The Racial Politics of Elementary School Choice for Black Parents

Living in Brooklyn, NY

Shannon Allen

The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

December 19, 2016

Purpose

Understand the consequences of over fifteen years of charter school policy in NYC from the perspective of one of the most important stakeholder groups, Black parents.

p. 6!2

Significance

•  NYC elementary school choice

•  Parents have shifting preferences and often make multiple choices

•  Generational and geographical framework

•  Addresses debates about choice and school segregation from Black parents’ standpoint

Research Design

•  Purposeful sample: 20 families

•  Data collection: 20 in-depth interviews that were recorded and transcribed

•  Data analysis: interpretive narrative policy analysis (Yanow, 1999)

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Brooklyn

Home to the majority of charters in NYC;

chosen because of rapid proliferation in

the borough.

2000 2010 2016

2 38 85

p. 78 !

Conceptual Framework

•  Pierre Bourdieu: habitus and cultural capital

•  Patricia Hill Collins: collective Black American standpoint

•  Thomas Pedroni: school choice as subaltern agency

•  Osamudia James: school choice as racial subordination

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Research Question #1

How do Black parents living in predominately low-income and racially segregated Black Brooklyn neighborhoods perceive and experience elementary school choice policy given the context of rapid charter school proliferation in their neighborhoods? 

Internalized public school crisis dominant narrative

Robert: “The fact of the matter is, particularly in the major cities now, public education has failed.”

Ebenita: “Every parent at their core wants to try and give their children the best opportunity. With public schools failing, with mayoral and state and federal funding cuts, teacher lay-offs, school closings; this downward spiral that public education has been on for such a long time, makes you have to try.”

Out-of-zone public schools ascribed cultural value in being like private schools

Yvonne: The school “has a private school feel in that everybody is involved and everybody pitches in and the kids call their teachers by their first name.”

Charters ascribed cultural value in being like private schools

Steven: Charters are “private city school[s]”

Ebenita: “It’s been a long time coming. It’s a daily fight getting there, Lord knows. It’s worthwhile and the kind of curriculum that they’re getting for free is a godsend, especially in this day and age because they really are like private school level.”

Private school communities perceived as more invested and involved

Michael: I can basically have an active role in my child’s education … You can do that in public schools as well, but I mean to completely control it. Because I just feel like in a private school setting, people take their jobs more seriously.  Parents take that school a lot more seriously.  They’ve invested, yes.  Whether it be money or time or whatever … Who knows?

Internalized engagement in school choice as good parenting

Jasmine: My mother was a single parent who “bent over backwards and gave us, you know, canned food, and Swanson dinners to pay my tuition.”

Enrolling children in NPS seen as culturally deficient parenting

Patricia: “My mom just put me in a school that was closest to our house…My experience that I took from that is that I don’t want my daughter to repeat the same thing that I had to go through, going to my zone school.”

Delphine: Some NPS parents are “lazy” because “when you want something for your child, trust me, you have to make your homework” and sending children to the “school next door” is “too easy.”

Indications of stratified neighborhoods

Richard: critical of a neighbor who had chosen a charter was “try[ing] to be something she ain’t” because she “figure[d] she put the kids in charter school would make her look, would make her shine.”

Delphine: “Oh now, oh yeah, she thinks that she's better, her daughter is better than us because she goes to a charter school.”

Research Question #2

How has the introduction of more public school choices in their neighborhoods through charters shaped their elementary school preferences, choices, and experiences and how have parents perceived and experienced the opportunity to make more school choice decisions in an increasingly complex school choice marketplace?

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16

Private,IndependentPrivateIndpendent,Scholarship

Private,Parochial

Public,HomeschoolingPublic,CharterPublic,Magnet

Public,Gifted&TalentedProgramsPublic,schooltransferthroughNCLBPublic,Varianceforschooloutsideof

Public,Zonedschooloutsideof

Public,CityorDistrictZonedPublic,NeighborhoodZoned

Choice sets had a range of private & public preferences

Parents often felt they had acquired school choice cultural capital too late

Ebenita: “Who would have thought to ask, ‘Hey, do I need to know if you have this, if you have that?’ It's very difficult. You usually don’t know what you need until you need it, and by then it's too late. Again, the children are the ones feel the greatest effect of that.”

Cynthia: “I learned all of this after the fact, but, I learned it [laughs]. Eventually. There's no map for it. Definitely not a map.”

Parents’ preferences are not static

Preferences shifted in terms of issues with access:

•  Patricia preferred “free first” through charters until her daughter was not selected in any lotteries. Now she is a strong proponent of parochial schools.

