Abstract
Many urban districts use a portfolio management model, hoping to promote school choice and improve school performance. This model requires school closure, which has predominantly impacted lower income families. In 2013, Chicago Public Schools relocated Granger Elementary into one of 48 schools it closed, placing its middle-class parents in the unusual position of resisting a school closure-related decision. Our case study explores parents’ resistance from a perspective of capital use and parental agency. Interview participants leveraged extensive capital in response to the proposed closure–relocation. When their efforts failed to halt the directive, they used their resources as consumers, largely finding their children spaces in other schools. Parents were unable to effectively exercise agency to influence district-level policy, but they secured educational advantages for their own children by leveraging their capital. Findings inform implications for market-based policy theory, equity, and democratic control of public schools.
From Hartford to San José, urban school districts’ recent history is dotted with school closures and consolidations, accompanied by community resistance (Hurdle, 2013; Megan, 2018; Noguchi, 2017). School closures sometimes result from financial shortfalls and population shift. They are also an inherent part of the portfolio management model (PMM) of district governance. PMM districts use the logic of school choice and consumer demand to cultivate a diverse portfolio of schools, and to determine which schools to keep open or to close (Bulkley & Henig, 2015). As parents select schools from the portfolio for their children, PMM districts track school enrollment numbers and slate underenrolled schools for closure. School consolidations make it possible for districts to offer multiple schooling options under one roof, or to expand successful programs into sparsely enrolled schools. Thus, school closure and consolidation represent a culmination of the school choice promise: parents select and deselect schools, ineffective schools close, and higher performing schools thrive and grow (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Hanushek, 2002). PMMs’ theoretical promise relies on market-driven levers to make schools responsive to parent demands.
Parents have resisted school closure and consolidation through political activism, such as a 19-day hunger strike over the planned closure of Dyett Academic Center in Chicago (Ewing, 2018; Perez, 2015). Because closures have disproportionately affected children of color from lower income families (Deeds & Pattillo, 2015; Lee & Lubienski, 2017; Mooney, 2013), political resistance has often occurred in communities that contend with multigenerational poverty and institutional neglect. This resistance has seen only limited success, which itself is often tied to political support beyond a school’s immediate community (Finnigan & Lavner, 2012). Absent from our understanding of school closure and consolidation, resistance are more institutionally, politically, racially, and economically empowered parents. This study therefore considers middle-class and upper-middle-class parents’ resistance to a school closure–consolidation, and analyzes the conduct and results of resistance under conditions of atypically high parental empowerment. We therefore explore the extent to which middle-class parents exercise agency over their children’s schooling options in the face of proposed school closure and consolidation, and how their access to resources shapes their power to influence these district actions.
Parent empowerment under market-based policies like PMMs, however, takes a peculiar shape. PMM districts rely on enrollment data to manage their portfolio of schools, relying on parental choices as indicators of school success. District officials see in-demand schools with long wait lists as successful models, and presuppose that schools with available seats must be ineffective. PMM districts respond to parental demand by allowing dissatisfied parents to “exit” a school (Hirschman, 1978). Exit is an impersonal, indirect way for parents to affect education systems via patterns of deselection and selection. Yet, many parents could not opt to exit unless they were able to pay for private school or move residences (Lareau, 2014). Even then, parents—and all citizens—“cannot exit from public schools as a public good . . . we cannot escape having to live with the social personal consequences of the public school system” (Labaree, 2010, pp. 112–113). As such, education is not only a private good available to individuals, but also a public good that inevitably affects us all. From this perspective, citizens need a political lever to express dissatisfaction with public schools: what Hirschman (1978) refers to as “voice.” Yet, PMMs complicate notions of exit and voice. They rely on exit as parents’ primary means to affect schools, while many citizens also expect district policymakers to respond to parents’ voice.
In this case—middle-class and upper-middle-class, 1 predominantly White parents who resisted the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) plan to close and consolidate one underenrolled school (Byrne 2 ) into another overenrolled, high-performing school (Granger)—parents’ political resistance failed to bring about policy change. Instead, middle-class parents found themselves positioned to engage with public schools as consumers with substantial, yet constrained, power. Parent participants defended their access to Granger, and then adjusted to the consolidation, from a position of social, economic and, for most, racial privilege. Their advantages, however, only helped them secure educational resources for their own children after the closure–consolidation was approved. Their resources did not help them influence policies that would affect the entire community. In other words, CPS’s use of PMMs allowed for exit, but did not respond to voice, even very powerful voice.
This article continues with a literature review on relationships between parent engagement in school, social status, and school closure and consolidation. We then describe our conceptual framework, which combines notions of parental agency with Bourdieu’s (1986/2010) concept of capital. Next, we share our case study’s design and methods and describe the study’s two focal schools in context. In discussing our study’s results, we address how parent participants “spent” capital and exercised privilege, yet still found themselves constrained as consumers of market-based policy, at three points in time: finding and enrolling their children at Granger, attempting to defend Granger against the proposed closure–relocation, and moving on after the CPS Board of Education approved the proposal in May 2013. We conclude by discussing implications for market-based education policy in the areas of theory, democratic school governance, and equitable access to educational resources in 21st-century American cities.
