Bailey Brown was 4 when her parents had her tested for New York’s gifted-and-talented program. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1990s, Brown had little understanding at the time why she was taking the test or what her answers meant to her examiner.
Years later, however, Brown realized how high the stakes were for her parents, who “waited anxiously for my results, wondering what would happen if my score was not above the 90th percentile,” as she writes in “Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality.”
Her parents’ experiences sailing the rough seas of school choice in New York stayed with Brown, now an assistant professor of sociology at Spelman College. And those experiences became the impetus for Brown’s research into how parents choose an elementary school in the country’s largest school system.
“That whole process was so stressful for my parents,” Brown says, adding that her family eventually moved to Connecticut to escape the inevitable next round of choices they would have faced when Brown reached middle school and then high school.
From a researcher’s standpoint, New York is a rich repository of school-choice data. The city’s system is complex, with zoned and nonzoned public schools, magnet schools, charter and private schools, and gifted-and-talented tracks across and within districts. New Yorkers have had options, in one form or another, to choose schools since the 1990s, and they exercise those options frequently. One study from The New School found that about 40 percent of New York City kindergarteners went to schools outside their assigned zones in the 2016-17 school year.
From 2014 to 2018, when Brown was collecting her data, including extensive interviews with more than 100 parents, school choice was not the national hot topic it is now. But the intervening years have seen a political push to expand programs across the country that allow families to use public dollars, through vouchers and education savings accounts, to enroll their children in alternatives to their local public schools. School choice has strong support in the Trump administration, which has moved to dismantle the Education Department, with help from a conservative-majority Supreme Court. Congress is considering the proposed Education Choice for Children Act, which would give 100 percent tax credits to those who donate to private scholarship-granting organizations — a policy that critics say could result in diverting some $10 billion in taxpayer dollars to private schools each year.
As Brown worked through her analysis, she saw that when it came to school choice, New York was a microcosm for the country, and the city’s parents were canaries in the coal mine of education upheaval.
This is significant as school choice spreads because of what Brown learned: that researching, ranking and selecting schools represents untold hours of labor and stress that can last months, even years in families with multiple children. Most of that work and pressure lands on mothers and is largely ignored in policy discussions around school choice.
Brown details the frustrations many parents who have gone through the process bemoan, including inadequate or absent information on school performance, labyrinthine application processes, inflexible rules, tight deadlines and scarce resources. In New York, the system pitted parents against each other as they jostled for limited spots in the best-performing schools. This dynamic required another layer of labor: networking with other parents and lobbying district leaders and school administrators for favorable treatment.
All of which led Brown to conclude that a much touted tenet of school choice — that it frees families to find their own path to their children’s success — is not true for everyone. Only those with the time and wealth to invest in the process are likely to stick with it and see the best results. Given the gaps between rich and poor districts in New York, many low-income families have limited choices to begin with.
“The disparities in resources, information access, and decision-making power contribute to uneven outcomes and opportunities for students from different backgrounds,” she writes.
EdSurge spoke with Brown to explore more of what she discovered in the dilemma of school choice and its implications for families and communities.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EdSurge: You write about how having gone through New York City schools as a ‘choice student’ made a difference when you were interviewing the families, who were more likely to open up to you because you understood the struggle. You also were intimately familiar with how complicated New York’s system is.
Bailey A. Brown: It’s really a steep learning curve because there are so many different options. When I started the project, New York City schools had just started streamlining the online application process. So [there was] the learning curve of trying to research all these schools and then the learning curve of trying to understand the [digital] tools that were being used to put your choices into [the system].
The interesting thing is when I compare starting the work for this book and today, I would say that many school districts are getting closer to what is happening in New York City.
You show that mothers do most of the heavy labor of finding a school. But you also show that for many families, especially families of color, the labor doesn’t stop at choosing the school.
For families of color, the choice process continued because of this reevaluation that would happen after their child started at the school. Sometimes they would feel like the school wasn’t a good fit. In a lot of areas where you find a high-quality school, it’s not as diverse as a parent might want it to be. And so parents [are] thinking, ‘did I make the right choice sending my child here? What’s [my child’s] experience going to be like?’
And so this labor continues for that reason, trying to find that racially inclusive space and setting. Or, for other parents, it’s about trying to find that really niche environment that connects their child to their individuality.
And it also continues because it’s just elementary school. There’s a school choice process for middle school, for high school, and then eventually college.
If we think about the market theories that were involved in developing choice, the whole idea was that it was supposed to be empowering, giving parents the right or the power to choose. My aim in this book is to show that there’s also labor in that choice. It is exhausting, and who does it fall on? It’s also unevenly experienced, depending on the resources you have.
So the power to choose is really only a power if you’re supported and you feel like you can make a choice.
For a lot of the wealthier families that you portray in the book, those women had the time to do exhaustive searches.
I think the most interesting thing was how some of the mothers I interviewed talked about forming these groups and sharing resources in an online group and in-person groups, and going on multiple tours at different times, organizing their schedule around that. It is time-intensive.
