Parental choice,neighbourhood schools,and the market metaphor in urban education reform

Abstract

Critics of many popular urban school reforms in the United States allege that these reform efforts unfairly insert market forces into the public domain, resulting in widening inequalities. In this paper, I challenge the notion that market forces per se are responsible for the gentrification that school reform often facilitates. Drawing on in-depth interviews, government documents, and media accounts, I analyse one component of school reform in Boston, the overhaul of the city’s public school student assignment policy, which curtailed parental choice (and, therefore, market pressure) within the city’s school system, while still potentially perpetuating inequalities. I discuss the implications of these findings for urban social theory related to education reform.

Keywords

education reform gentrification middle class school choice urban

A growing body of sociological research has demonstrated the increasingly important role that elementary and secondary schools play in shaping urban demographic and economic patterns in many major American cities. Throughout the country, cities have undertaken initiatives to reform their public schools in order, among other reasons, to persuade middle-class families to remain and enrol their children, rather than relocating to suburban communities. To the extent that these top-down reform efforts succeed in retaining middle-class families, they represent a novel form of state-facilitated gentrification (Billingham and Kimelberg, 2013; Lipman, 2011). Simultaneously, in many cities nationwide ground-level initiatives have been undertaken by middle-class parents, who have banded together in gentrified neighbourhoods within many major cities to overhaul local schools, remaking them into places where they are comfortable enrolling their children (Edelberg and Kurland, 2009; Hankins, 2007).

These two trajectories of contemporary school reform – the top-down reforms of cities and school districts, and the bottom-up reforms of middle-class parents – are rooted in a similar objective, easing the concerns of affluent parents and thereby retaining these families within municipal boundaries. However, particularly in the degree to which they privilege the idea of parental choice, these two movements have the potential to work at cross-purposes. This paper examines recent reforms to the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to explore the strains between city-driven and parent-driven school reform.

Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with middle-class parents in Boston, I demonstrate that affluent families living in gentrified neighbourhoods nearly universally preferred local, neighbourhood-oriented schools for their children. These preferences stood in stark contrast with the then-current student-assignment system in Boston, which offered parents a wide range of schools from which to choose. I then use data from government documents and media accounts to examine the overhaul to the student assignment system that BPS undertook in 2012. In contrast to many top-down school reform efforts, which work to expand parental choice, this initiative actually constrained choice for parents, returning student assignment in Boston to a more neighbourhood-focused policy and thereby bringing the district more in line with the wishes of gentrifier parents.

I conclude the paper by discussing urban school reform in the context of the ‘market metaphor’ (Henig, 1994). Critics of contemporary school reform frequently lament the spread of ‘market ideology’– epitomised by an emphasis on ‘choice’– in education as a threat to the provision of education as a public good. I argue, however, that the expansion of choice by itself is not necessarily a proximate cause of increased inequality. Moreover, constraining choice may, in fact, equally exacerbate inequalities by serving as a mechanism of exclusionary social closure, preserving privileged institutions for the affluent while barring entry to lower- and working-class families.

Background

In recent years in many gentrifying cities, urban public schools have taken on the status of urban amenity – an asset indispensable to cities’ success in attracting and retaining a stable group of upper-middle-class households. Efforts to reform and improve urban public schools for the explicit purpose of drawing back middle-class families have been documented by social scientists and journalists in Philadelphia (Cucchiara, 2013), New York (Haughney, 2010; Stillman, 2012), Chicago (Lipman, 2012), Charlotte (Israel, 2013), Boston (Billingham and Kimelberg, 2013; Jan, 2006), and other American cities, as well as in European cities (e.g. Butler and Robson, 2003; Karsten, 2003). Middle-class reluctance to matriculate within American urban public school systems contributed significantly to patterns of suburban flight through the late 20th century (Wells and Crain, 1997). The widespread adoption of urban public school reform suggests that municipal leaders have recognised this problem and endeavoured to reverse that logic, striving to improve urban schools – or at least their reputations – in the hopes that such efforts will persuade upper-middle-class families with children to move in, while convincing families already in the city that they do not need to relocate to the suburbs when they have children (Varady and Raffel, 1995).

There are many educational goals at stake in the quest to transform urban schools. Improving academic achievement among all students, and, in particular, narrowing achievement gaps between white and non-white students, are consistently cited as reasons for pursuing urban school reform (Vinovskis, 2009). To the extent that public school reform initiatives are proposed and undertaken by municipal leaders as a means for attracting and retaining more affluent residents, however, they represent not merely educational strategies but also economic development strategies (Cucchiara, 2013; Lipman, 2012). Recognising that the demands of residents shift as they move through the life course, cities have increasingly looked to their public school systems as amenities that may serve either as assets or as liabilities in the quest to recruit the middle class (Cucchiara, 2013; Varady and Raffel, 1995). As such, in many cities public school reform is bound up with contemporary gentrification processes, reflecting, as Hackworth (2007) and others have noted, a neoliberal reformulation of urban space.

Compared with previous generations of affluent urbanites, evidence suggests that upper-middle-class families are increasingly willing to consider urban public schools for their children, and are less likely to decamp to the suburbs when schooling pressures arise (e.g. Stillman, 2012). While this movement reflects, in part, parents’ endorsement of the top-down reforms instituted by cities and school districts, in some places it also reflects a bottom-up movement undertaken by parents themselves. Many of these middle-class families have taken public schooling matters into their own hands, working diligently, even before their children reach school age, to transform neighbourhood schools so that they will provide an acceptable learning environment once their children are eligible to enrol. These types of middle class-driven school reforms, observed in many cities across the country (see Billingham and Kimelberg, 2013; Cucchiara and Horvat, 2009; Edelberg and Kurland, 2009; Holme, 2002; Posey, 2012), involve the infusion of private financial and cultural resources from affluent parents into local public schools. Parents volunteer time and energy to repair and refurbish the physical plant of schools, donate school supplies, and often help to recruit new, dynamic school leaders.

