ways parents describe their magnet school choices. Interviews with 11 mothers have been conducted, and preliminary findings suggest that parents do not describe their choices using identified media frames. While some name systemic inequalities, mothers do not describe their school choice motivations about undoing racial inequality in education. Many, including parents of neurodivergent children, choose magnet schools that are responsive to their child’s specific needs that they were not receiving in their home districts. Importantly, this complicates the picture of school choice of privileged parents choosing schools to give their children an additional advantage that others would not receive. Instead, it highlights how parents utilize privilege to send their children to an interdistrict magnet school in order to address another systemic issue, such as the way we educate neurodivergent youth. Since desegregation is the goal of these schools, though, the paper suggests that without considering the needs of other people’s children, programs established to eradicate systemic inequalities based on parental choice alone are likely to fail. The conclusions do not blame parents, however. Instead, the argument highlights the mismatch of the ways these schools are framed in the media and the ways parents make their school choice decisions. The mismatch is theoretically important for sociology of culture literature, which often questions the role of culture in shaping decision making. As such, this study examines how parents make sense of their school choice decisions in direct comparison to media frames to explore the issue of racial and educational inequalities.

Author

• Mairead Carr, University at Albany, SUNY