Parents, Social Status, and Market-Based Education Policy
Within extensive research on parent engagement in schools, a smaller body of evidence concerns how parents have responded to market-based education policies such as school choice, closure, and consolidation. This literature, consistent with broader findings about parent–school engagement, reveals that parents invest available resources when navigating market-based policy, and that parents’ status shapes their engagement with policies and the schools to which those policies grant them access. Parents who have available resources are widely known to invest in their children’s educational development and advantage. Higher income parents tend to invest economic capital in their children’s cognitive development and pursue educational advantage by paying for out-of school experiences such as preschool tuition, after-school and summer enrichment activities, and individual tutors (Putnam, 2015; Reardon, 2011, 2013). Parents appear to use resources in similar ways as they navigate school choice policy. They pay school search consultants, invest extensive time in the search process, and develop costly backup plans such as private school or moving out-of-district (Kimelberg, 2014; Roda & Wells, 2013). Insufficient information, housing instability, fluctuating work schedules, and transportation constraints (like cost and availability) have been found to restrict lower income parents’ abilities to fully exercise school choice (de la Torre et al., 2015; Pattillo et al., 2014; Rhodes & DeLuca, 2014; Yettick, 2014).
Parents who possess extensive resources invest them into their children’s schools as well. Yet, they tend to focus their efforts—such as fundraising, volunteering, and advocacy with district leadership—on schools and programs that benefit their own children rather than schools or districts as a whole (Cucchiara, 2013; Posey-Maddox, 2014, 2015). Similarly, Roda and Wells (2013) found that affluent New York City parents pursued high-status, less racially diverse schools for their children even though their placement in such schools would perpetuate racial segregation for their and others’ children. Abundant resources seem to expand parents’ command over school choice, allowing them to navigate policies for their own children’s sake.
These bodies of research suggest that socioeconomic status matters when parents encounter school choice policy. We understand far less about how middle-income families fare under school closure or consolidation. Research on parents’ responses to school closures focuses on lower income families and families of color, and suggests that school closure is unwanted and disruptive, with negative repercussions for their engagement in schools (Deeds & Pattillo, 2015; de la Torre et al., 2015; Kretchmar, 2014). Under such circumstances, parents reported feeling disenfranchised, and at times became less involved in their children’s schooling. Still, parents of children in schools that closed often sought new schools where they had social relationships within the school or its surrounding neighborhood (de la Torre et al., 2015), demonstrating a desire to use available resources to their children’s benefit. Similarly, Finnigan and Lavner (2012) note that strategic parent activism—such as the creation of alliances with community organizations and politically connected individuals—helped prevent school closure in lower income communities. This research suggests that the interaction between economic and noneconomic forms of parent capital and school closure is substantial and multifaceted, leading us to question how middle-class parents might engage their own capital with school closure and consolidation, and how capital might shape their engagement.
Conceptual Framework: Parents’ Agency and Its Relation to Capital
To understand how middle-class parents engage with school closure and consolidation, we use the concepts of agency and capital. We situate this study at the intersection of parents’ sense of agency regarding their children’s schooling opportunities and their access to useable capital. Highly relevant to parents’ navigation of school closure and consolidation is Mary Pattillo’s distinction between parental agency and parental agentic power regarding public schooling. Pattillo (2015) contends that while agency affords individual parents control over which schools their children attend, agentic power is “determinative, thereby exhibiting power over others, institutions, or structures” (Pattillo, 2015, p. 46, emphasis in original). Parents with agentic power have control over school selection and influence systemic policy change.
PMMs that emphasize school choice presume parent agency, in which parents “exit” schools they find unappealing. It remains unclear, though, whether it is possible for parents encountering school closure or consolidation to experience agentic power, in which they activate “voice” to shape the policies that affect their children. Research on sociopolitically marginalized parents’ experiences of school closures (and consolidations), reviewed above, suggests substantial limitations to agentic power or voice. We do not know, however, whether more expansive capital would change this relationship.
Parental capital is also essential to our understanding of parents’ sense of agency and agentic power, particularly under conditions of education policy that positions them as consumers of education. Bourdieu’s (1986/2010) descriptions of capital ground this understanding. He asserted that “different types of capital (or power, which amounts to the same thing) change into one another” (Bourdieu, 1986/2010, p. 84). Although economic capital can be spent directly, other forms of capital—social capital that inheres in interpersonal relationships; cultural capital, which signals through physical and interpersonal expressions an individual’s social status; and human capital such as one’s acquired skills—can all convert into economic capital. Our literature review above illustrates how parents deploy various forms of capital to help their children gain educational access and advantage when possible. In this sense, parents “spend” different forms of capital to promote their children’s educational advancement.
