“I Just Didn’t Want to Risk It”: How Perceptions of Risk Motivate Charter School Choice Among Latinx Parents

Szabo, Julia

doi:10.3102/00028312221078579

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…However, the specific racial disparities that we observe in this sample may not replicate in the same way in other samples. For example, in a study of school choice among Latino families, U.S.-born parents used a logic of avoidance as a justification for enrolling in a suburban charter middle school, suggesting that while we only observe experience-motivated avoidance among Black parents in DISD in this sample it may be more broadly used across racial and ethnic groups and in both urban and suburban school contexts (Szabo 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

“I Went There”: How Parent Experience Shapes School Decisions

2023

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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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

“I Went There”: How Parent Experience Shapes School Decisions

2023

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“…Yet Brown and Black parents themselves also readily send their children to charter schools, driven not by overt expressions of anti-Black animus or aspirational whiteness but often a desperation for something “better” than their failing district schools. As a recent study of Latinx parents’ decision-making processes showed, the choice of charter schools was often a mitigation of perceived risk, protecting their children against the precarious present and future of traditional public schools (Szabo 2022). The logics of neoliberalization can hold up individual parents’ motivations as evidence of the race-neutral promise of school choice policies.…”

Section: Embedding Racialized Organizations In Racialized Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…racially and economically marginalized groups facing uncertainty in education and housing, and who therefore attempt to navigate a set of choices that they have had little say in defining” (Stovall 2013:2). Today, Latinx students make up the largest percentage of charter school students nationwide (Szabo 2022). What results is the reproduction of racialized dispossession and disenfranchisement of minoritized communities.…”

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confidence: 99%

Racialized Organizations in Racialized Space: How Socio-spatial Divisions Activate Symbolic Boundaries in a Charter School and a Public School

Yazdiha

2022

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

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Much research documents the systems of racism that undergird the rise of school choice policies and charter schools, racialized organizations that reproduce racial logics. While school choice policy gets enacted at the structural level to enable the formation of charter schools, policy also interacts with a localized neighborhood context where space must be allocated to the charter school. As race scholars show, space is itself racialized. How does this localized allocation of racial space shape intra-group dynamics in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood? Evidence for this study comes from two years of ethnographic participant-observation and informal conversations with parents in a traditional public school and a charter school in a large Northeastern city. Findings show how threats to the material boundaries of school space activate symbolic boundaries between parents from each school, drawing from racialized organizational identities of traditional public schools as representing neighborhood loyalty and anti-gentrification resistance positioned against charter schools as representing dominant whiteness, superiority, and social mobility. I conclude with a discussion of implications for broader studies of racialized space and organizations, culture, and collective action.

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College Choices, Choice Dilemmas: Black Advantaged Parents’ Views of Their Children’s College Options

Faulk

2023

Social Problems

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Studies investigating college views largely neglect the Black advantaged and specifically the role of parents in the college search process. Drawing on interviews with upper, upper-middle-, and middle-class parents, this paper investigates how Black advantaged parents view their children’s college options. In an anti-black and credentialed society, parents contend with the consequences of where their children enroll in college and the names their degrees bear. Black advantaged parents’ views of their children’s college options reflect a set of dilemmas relative to college choices. As college graduates, parents recognize that degrees from HBCUs are weighed down by racial stigma and institutional anti-blackness. Fears about anti-black perceptions of HBCUs fuel parental concerns about racial discrimination post-graduation. Yet, parents also recognize that as students on historically white campuses their children are at risk of experiences with anti-black racism while enrolled in college. This article describes the challenge of antiblackness as multi-dimensional, impacting parents’ attention both to their children’s experiences as graduates and as students. This paper offers implications for black parenting, decision-making, and higher education.

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“I Just Didn’t Want to Risk It”: How Perceptions of Risk Motivate Charter School Choice Among Latinx Parents

Cited by 4 publications

References 48 publications

“I Went There”: How Parent Experience Shapes School Decisions

“I Went There”: How Parent Experience Shapes School Decisions

Racialized Organizations in Racialized Space: How Socio-spatial Divisions Activate Symbolic Boundaries in a Charter School and a Public School

College Choices, Choice Dilemmas: Black Advantaged Parents’ Views of Their Children’s College Options

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