SD Notebook is back from a mid-summer break with a guest post that extends a recent series on the relationship between parental decision-making and school segregation. Guest authored by Allison Roda and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, this post summarizes their new study on how White parents navigate New York City’s complex school choice ecosystem. It includes stunning quotes from interview participants. And, it can be read alongside recent posts that find similar results in interviews with parents in Washington, DC as well as study (also including Dr. Roda) that identifies happiness-orienting parenting as a hopeful alternative to the kind of opportunity hoarding described below.

American school systems promote and reward efforts in pursuit of individual advancement under the banner of meritocracy. Belief in meritocracy—that is, the notion that educational opportunities and successes are a function of students’ hard work and talent—often ignores or minimizes the influential role a person’s race/ethnicity, class, or gender can play in determining their educational and professional pathways. Systems and policies based on meritocratic ideals also tend to overlook the impacts of parents’ resources and ability to successfully navigate educational systems on the opportunities students are afforded. Yet, as the recent Supreme Court Affirmative Action cases (SFFA) in higher education made clear, arguments in support of meritocratic laws and policies are based on a colorblind myth. As Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent, “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” 

The problem with basing policies on the idea of meritocracy in PK-12 schooling is evident in urban school choice contexts as parents compete for what they consider to be limited supplies of “high quality” schools. Indeed, the outcomes of elementary gifted and specialized high school admissions in NYC reveal the myth of meritocracy: each year, Black and Latinx students are vastly underrepresented in the most competitive (and often highest performing) schools compared to their White and Asian peers. In our recent Educational Policy article, “Meritocracy and Advantaged Parents Perceptions of the Fairness of School Choice Policies,” we build on our earlier work on opportunity hoarding in NYC school choice and use the narratives of 59 economically advantaged White parents competing for spots in elementary gifted and talented (G&T) programs and selective high schools to show fallacies in the narrative of meritocracy from the perspective people whose children are most likely to benefit from it. While the advantaged parents in our article dismissed claims that school choice is meritocratic, they still used their privileges to hoard spots in the most popular, academically desirable schools/programs in New York City. What is more, they ultimately believed that their children earned their admissions offers due to their hard work and time and effort invested into earning high scores and grades required for admission.

Drawing on contradictory White discourse framework, we show that White parents acknowledge the inequities and hardships in the school choice system for all families, but especially for low-income and immigrant families. At the same time, these parents do not change their own school choice behaviors—including paying for test preparation and private consultants. Moreover, they reject or overlook policy alternatives that could level the playing field (e.g. removing academic screens or tracking overall). Instead, they propose policy solutions that would continue to benefit their own children and preserve their access to exclusive schools/programs but would not advance equity or even combat existing inequities in the system (e.g., a return to neighborhood school zoning). 

First, we found that advantaged parents were aware of and frustrated by the lack of what they perceived to be high quality school choice options. Parents made comments about the stress and time commitment of touring schools and applying to them, calling both the elementary and high school choice processes a “nightmare,” “hectic,”  and a “full-time job.”  Laine, the mother of an eighth grade boy summed up many parents’ experiences with high school admissions in NYC in the following way: “[It is] horrible, absolutely horrible . . . Part of it is that there are so many choices; it is overwhelming.” 

The advantaged White parents we interviewed recognized the additional challenges that low-income and immigrant families might face understanding and negotiating the confusing choice procedures because of what they perceived to be a lack of knowledge of the system and limited proficiency in English. Jane, whose kindergartener was successful in gaining entry to a G&T program, lamented:

Even though we have been very happy and lucky, I think the G&T system as well as the middle school and high school admissions system in NYC is very flawed and tremendously difficult to navigate. I honestly can’t imagine someone without a college education, much less a non-English speaker, being able to navigate the public school admissions process.

By comparing their challenging school choice experiences to those of others with less time and resources, these advantaged parents questioned the idea that school choice was meritocratic in the first place.

Our analysis also showed that advantaged parents felt they had to “play the game” of school choice to get their children into the limited supply of desirable schools/programs that were standard options among families in their social network. Their strategies included relying on other advantaged parents for insider information, enrolling in private preschools that offered G&T test prep and access to school choice consultants, and paying for exam preparation services and private tutoring. They compared these types of school choice investments with their perceptions of what low-income Black and Latinx families did using deficit-based language and racialized assumptions. Kathy, for example, whose child was admitted to a G&T program, described how her children’s early educational experiences propelled them ahead of children with less stimulating early childhood settings: 

I think what happens, it’s unfortunate, is the situation where there’s that really big contrast between like, all right, there’s all these kids that are coming to school from the nearby projects in the Gen Ed and maybe kids who didn’t go to nursery school or didn’t have like a leg up for whatever reason, by the time they entered, so they don’t even understand that they have to sit still in the classroom or aren’t prepared with the basics. They didn’t get the basics, the pre-reading and the math and the pre-writing. So I think that’s when there’s a really stark contrast. 

Similarly, Jeremy, the father of a high school choice participant, commented on how his resources and professional background gave him skills and advantages he could use to understand how to effectively navigate choice; he contrasted this with “immigrant and ESL [English as a second language] parents who probably don’t”: 

I pity the parent who isn’t wired in. The book [Directory of New York City High Schools] doesn’t give you a clue . . . the average parents don’t have the info readily available. I have resources to get that information . . . . I am used to it in professional life—facing things I don’t comprehend and figuring [it] out. I have the skills to do that. I imagine these parents, a lot of them don’t. They are depending on their child to help them with it. 

These quotes show parents who recognized their privileges in a system that allowed their children to have a competitive edge compared to low-income and immigrant students. Yet, they perceived their behaviors, which we labeled opportunity hoarding, as necessary to avoid less desirable, “lower quality” schools.

Overall, parents expressed negative views of school choice in NYC, but responded in ways that preserved their privileges in the system. At the end of our interviews, we asked parents what alternative school choice policy ideas they had to improve the system. Reflecting contradictory white discourse, their ideas included a return to neighborhood school zoning or expanding the number of gifted and talented seats, neither of which would fundamentally address the system’s underlying structural inequities and would likely produce guaranteed positive results for their children without the burden of participating in competitive school choice. Neighborhood school zoning was understood as a way to take the pressure off from choosing, reduce travel time, and allow families to invest more in their local schools. Yet, this policy ignores the realities of segregated housing and fails to consider the constraints that limit many low income families’ ability to move to neighborhoods with higher quality schools. 

In the absence of advantaged White families’ willingness to give up their privileges for the greater good, their acknowledgment of the inequities in the current system for other people’s children seem like empty words. Yet, they reveal an awareness of and discomfort with the inequitable status quo. Therefore, we argue that policymakers and leaders must enact equity-driven policies that set explicit diversity goals and dismantle clear, known barriers for lower income families. For example, Brooklyn’s District 15 implemented a controlled-choice middle school student assignment plan in which everyone chooses and students are assigned to schools by a weighted lottery. There are also signs that districts and schools are adopting school-wide enrichment models for gifted education that would remove them as choice options. Ultimately, our study is a cautionary tale of what happens when school choice and student assignment policies lack equity-focused oversight, making the latest Supreme Court decision that affirmative action policies in higher education are unlawful even more disastrous for achieving racial and socio-economic equity, integration, and fairness in U.S. schools.