Given this study’s emphasis on educational opportunity, property is one pertinent form of capital. U.S. public education has historically been connected to one’s place of residence, with school attendance boundaries determining which students can attend which schools, and driving many families’ choices of residence (Lareau, 2014; Wells et al., 2012). In this sense, family property determines educational opportunities, advantages, and disadvantages. Critical race theorists note how race and property intersect in ways where laws and rules—such as school attendance boundaries—are used to protect and preserve racial privilege (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 2009). Proponents of market-based policy present it as an equalizer that promises parents control over their children’s schooling (Holt, 2000), offering all families equal access to educational “property” regardless of their place (or cost) of residence. Yet, the relationship between capital and parental agency over their children’s schooling is not entirely clear under policies like school choice, closure, and consolidation. On one hand, parents with capital can use it to navigate these policies for their own children’s benefit, yet these policies also promise to divorce parent capital from parent control of schooling options.
Research Questions
Our framework engendered questions about how much, and what kind of, agency parents might exercise in response to school closure or consolidation. Furthermore, we were curious about how parents’ capital would intersect with their own agency. We therefore posed two research questions. First, to what extent do middle-class parents exercise agency or agentic power over their children’s schooling options in the face of school closure or consolidation? Second, in what (if any) ways does capital influence parents’ agency or agentic power?
Method, Setting, and Data
Our questions led us to conduct a case study of middle class parents’ responses to a PMM district’s closure-related policy. We purposefully selected CPS’s proposal to relocate Granger Elementary, a school that admitted students via a citywide lottery, into the building of Byrne Elementary, a school it planned to close. This plan called for Granger to absorb Byrne’s students and teachers, and use its attendance boundaries, amounting to a school consolidation. This closure–consolidation was part of CPS’s closure of 48 schools in 2013. District officials, in line with the logic of PMM district governance, claimed that closing underenrolled schools was necessary for the improvement of schooling across the district. As Barbara Byrd-Bennett, then the CPS CEO, maintained, “It is imperative that you take the difficult decision but essential steps to maintain a range of quality schooling options for all Chicago children” (Ahmed-Ullah et al., 2013).
CPS announced the possibility of closure for 330 schools in late 2012. After a series of reviews and community hearings, it reduced the number to 48. Even though African American students represented only 35% of CPS’s student population, they comprised 88% of the students affected by closures. About 95% of those affected were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, compared with CPS’s overall rate of 85% eligibility (see Table 1; de la Torre et al., 2015). White, middle-class students, notably underrepresented in schools affected by closures, represent a subgroup in CPS that has grown in size and influence. Chicago’s predominantly White, affluent neighborhoods grew by 50,000 residents between 2000 and 2010 (Wilson et al., 2012). During that time, CPS introduced a wider variety of schooling options, in part a response to rising middle-class demands for rigorous public schools (Lipman, 2004; Martinez, 1999). Granger, a high performing school in a predominantly White neighborhood, was simultaneously highly sought-out by middle-class residents and targeted by school closure and consolidation policy.
Select Student Demographics at Granger and Byrne Schools.
Granger therefore represented an atypical case of school closure–consolidation, and also reflected CPS’s growing middle-class, White population. Granger therein created a unique opportunity to pursue our research questions. We conducted a single case study (Yin, 2013), engaging multiple forms of evidence between March 2013 and August 2013. We recruited interview participants with the assistance of a parent who spoke at early public hearings, who forwarded our recruitment email to a listserv of 49 parents. A total of 11 parents (nine females, two males, nine Whites, two Latinos) volunteered to participate in interviews, representing the core group that actively resisted the proposed action as well as parents who were more peripherally involved. All resided in two-parent households where at least one adult was college educated and employed in a professional, white-collar position such as attorney, school administrator, and speech therapist. As this case is identifiable because it was unusual and generated public data, we have masked the schools’ and parent interview participants’ identities and individually identifying information (such as participant race, gender, and occupation) to maximize parent and school privacy. Parent interview participants were told as part of the informed consent process that the school, and by extension all participants, are potentially identifiable in publications resulting from this study.
Although our parent interview sample was relatively small, our study’s data are enriched by multiple forms of evidence. Our data sources include public transcripts from two community hearings and two school board meetings, field notes from two public meetings at Granger, and analysis of artifacts and media coverage, 3 all of which provided insight into a broader range of parent experiences. Other artifacts collected include the petition distributed by parents at Granger, a flyer that Granger parents distributed to CPS board members at the May 22, 2013 board meeting, and CPS website content such as school demographics and performance data.
In our data collection and analysis protocols, we sought to learn how parents understood and approached the proposed relocation, actions they took in response to it, and forms of capital they used to support their actions. In interviews, we also inquired about how participants’ children came to attend Granger, their involvement in their children’s schooling, and their plans for their children’s schooling for the following year. We conducted two interviews per participant, before and after CPS’ final decision to relocate Granger.
Data analysis began during this study’s data collection phase, initially consisting of brief analytic memos (Emerson et al., 2011) and team meetings where we debriefed impressions of the field and collaboratively developed tentative coding lists. Our coding process combined structural coding, which used concepts related to extant literature and our research questions (e.g., use of capital, types of agency) with identification of emergent themes through descriptive coding (e.g., notions of Granger as property) (Saldaña, 2015). To establish intercoder reliability, we independently coded a representative sample of data (including public meeting transcripts, field notes, and interview transcripts) and used NVivo software to establish a Cohen’s kappa of at least .85 for each code. For codes that fell short of this goal, code definitions and criteria were adjusted and recoded until agreement was reached. The first author then coded all interview transcripts while the second author coded all field notes and meeting transcripts. When our analysis revealed distinct types of participant engagement with CPS before and after the board approved the closure–relocation proposal, we considered in finer detail how parents’ actions, use of capital, and expectations of CPS differed across these stages. We used analytic memos to further our interpretation of analyzed material, collaboratively developed propositions, and tested these with participants during and after data collection, via follow-up interviews with participants.
