Latinx students now make up the largest share of charter school students nationally. In this article, I focus on Latinx charter school choosers in Houston, Texas, and ask what motivates Latinx parents to exit district schools. Drawing on interviews with 31 families, I find that perceptions of present and future risk motivate charter school choice. Perceptions of present risk centered on children’s negative experiences with safety and academics and parents’ negative experiences when they attempted to intervene in district schools. Perceptions of future risk focused on future district schools and relied on information from networks, observations, and the educational experiences of U.S.-born parents. Parents framed charter school choice as a strategy to mitigate risk and protect their children’s educational futures.
As school choice expands, families face an increasingly arduous decision-making process around school enrollment. Through interviews with a socioeconomically and ethno-racially diverse sample of 60 parents in Dallas, Texas, we illustrate one key way families negotiate this choice landscape. We find that many parents use their own educational experiences as first-stage decision rules for narrowing the types of schools they consider for their children through experience-motivated replication and experience-motivated avoidance. Parents with positive schooling experiences sought to replicate the type of school they attended for their children, while parents with negative schooling experiences aimed to avoid the type of school they attended. While experience-motivated replication was used by parents across race and class positions, it was most common among White parents who often entrenched patterns of white flight through replication of private or suburban school enrollment. In contrast, experience-motivated avoidance was used by Black parents in our sample as a strategy to disrupt educational inequality for their children by eliminating traditional public schools, where parents reported feeling underserved as children, from their choice sets. Our study adds to our understanding of how families negotiate the increasingly complex school choice landscape, and mechanisms for the persistence of intergenerational educational inequality.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, families have faced a difficult decision between online and in-person instruction. In many school districts, a higher proportion of non-White families selected online instruction for fall 2020, but the factors influencing these patterns are unclear. Using a case study approach, I focus on the experiences of 21 Latinx families whose children attend the same majority-Latinx charter school in Houston, Texas, and explore the factors families balanced when deciding between online and in-person instruction. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews with mothers and their children, I find that Latinx families made schooling decisions informed by their shared school context, the needs of family networks, and community infection rates. Health and safety concerns drove most families to select online instruction while acknowledging it was an academic sacrifice, but maternal employment and access to child care shaped their ability to make this choice. This study highlights the influence of nonschool factors in pandemic schooling decisions.
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