•  Robert and Mariam chose a private school after bad experiences with public schools in their neighborhood and not being able to secure seats with a variance.

And preferences shifted with social change: •  Margaret: “People would say, ‘Oh,

[Obama]’s one of a kind, or once in a lifetime.’ I’m like, ‘No he’s not. I know lots of guys like him. They didn’t run for president.’ Right? So, in some ways it did kind of shift my mindset, because I’m like, well, wait a minute, my son is one of those guys…. I don't want to say he's one of those guys, but I'm preparing him to be one of those guys.”

Parents choices often were not static

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

Amber

Amina

Beverly

Cynthia

Deborah*

Ebenita

Jasmine

Margaret

Michellene

Nailah*

Yvonne

3rdchild

2ndchild

1stchild

Research Question #3

How, if at all, do the variables of race, class, and geography influence parents’ school choice preferences, decisions, and behaviors within the context of a complex, rapidly changing, and highly segregated school system? 

Place matters

•  Dilemma of passing down neighborhoods with areas of concentrated poverty to their children (Sharkey, 2013).

•  Place-based perceptions of schools shaped preferences; these mattered as much as spatial concerns (Bell, 2009).

•  Low-income single mothers incurred costs related to travel after being selected in charter lotteries far from home.

•  Charter location instability led to school mobility.

•  G&T testing and program location issues

Class matters

Parents perceived choice as means to

•  avoid concentrated poverty

•  acquire dominant cultural capital as a preparation for college and career in a globalized society and economy; however, parents differed in the educational models they preferred and chose to meet that end.

Middle-class parents want the DOE and charter school sector to recognize class diversity in their neighborhoods and diversify educational models accordingly.

Race matters

Strong – and often frustrated - preferences for “diverse” schools.

•  Amber: “Like I personally, like if I could have, if I was zoned or could have placed my kids in a school in Park Slope, that's where they were going. I love diversity. You can't [laughs], not to be funny but, I don't want to be nowhere, honestly, with all just Black people all the time and that's just me.”

Nailah: “This mentality of the Black children who went there, that it was like them against the world.  I felt like they were afraid to… They didn’t know how to coexist or to be in a world with other cultures.  They were like aliens to some degree.”

Beverly: “How was she going to interact in an office, if she's afraid of White people? How are you going to interview with someone, if you're afraid of them?”

Research Question #4

School choice has been framed as a mechanism of liberty and racial educational equity by policymakers and school choice advocates, but how do these intents and assumptions correspond with the perceptions and experiences of Black parents who have engaged in elementary school choice?

A necessary emotional burden

Personal responsibility

•  Margaret: “One of the important things is stability. If you make the right choice from the outset, then your child gets to enjoy stability.”

Advocacy

•  Cynthia: leaving the charter was “tuck[ing] my tail beneath my legs” while parents who stayed were engaged in a “constant battle”

Frustration, Anxiety, Guilt •  Beverly: I just feel like the fact that it's a lottery,

why do I need to gamble to make sure my child has a decent education?

•  Patricia: What am I supposed to do with that? Am I supposed to keep it and hope and pray that she'll get into the school if some person, 61 people before her say, no. People who were called say they don't want to go. I can't hope for that to happen.

•  Michellene: “not everybody win the same way I win.”

Deferred life and career goals

Margaret: “It should be easier. I want to focus on making a living, and a life. I don't want to focus as much as I've had to on navigating the New York City educational landscape, public, private, charter, or otherwise… People got to make a living. Well, they got to make a life. This is probably my own fault to be over-engaged and invested, but I feel like I had to be in order to navigate my children.”

Charters as unresponsive and unaccountable

Pushing- or counseling-out

•  Cynthia:

•  “it was almost like they were trying to take out all the kids that had some kind of special needs issue.”

•  told by another charter that they could not “accommodate” her son, adding that the charter would be “remiss to tell you to bring him here.”

Charters seen as having culturally deficient models of parental involvement: •  Margaret: “equal opportunity

disempowerment” •  Amber: charter parents “can’t have too

much opinion because [charters] basically…run their own game.”

Policy Recommendations

•  Use school choice policies to promote voluntary socioeconomic integration.

•  Diversify public school choice marketplaces in Black neighborhoods.

•  Fund School Choice Family Resource Centers in every Community School District.

•  Amend New York State Charter Schools Act of 1998 to make charters more transparent, accountable, and responsive to families.

Future Research

•  Comparative case study with similar urban areas

•  Closer look at documenting high rates of school mobility captured in this study

•  Long-term evaluation of proposed Socioeconomic Integration Pilot Program NYC