Our research was shaped by our own positionality in relation to study participants. As two White, university-affiliated females, our demographic similarity to most interview participants was striking. We found ourselves perceived by participants as insiders, particularly the second author, a parent of a school-aged child, and similar in age to most parent participants. Our presence at open school meetings went unquestioned. Participants’ comments seemed to reflect their expectation that we understood their points of view (e.g., “Our neighborhood school was not an option”). Our perceived resemblance to participants may have afforded us privileged, insider status rather than the outsider status qualitative researchers (e.g., Acker, 2000) often describe, and ran the risk of tilting our analytic focus. We, therefore, used strategies such as asking participants to explain their statements (particularly about their perceptions of different schools), the triangulation of multiple data types, engaging a researcher of color (who was not a parent) in the preliminary data analysis process, and peer review of our study at multiple stages.
Findings
Granger parents activated economic, human, social, and cultural capital throughout their children’s educational experiences, including their encounters with the proposed closure–consolidation. Even as parents exercised capital on behalf of their children’s education, they confronted stubborn limitations to their own agency, ironically associated with their positioning as education consumers. We saw evidence of unsuccessful attempts to exercise agentic power (Pattillo, 2015), or power over the policies that shaped children’s schooling opportunities. We report findings in three chronological sections: parents’ initial search for a school for their children, their efforts to “defend” Granger when confronted with the proposed consolidation, and their responses after the Chicago Board of Education approved the proposal in May 2013.
Finding Granger by Exiting Neighborhood Schools
Granger parent participants exited neighborhood schools they considered unappealing, and secured spots at Granger with the assistance of available capital. They exited open-enrollment, neighborhood schools they perceived as disorganized and inferior. “I didn’t like the environment,” Julia said of her neighborhood school. “It was too many kids in a classroom and my son didn’t want to go to school, he was crying.” Similarly, Sandra said, “Our neighborhood school is not an option. It’s overcrowded, and there are safety issues. He’s just not going there.” Other parent participants sought out Granger because of its special education program’s reputation. Yvonne described her son’s special education experience in his first school as “an absolute disaster” that “really scarred me and my husband’s psyche about CPS” and left them “feeling very protective of our son.” Of the neighborhood schools that parent participants exited or avoided altogether, nearly all enrolled a larger percentage of Black students and a larger proportion of students who qualified for free- or reduced-price lunch than Granger did.
Granger parent participants’ associations with neighborhood schools—aside from a few schools they named that stood in more affluent, predominantly White neighborhoods—were uniformly negative. They described neighborhood schools, including Byrne, as places that students attended by default. “There’s a lot of refugees, homeless kids there,” Melissa said of Byrne. She described Granger as a school where,
you have to drive them there, you have to be invested in your kid’s future, which is different from the neighborhood school, where you might have the kid whose mom who is passed out on the couch and he’s trying to get his sister ready for school.
Although parent interviews contained a striking absence of explicit language about race or poverty—aside from positive but generic mentions of school diversity—parent participants often avoided or left predominantly lower income, Black and Brown schools for Granger.
Granger parents deployed capital as part of their exit strategies. They used social networks and internet access to gather information on schools, and traveled around the city to visit schools and to have their children tested for academically selective CPS programs. Yvonne applied to 20 CPS schools for her son. Elaine, a stay-at-home parent whose husband worked full-time, described her school search as “like a part-time job.” She spent up to 15 hr per week researching and visiting schools, and hired sitters so she could visit schools without her young children. Another Granger parent, speaking at a public hearing, said that the process involved “a couple of years researching schools, (and) months applying” enrollment at Granger likewise required resources. Melissa, Sharon, and Julia responded to phone calls inviting them to enroll their waitlisted children within the school’s 1-day window (after which the spot would be forfeited) because of the flexibility they had as stay-at-home parents or white-collar workers.
Fighting to “Keep” Granger: Deploying Capital, Claiming Property
As CPS sought community feedback on proposed school closures and consolidations over a period of 2 months, Granger parents (both interview participants and the general parent population) challenged the proposal that involved Granger. 4 They exercised “voice” by speaking at public hearings, circulating a petition, engaging local media, and contacting local public officials. These actions align with Pattillo’s (2015) description of agentic power in that they attempted to change the institutions and structures that framed school closure and consolidation as a necessity. Capital permeated these actions. At times, Granger parents’ use of capital seemed almost unconscious, as they simply responded to the situation in front of them with the resources they had, and evoked Bourdieu’s (1993) discussion of the instinctive performance of social position. At other times, they deliberately used their resources to bolster their efforts.
