“It’s a Chance, Not a Choice”: Black Families, School Choice, and Gentrification in Washington, D.C.

Abstract

Background: Public education reforms, such as expanded school choice, have become a critical lever for remaking urban landscapes. These reforms often aim to attract and retain affluent and White families in urban schools, so scholars have examined how these parents navigate the perceived risk of choosing these schools for their children. Purpose: This paper extends this scholarship to understand how other families experience these reforms in gentrifying landscapes. We ask: (1) How do Black parents navigate school selection in a gentrifying and expansive education marketplace? (2) How do Black parents’ perceptions of schooling shape their approach to school selection? (3) How do parents’ positionalities (e.g., gender, class, place attachments, and tenure in the city) influence their experiences? Research Design: We leverage a qualitative meta-analysis design that pools data from three separately conducted studies of gentrification in Washington, D.C. For this analysis, we center on 34 Black parents’ experiences as they navigate school selection. We reanalyzed data through the lens of critical spatial and racial theories. We paid particular attention to participants’ attachments to place, their perceptions of their choices, the school and neighborhood attributes participants valued, and how they navigated school selection. Findings: Parents considered a broad range of school and neighborhood characteristics as they constructed their choice sets. As they searched for schools, Black parents made a series of racialized compromises to find schools they perceived to be racially, physically, and socially safe for their children. Parents, for example, negotiated their desire for academic rigor with their perception of schools’ social climates and their perceptions that schools would be racially affirming and inclusive. Place and space were essential to parents’ choice set construction. Schools’ physical locations and perceptions of safety influenced whether parents viewed schools as viable options for their children. Conclusion: Our study underscores the multiple factors that bound choice set construction. Critically, Black parents’ experiences as they navigated school selection suggest that the expansive educational marketplace offered a “chance, not a choice” at high-quality educational opportunities.