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School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.
Sociology
Sweet Land of Liberty is Thomas J. Sugrue’s epic account of the abiding quest for racial equality in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South. Sugrue’s panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the present–more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power. Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups, Sweet Land of Liberty creates an indelible history.
This "provocative and personally searching"memoir follows one mother's story of enrolling her daughter in a local public school (San Francisco Chronicle), and the surprising, necessary lessons she learned with her neighbors. From the time Courtney E. Martin strapped her daughter, Maya, to her chest for long walks, she was curious about Emerson Elementary, a public school down the street from her Oakland home. She learned that White families in their gentrifying neighborhood largely avoided the majority-Black, poorly-rated school. As she began asking why, a journey of a thousand moral miles began. Learning in Public is the story, not just Courtney’s journey, but a whole country’s. Many of us are newly awakened to the continuing racial injustice all around us, but unsure of how to go beyond hashtags and yard signs to be a part of transforming the country. Courtney discovers that her public school, the foundation of our fragile democracy, is a powerful place to dig deeper. Courtney E. Martin examines her own fears, assumptions, and conversations with other moms and dads as they navigate school choice. A vivid portrait of integration’s virtues and complexities, and yes, the palpable joy of trying to live differently in a country re-making itself. Learning in Public might also set your family’s life on a different course forever.
How families choose schools for their children can shape those children's social, academic, and cultural experiences. It can also shape the schools that educate and socialize our young. Increasingly, school choice is being used as an education reform strategy, with charter schools, magnet schools, private school vouchers, and open enrollment programs providing low-cost opportunities for families to select from an assortment of nearby schools. School choice advocates often invoke a type of market logic whereby loving parents who know their children intimately make careful, informed school choices, generating pressures for schools to offer appealing, high-quality programs or risk succumbing to under-enrollment. However, these "demand side" pressures can go wrong, yielding education systems that poorly serve the goals that societies have for their schools. First, families could make choices that are inconsistent with their desires. For example, if school choosers are uninformed or misinformed about their options, they might choose schools that are poorly suited to their children's needs while their aggregated choices fail to support and reward high-quality schools. Second, families' desires for their own children's schools could be inconsistent with the broader public's goals for its education systems. For example, if families choose schools that intensely focus on advancing their own children's private success, then schools might underserve more collective interests related to society's political, social, and economic wellbeing. This dissertation explores the desires and behaviors of school choosers, examining where demand side pressures might go wrong and how school choice policies and programs can be strengthened. The dissertation features three empirical articles. The first two articles use experimental and quasi-experimental methods to assess the effects of providing school choosers with information about their options. I find that school choosers' beliefs and behaviors are highly malleable but do not always respond to the provision of information about schools in predictable ways. Parents and children respond differently to the same information, and while formal government ratings can change opinions of schools, they are less influential than the types of comments that people regularly hear through their social networks. The third article examines what school choosers and the American public desire from schools, testing the hypothesis that parents would like schools to pursue their children's private wellbeing -- at the expense of our collective political, social, and economic wellbeing -- to a much greater extent than the public would like. Using randomized experiments with a large, nationally representative sample, I show that parents' and the public's desire for schools are more similar than what is commonly hypothesized. In an era when school choice is a cornerstone of many education reform efforts, improving our understanding of how people choose schools -- and how we can support them as they do -- improves our ability to construct sensible education policies and programs.
Working mothers, broken homes, poverty, racial or ethnic background, poorly educated parents—these are the usual reasons given for the academic problems of poor urban children. Reginald M. Clark contends, however, that such structural characteristics of families neither predict nor explain the wide variation in academic achievement among children. He emphasizes instead the total family life, stating that the most important indicators of academic potential are embedded in family culture. To support his contentions, Clark offers ten intimate portraits of Black families in Chicago. Visiting the homes of poor one- and two-parent families of high and low achievers, Clark made detailed observations on the quality of home life, noting how family habits and interactions affect school success and what characteristics of family life provide children with "school survival skills," a complex of behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge that are the essential elements in academic success. Clark's conclusions lead to exciting implications for educational policy. If school achievement is not dependent on family structure or income, parents can learn to inculcate school survival skills in their children. Clark offers specific suggestions and strategies for use by teachers, parents, school administrators, and social service policy makers, but his work will also find an audience in urban anthropology, family studies, and Black studies.
School business officials (SBOs) must, in many respects, serve as all things to all people in their workplaces. Put another way, SBOs must be knowledgeable about a wide range of legal issues ranging from contracts to setting policy to state biding laws let alone constitutional matters involving the rights of students and teachers. Aware of the fact that issues involving the law are at the heart of many of a SBO's duties, the chapters in this edited book have been written by a diverse array of individuals with experience as educational leaders in schools and/ or who possess significant expertise in the school law. In light of the need to keep SBOs up-to-date on many issues in the ever changing world of Education Law, this volume is divided into two parts. The first section deals with issues that primarily impact on the management of schools while the second deals with the rights of students and teachers. More specifically, each of the chapters is designed to examine a specific area about which SBOs need information. While no single book can ever hope to cover all of the myriad of legal topics that SBOs and other educational leaders must master in their professional lives, this book will serve as an up-to-date and ready source of information to help keep them abreast of the many changes in the ever evolving area of school law.
This study examined why some low-income families in the Central Florida area made particular school choices for their children. Specifically, this study aimed to understand why families living in poverty selected their zoned public school as their first choice as an educational pathway for their children. This study is significant because understanding how and why families make school choices allows educational stakeholders to provide more equitable circumstances for students and families living in poverty. Qualitative data collection methods revealed that families recognized the advantages and disadvantages of their choices, but ultimately selected a zoned public school for their children as the best option. A primary finding from this study revealed that families valued teachers over any other resource available in the school. This study is unique because families living in poverty are often under-represented in studies involving school choice. Recommendations that could improve upon this study may include the involvement of more participants from different regions.