Capital use in pursuit of voice and agentic power
Granger parents’ capital enabled them to respond quickly to the proposal. Their attendance at daytime meetings, and their circulation of an antirelocation petition during Granger student drop-off and pickup, were facilitated by the flexible schedules they had as either stay-at-home parents or white-collar professionals. Sharon, for example, shifted her work schedule, within which she had already negotiated a half-day per week off for school volunteering, so that she could meet with public officials and attend CPS board meetings, which occurred during business hours.
Granger parents’ available time and money shaped their actions in many ways. Substantial networking and information exchange about the proposed closure–relocation occurred on Granger’s playground, where interview participants lingered after drop-off and before pickup. Access to the internet and to electronic devices also seemed to propel parents’ activism, as the class Shutterfly website was the first venue through which parents exchanged responses and strategized about the proposed closure–consolidation. Access to electronic media also enabled parents to secure limited public comment spots at school board meetings—60 per meeting, usually taken within an hour of the spots’ public opening—by registering online.
Granger parents’ human and social capital also informed their proposal-related interactions with CPS. Interview participants held (at or before the time of data collection) professional occupations in fields such as law, education, advertising, city administration, community organizing, and crisis response services. These backgrounds contributed knowledge that was relevant to parents’ efforts to understand and respond to CPS’s formal procedures and unwritten rules. As such, they could assess and challenge the closure–relocation proposal. Daniel, describing his analysis and replication of CPS officials’ communication style, said, “this is the kind of language they use, so you want to use this language, this is the type of question they use, so let’s ask these types of questions.” One parent, who participated in anticonsolidation advocacy but who declined to participate in interviews, had worked as a CPS administrator. This parent advised parent interview participants on their efforts to identify and contact CPS employees, as well as policies relevant to school closing, like laws regarding school building occupancy rates for special education and proper notice for school closing, which Granger parents felt they had not received, even though CPS planned to relocate, not close, Granger.
In their efforts to gain agentic power, Granger parents also tapped into social networks. “We have a lot of connections that most people probably wouldn’t have,” Daniel explained. Through personal and professional networks, parents accessed elected officials, school board members, Chicago police officers, Chicago teachers union leadership, CPS administrators, attorneys, and parent advocacy organizations. Two interview participants communicated their concerns to school board members via professional and social acquaintances rather than through universally available channels. Participants also used networks to gain information about safety issues in Byrne’s neighborhood, CPS administrators’ communication with Granger’s teachers about their position on the proposal, and broader anticlosure activism within Chicago.
In addition, Granger parents deployed capital to publicize their grievances against the proposal. Local and neighborhood media outlets published 18 pieces that discussed Granger in relation to CPS’s school closure plan, even though CPS did not plan to close Granger. One local news network quoted only a Granger parent in its story on proposed CPS school closures. A state political news website’s video coverage of the closures featured a Granger parent as the only speaker. This parent spoke uninterrupted for just less than 2 min, using statements that conveyed her points in catchy sound bytes (e.g., “We’re a school of neighborhoods, not a neighborhood school”). This same website piece used Granger parents in two of its three images of parents. A local education advocacy organization that interview participants contacted for assistance also spoke specifically about Granger, in two local media interviews and on its own website, while criticizing the proposed closure–consolidation. Granger parents’ media coverage is striking since nearly all Granger parents who appeared were White and middle-class, while the vast majority of parents impacted by the 2013 school closures lived in low-income communities of color (de la Torre et al., 2015). This contrast suggests that the symbolic capital of parents’ social position (Lewis, 2003) amplified their advocacy efforts.
Granger parents also conveyed a sense that they possessed the authority to critique and improve upon the proposal to relocate their children’s school. This stance reflected both the cultural capital they used as they attempted to influence the board’s decision to carry out the proposal. Granger parents presented themselves as individuals who had the same (if not superior) social, cultural and professional status as CPS board members and administrators. For example, their public speech reflected an advanced, educated vocabulary, using words such as rhetoric, psyops, disingenuous, ludicrous, absurd, and fictitious. One parent speaking at a public hearing accused the board of engaging in “semantic jujitsu.”
Cultural capital also informed the way parents exercised voice. Many Chicagoans criticized CPS’s decision to close schools, but Granger parents did so from an elevated social position. They communicated a sense of superiority to other stakeholders professionally and legally authorized to act on behalf of Granger. When Granger’s elected Local School Council (LSC), composed of parents, community members, and teachers (who appeared more socioeconomically and racially diverse than the interview participant group) chose not to resist the consolidation as an official body, Allison questioned their ability to comprehend the proposal. “Not that they’re not intelligent people, but the information they were given, I don’t think they knew how to handle it,” she remarked. Parents also questioned district policymakers’ intelligence. A Granger parent, speaking at a CPS board meeting, criticized its building utilization criteria, which she claimed was based on “the inability of CPS to perform basic arithmetic.” Statements like these reflected parents’ sense that they knew better than professional educators, board members, and elected LSC members how to address the school’s and district’s problems.