And doing all this before the application period opens. Then if your child gets waitlisted at the schools you really want, you also have to invest time, even after the application decisions have been sent out, to try to fit them in a different option.
You go much further into the implications of choice, the results of choice. One is that it basically breaks down communities because families are constantly traveling outside their neighborhoods to schools miles away. The old model of the neighborhood public school as community anchor is rapidly disappearing.
You find parents challenged by that because some people move to their particular boroughs thinking that it’s going to be a great place to raise kids. But then the kids that you might have known in preschool, they’re no longer going to the same schools. As one mother described it [to me], ‘this person’s going to a charter school over here, this one’s doing a gifted-and-talented program here, and my kids are going somewhere else.’
So how do you maintain those community bonds? Do you invest in the community bonds at the school or in your home neighborhood? Do you try to manage and navigate both?
[Choice] is changing the very nature of communities because schools usually have such a strong foothold. They can bring different resources. They can have community events. When that environment shifts, it’s hard for parents to work with that. And these are parents who grew up during a time when you did think of a school as a social anchor. The reframing in the neighborhood was a big change for them.
What surprised you about the research?
What surprised me the most was how the mothers seemed to attach the school decision they made to their status as a good or bad parent. The meaning they attached to it — it felt like it was so consequential, even though this was just the start of kindergarten, the start of elementary school. But all the stakes were on this school decision and it was anxiety-inducing.
I had done a lot of research on market theory and this idea that choice is supposed to be empowering. I was really surprised that no parent I spoke to described it in that way — as a process that they would love to do over again.
Advocates of school choice say that every parent should have the right to do this, that it gives them total control. I wasn’t left with any parent who described their experience in that way.
Many of them ended up liking their child’s school — I should acknowledge that! One mom said ‘it felt like all the stars aligned when [my child] got into this particular school.’
So you can be satisfied with the [result], but the richness of doing the interviews is you get to see the winding road it took to get there.
The majority of fathers you interviewed put very little labor into the choice of schools. A couple of them opted for the neighborhood school, even if it was a ‘failing’ school. Another father whose wife did all the research knew little about the many options she had considered but nevertheless swept in at the last minute and vetoed her choice.
It really demonstrates the way ideologies about household responsibilities take over and then shape the school-choice process.
I think that’s something that has really been understudied. We’ve known for years that mothers are taking on more of this labor. But what does it mean when an educational policy shifts in such a way that that labor increases even more?
You conclude your analysis by advocating for more investment in public schools. But it feels like that goal is getting further and further away from us. What should families be doing if ‘choice’ is going to be the choice?
It would be better to place less of a burden on the families. There are versions of choice systems that can be more equitable, choice systems that ensure a mixture of students are able to go to a particular school. They have easier-to-understand parameters, easier processes for enrollment that try to capture students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch and make sure that they are not all concentrated in a single school.
There are still things that can be done structurally so that we can make these systems more equitable. I feel like I’ve been most concerned with making this process more equitable for families.
I think the parents who did have an easier time navigating this process could rely not just on the systems in place, but their networks of individuals and other moms who were there to support them. There’s been resistance to social friendships in that way; we need to increase them.
So getting recommendations, getting advice, connecting to parents who have already gone through these processes can really be transformational. Leaning on each other to lessen the burden that you experience.
There’s a mother [I interviewed] who created her own color-coded spreadsheet, listing the school tours she had gone to, the ratings, all of that. That would be so much easier to handle in the form of a tool, an educational tool that helped you do that sorting. So every time you visited the school you could check it off and think about your comments and feelings about that.
How information is aggregated, at least in New York, was a little bit limited. Sometimes it’s done by design. If there are a few high-quality schools, there’s not an incentive to share and spread the information because then there’ll be more people who want to go to that school. It’s like this idea of scarcity in high-quality schools.
You point out how choice ends up entrenching racial differences and inequities. Even well-meaning white families that were making choices based on how diverse a school was — “social-justice choices,” you call it — those concerns were very different from the diversity concerns for families of color.
I wanted to include the social justice-oriented parents to demonstrate that it’s not just the parents of color who are concerned about diversity. But the level or urgency of that concern is what differs so much. Seeing diversity as something that’s going to enhance my child’s well-being, give them a better outlook, a better attitude versus an actual concern for how my child will identify, how they will feel about themselves, how accepted they will feel. [The parents are] battling different systems and different ideas about what the school provides.
I think it’s unexpected how school choice can reproduce some of the inequalities it was meant to reduce. So in my sample of over 100 parents, I still found that the middle-class parents ended up in schools that had fewer Black and Latino students and were higher performing on standardized tests relative to the low-income families.
And that’s what you see across New York City, that school choice is not actually creating more equity, but because middle-class parents have more access to resources, they can make decisions about which school they want their child to go to in easier ways.
That’s one of the most disappointing aspects of school choice. It’s an unfulfilled promise.