Framing and claiming property: Parents’ views of Granger as “their” school
Beyond their use of capital to resist the closure–consolidation, Granger parents characterized their children’s spots at Granger—a lottery-based admission school not tied to neighborhood boundaries—as their property. As such, they attempted to activate the capital of property in an effort to exercise voice in opposition to the closure–consolidation. This sense of property was distinctly individualistic, in comparison to a sense of community ownership of a local public school. Having secured a spot for their children 5 at Granger, parents felt that those spots belonged to them and argued that CPS was unjustly revoking them.
Granger parents consistently expressed that CPS wanted to revoke their children’s fairly “earned” spots at a desirable public school. “We played by the rules that CPS set out,” Allison explained. “We went through the testing procedure, we picked our schools and applied, we met with the administration of every single school. That’s why so many parents were so angry.” Gerardo felt similarly, explaining, “We were thinking, this is great, (our child was admitted to) a small school, we’re done. We don’t have to go through that (school search) again (for our younger child).” Having followed the procedures laid out by CPS’s school choice policies, many Granger parents felt like they should not have to start again, nor did they want their children at the “new” Granger. They had exercised choice in a system where many people got no access to any of the schools they chose, and were fearful that they would neither receive (at the consolidated Granger) nor be able to choose a school comparable to Granger. In this sense, privilege did not protect Granger parents or children from being positioned by CPS into schools they did not want to attend, even in a context of school choice policy. They had already exited the schools they did not want, and did not want to be, in a sense, deported back to them.
Granger parents’ desire to “keep” their children’s spots at Granger was further reflected in some parents’ reframing of those spots as property. This point was made most clearly by one parent who, speaking at a community hearing, described CPS as breaking the law of adverse possession. This law is usually applied to property (such as homes, furniture, or vehicles) that has been taken over by another claiming a right to it. He described Granger as being taken away from current students’ families because CPS planned to reshape Granger’s admissions procedures, move the school’s building, increase its enrollment size, and introduce new students, and transfer in Byrne teachers. A local education advocacy group leader, from whom Granger parents sought assistance, shared this same description of the proposal in a public media interview. Other Granger parents similarly claimed ownership of their children’s seats, contesting CPS’s right to close their school without proper notice, which CPS had provided other schools slated for closure. “If it’s Granger it needs to be our teachers, our families, and our model,” one parent contended at a public meeting. As parents argued that their children’s school, and even Granger’s name, was being illegally taken away from them, they claimed possession not only over their children’s seats at Granger, but also over CPS’ staffing and structuring of Granger. They voiced little concern about what might happen to Byrne students, but rather over what would happen to the school they thought belonged to them and their children.
Parents’ possessive claims to Granger also represent an attempt to appropriate closure policy in their children’s favor. CPS leadership had promised to place students from closing schools in schools with equivalent or better student performance. As such, CPS could not have sent students from a “closed” Granger to Byrne, as Granger’s students outperformed Byrne’s on standardized tests. Granger parents used this policy, which was intended to protect students whose lower performing schools had closed, in an attempt to protect their children’s relatively exclusive access to a higher performing school. Granger students, by their parents’ and the district’s account, accessed greater educational resources than most CPS students did. Yet, their parents attempted to use policy to protect and preserve their advantage. Parents therein attempted to activate policy to protect what they saw as their educational property, within a district marked by racial and socioeconomic disparities.
Moving on From Granger: Constrained Parental Agency
Granger parents’ campaign to halt or change the proposed closure–consolidation ended when the Chicago Board of Education voted in May 2013 to enact the proposal the following school year. Although Granger parents’ multifaceted capital and privilege positioned them as potentially powerful consumers, their powers ultimately proved limited. Once Granger’s consolidation with Byrne was imminent, parent participants’ attention quickly shifted from collective action to their own children’s schooling. This shift reflected capital-driven, individualistic agency rather than agentic power (Pattillo, 2015) that aimed to address broader policy issues. Sharon described the postdecision process as “every man for himself.” She explained, “There was nothing left to do. It really came down to, okay, tomorrow I wake up and I find a school for my kid to attend next year.” Most interview participants (nine of 11) expressed their dissatisfaction by leaving Granger, or by leaving CPS all together. Their actions reflected educational consumers’ power that lie in their power to exit schools in response to undesirable policy and practice decisions (Ogawa & Dutton, 1997).
Uninterested in keeping their children at the “new” Granger, most parent interviewees moved their children from Granger to another CPS school. Allison and Yvonne were “thrown a life line” (in Yvonne’s words) when their children were accepted to academically selective schools. Both expressed uncertainty over what they would have done otherwise. “I’d done enough research to know there weren’t (other) options,” Yvonne said. Julia sent her son to a charter school, while Sharon chose her neighborhood school, which she’d rejected when she sent her daughter to Granger (noting that the principal told her “I would jump up and down if you sent your kids here”). Later, though, Sharon moved her daughter to a higher performing neighborhood school after she was admitted off of its wait list. Sharon’s family eventually moved out of state, at which point she contacted the second author seeking contacts with individuals knowledgeable about local schools in their new city.
Melissa’s school search process reflects how she and other parents were positioned in a way that relegated them to using capital for individual, nonagentic purposes. CPS launched an enrollment campaign for students whose schools would close (de la Torre et al., 2015), Meanwhlie, Melissa engaged in her own campaign, as CPS’s led only to schools with lower student performance than Granger. “First thing I did was pull up all of CPS’ utilization reports for all the level one (highest-performing) schools in my area,” Melissa explained:
I checked to see which ones were over-utilized, underutilized. So, I picked all the ones that said underutilized, then I cross-referenced it against the Illinois State Report Card, which breaks down classroom size grade by grade. I saw how many kindergarteners there were . . . I found the schools that would have space.
Melissa called those schools’ administrators, but received no affirmative responses. She then learned from a coworker about a school on her list that, while officially overenrolled, had just built an addition to accommodate more students. Melissa negotiated an exception for her daughter to gain admission. Melissa felt proud that she had managed to “stick it to CPS” after failed efforts to halt the consolidation, and a lack of appealing alternatives to Granger. “The best part of it is knowing that they purposely set it up so that I would not be able to go there,” she said. “Networking came into play, the principal came into play, my research came into play.” Melissa succeeded in her dealings with CPS via intensive research on schools and enrollment policy, along with negotiation and advocacy skills. This pathway, however, was for her child only.
Three parents enrolled their children in private schools, even though they expressed a deep commitment to public education. “I don’t want to send him to private school” Sandra said, “But he’s going to get the education he deserves.” Other parents’ decisions reflected a negative reaction against CPS’s actions toward Granger. “I’m not going to drive my child 4½ miles to an experiment,” Elaine explained of her decision to move her children to a parochial school, criticizing CPS’s plan for Granger.
Two parents hesitantly kept their children at the new Granger. Kim’s daughter, a special education student, had already changed schools multiple times before Granger. For the first time, Kim felt that her daughter, Teresa, was challenged academically, encouraged with positive incentives, and had strong peer relationships. Kim tearfully expressed her fears that none of Teresa’s friends would go with her to the new Granger, and that Granger’s strong record of teaching special education students might falter. In an effort to maintain consistency for her daughter, however, Kim kept Teresa at Granger. Citing his commitment to social justice, Gerardo also kept his children at Granger to hold CPS accountable for promises it made to “welcoming” schools. Still, he and his wife looked at homes for sale in a nearby suburban community. Although parents exercised substantial agency in responding to the consolidation, these actions reflected only the power to exit (or stay put). They seemed relegated to use available capital to avoid the consequences of unwanted policy directives. They also abandoned collective forms of activism—what school choice proponents and scholars call voice—once those efforts appeared futile. They could do little but spend their own capital for their own children’s benefit.
Discussion and Conclusion
Our study of middle-class parents’ experiences of a school closure–consolidation reveals that their positioning as capital-wielding consumers ironically constrained their empowerment and agency. Through the school choice process, Granger parents spent available capital on their children’s behalf, and gained a sense of ownership of their children’s schooling and even of the school their children attended. Their well-resourced and socially privileged actions, in the end, kept most of their children from attending Granger after CPS consolidated it with Byrne, suggesting that they exercised agency within the domain of school selection and deselection. However, these parents’ agency did not ultimately influence the board’s decision to proceed with closure–consolidations at Granger. These parents found meaning and satisfaction through their political engagement, but their actions were limited in scope and power, reflecting a lack of agentic power to influence district-level decisions (Pattillo, 2015). These findings hold implications for our understanding of market-based education policy, democratic school governance, and for the equitable distribution of educational resources.
Our finding that market-based educational policy positions parents to act on their own behalf, but not to act agentically, extends and challenges existing theory on “exit” and “voice” (Hirschman, 1978; Ogawa & Dutton, 1997). Granger parents’ early activism exemplified voice: they collaborated with other parents, participated in public meetings, and proposed potential solutions to CPS for Granger and Byrne schools’ problems. Even as Granger parents’ capital amplified their voices, however, their collective resistance did not lead to policy change. Rather, their civic participation was actualized through their choices as education consumers, which constrained the range of educational issues that they could effectively address. They could adapt to their children’s consolidated school, or exit it for other CPS or non-CPS schools. By delimiting parents’ options, market-based policy constrained, fragmented, and therefore weakened parent participation in schooling. Granger parents were most powerful at managing their own children’s education. Such findings support Beal and Hendry’s (2012) contention that “When parents’ role in school choice focuses on individual agency and competition, it . . . contributes to the erosion of public education as a common good.” Early school choice proponents (e.g., Chubb & Moe, 1990) advocated for a shift in parent involvement from democratic governance to exercising choice over their children’s schools. In action, such policy stands to weaken parents’ agentic power over school and district policy.
This study’s findings give cause for broader concern about market-based policies’ alignment with the principles of democratic school governance. Although CPS has in place democratically elected LSCs to promote parent engagement, LSCs are understood to have highly curtailed powers in the face of forces like Chicago’s mayor-appointed school board and increased federal regulation of school districts (Superville, 2014). Most LSCs opposed but did not prevent school closures in 2013; Granger’s LSC opted not to state any position regarding the proposed closure–consolidation. In cases of limited formal power to effect district policy, parents are left to advocate for their own children. Portfolio management models have demonstrated the power to expand local control and responsiveness to local demands (Bulkley & Henig, 2015), but our evidence suggest that this control does not authentically rest with parents but rather with local actors such as civic, educational, and political leaders. To preserve democratic school governance, school boards and other policymakers must take decisive measures to incorporate heterogeneous parent voice, rather than defaulting to parent engagement via the selection or rejection of schools, and parent empowerment via the expenditure of unequally distributed capital.
Our findings also raise questions about what educators, policymakers and citizens mean, and ought to mean, by “ownership” of public schools. Instead of a community sharing ownership over a school as an institution, Granger parents came to see their school as property that could not be legally taken away or even restructured to include others in Chicago. In contrast, parent and community activism that challenged CPS’ planned closure of Dyett Academic Center and culminated in a hunger strike expressed ownership via inclusiveness. Dyett activists did not strive to constrain community access to the school as many Granger parents did. Rather, Dyett activists invited Chicagoans to join them in their protest and advocated for a school redesign that would draw more students (Perez, 2015). Although these actions signaled community investment in local schools, Granger parents’ actions suggest defensive opportunity hoarding (Lewis & Diamond, 2015) in the face of racially and socioeconomically stratified educational opportunities. We find Granger parents’ actions a logical, yet civically disturbing result of market-based education policies that position parents as consumers. They followed the rules to access Granger, expending significant resources to do so. They then fought to keep Granger as it was, even when others at the school and in the district disagreed with them, even when other students in the district (including Byrne students) received fewer resources than their children did. Evidence suggests that a similar sense of consumeristic ownership manifests in affluent urban parents’ efforts to raise funds and to use social and political relationships to forward their own agendas for their children’s schools (Cucchiara, 2013; Edelberg & Kurland, 2009; Posey-Maddox, 2015).
Through market-based education policy, American society’s historic emphasis on property as a basis for civic rights (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) again paints public schools as a form of property. These circumstances raise alarm because schools that “belong” to parent–consumers cannot simultaneously belong to democratically governed communities. Furthermore, policies that encourage privileged parents’ notions of schools as their own (and not others’) property cannot also convey a sense that schools are truly public and open to all children. This point is particularly salient since critical race scholars note how those with less valued property have diminished political power (Harris, 1993; Ladson-Billings, 2009). Without saying directly that they did not wish for their children to attend a school with a less privileged population, Granger parents attempted to create a barrier around their children’s school and to limit its accessibility by a racially and socioeconomically diverse group of students. District administrators and policymakers must oppose proposals that strive—by design or by default—to preserve demographically differentiated learning opportunities, particularly in a context of school choice policy where the already-powerful are shown to benefit the most.
Granger parents’ resource-fueled exit from the school after CPS enacted the closure–consolidation also holds troubling implications for the equitable distribution of educational resources. Most of Granger’s parents used their connections, knowledge of the system, and financial resources to secure alternative schooling placements. Middle-class families are known to benefit disproportionately from market-based policies (Holme, 2002; Roda & Wells, 2013). This case further reveals how middle class families can circumvent disruptive or undesirable market-based policies. Granger’s middle-class parents had access to exit routes, which meant that they were not subject to CPS policy in the same way as lower income families whose children’s schools closed, and were forced to choose from available but not necessarily appealing options (de la Torre et al., 2015). This discrepancy suggests a two-tiered education policy experience for urban residents, which could dissuade affluent citizens from opposing policies that bode poorly for cities’ most vulnerable residents. In the context of increasing socioeconomic inequality and gentrification in America’s cities, these possibilities are both real and disturbing.
Although this study provides insight into a unique case, it is limited to the specific social, geographic, and policy contexts of Chicago. It is also limited to those who resisted CPS’s proposed closure–consolidation. As such, our data do not represent the perspectives of individuals who supported this policy directive, they do not include the viewpoints of school or district personnel, nor do they amplify the voices of the thousands of families whose schools were in fact closed in Chicago in 2013. We recommend further research that explores parent engagement with school closure and consolidation across multiple contexts, from multiple perspectives, engaging socioeconomically, racially, and geographically diverse populations.
This study suggests that even relatively powerful, affluent parents have limited voice in response to unwanted policy initiatives, and that all parents are left to deploy their own resources to defensively advocate for their own children. Accordingly, public schools stand to foment competition and divide citizens from citizens, neighborhoods from neighborhoods, and schools from schools. Children whose parents have fewer resources stand to benefit less, relegated to schools where the fight for access is not so intense. Such responses imply a disturbing reversal of 19th century public education advocate Horace Mann’s vision of schools as the “balance wheels” of a diverse, democratic society. We encourage policymakers to approach market-based policies with caution, keeping in mind the kinds of outcomes we identify in the present study. We also encourage urban parents to consider how their own actions on behalf of their children reflect their positioning within systems that employ market-based policy, and within cities marked by growing income inequality. Our hope is that those involved consider how their actions stand to promote, restrict or erode equitable access to educational opportunity in our cities.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Beth Wright-Costello is now affiliated with Whittier College, CA, USA.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