Within these movements, parents of similar-aged children often come together long before their children approach elementary school, and mutually pledge to register their children in a nearby school with a stigmatised reputation. These middle-class parents, proud of their commitment to urban living, often profess their desire for their children to attend ‘diverse’ schools, yet they have very limited parameters regarding what levels of diversity they find acceptable (Kimelberg and Billingham, 2013; Roda and Wells, 2013). The aim with these parent-driven movements is to create a ‘critical mass’ of resourced parents, thereby reducing the educational and social ‘risk’ that any one affluent child would face by entering that school alone (Cucchiara, 2013; Edelberg and Kurland, 2009; Kimelberg, forthcoming).

These movements reflect a natural progression in the consumption-driven progression of gentrification, as individuals who first relocated to the inner city in order to enjoy an urban lifestyle within a fashionable neighbourhood feel comfortable retaining that lifestyle, even after the arrival of children (Billingham and Kimelberg, 2013). From the perspective of the production-driven progression of gentrification (see Lees et al., 2008), this process reflects the increased involvement of the state, via the public schooling apparatus, in shaping urban ‘upgrading’.

To the extent that gentrification unfolds as a neighbourhood-level phenomenon, with gentrifiers committed to improving their neighbourhoods and orienting their daily lives around their neighbourhoods (Brown-Saracino, 2009), it is unsurprising that once they have children these affluent newcomers would work to improve their neighbourhood educational institutions. What is potentially surprising, though, is the tension that can arise between this desire for limited, and local, schooling options within affluent neighbourhoods and the general widespread diffusion of free-market principles within other components of the urban school reform movement. Contemporary school reforms often reflect an infusion of market-driven logic into traditional public education systems (Apple, 2001; Barkan, 2011; Gordon, forthcoming; Henig, 1994; Lipman, 2011, 2012; Saltman, 2010). While other market-oriented reforms (such as the push for merit-based pay for teachers, the marketing of public school systems to middle-class ‘customers’, and the outsourcing of support services within schools to private external firms) have taken root in many cities (Compton and Weiner, 2008; Cucchiara, 2013), the effort to introduce more school choices within the public school marketplace has at times run into opposition, not only from groups traditionally opposed to the various components of urban school reform (e.g. teachers’ unions and minority families), but also from affluent families, who have generally supported the spread of other types of reform (Bushaw and Lopez, 2011).

In other words, while critics have alleged that urban school reform is rooted solidly in a determination to infuse market logic into public institutions, at least in some cities, middle-class advocates of school reform may in fact resist market pressures through their efforts to rein in school choice and promote neighbourhood schools. This paper uses recent changes to the student assignment system in BPS to investigate this tension. I begin by examining the attitudes of a sample of gentrifier parents in Boston regarding the ideas of school choice, neighbourhood schools, and the busing of students. I then investigate the process by which municipal and school district leaders in Boston overhauled the policy determining how students in the city get assigned to schools. I conclude by discussing the limits to the market metaphor in social theory related to urban educational inequality.

Data and methods

In this paper I draw on data from in-depth interviews conducted with parents of school-age children in Boston. With Shelley Kimelberg, I recruited volunteers through advertisements posted on online discussion forums related to the topics of parenting and schooling in Boston. This process resulted in 32 interviews conducted either by Kimelberg or myself, which took place in 2009 and 2010 (see Kimelberg and Billingham, 2013).

Nearly all of the respondents in the first round of interviews were white and relatively affluent, and while they were spread out across Boston, the majority were concentrated in three neighbourhoods (the South End, Charlestown and Jamaica Plain), all of which have experienced significant gentrification over the past several decades. To add racial, socioeconomic, and geographic diversity to the sample, in 2012 I recruited additional volunteers through flyers posted in local public libraries in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, neighbourhoods with some of the largest concentrations of working-class African Americans and Latinos in Boston. This second round resulted in four additional interviews.

Altogether, 36 interviews were conducted between 2009 and 2012. Each interview took place at a site selected by the participant. Most were conducted in participants’ homes or in nearby coffee shops. Respondents were asked about their own upbringing and education, their residential preferences and migration history, their socioeconomic and social class characteristics, and the choices they made regarding their children’s schooling, as well as their satisfaction with those choices. With permission from the respondents, each interview was recorded and transcribed.

Table 1 presents descriptive statistics about the sample of 36 respondents. All of the volunteers were women. The gender distribution was skewed in part because women generally take the lead in families’ school choice decisions (André-Bechely, 2005), and in part because the online message boards where the initial recruitments took place were oriented toward mothers. The majority of respondents (30 out of 36) were married. More than 80% were white. Most respondents were highly educated; all but two had completed at least a bachelor’s degree. Household income levels varied widely, from a low of $11,000 to a high of $350,000, but most respondents were members of the upper-middle class. The median household income, among those who provided income information, was about $125,000. Respondents’ children ranged in age from newborns to adults, but most were quite young. The median age of respondents’ children was five, and most respondents either had their children currently enrolled in elementary school or were in the process of searching for an appropriate elementary school.

Table 1.

Sample characteristics (N = 36 unless otherwise specified).

	N	%
Marital Status
Married	30	83.3%
Divorced	3	8.3%
Widowed	1	2.8%
Never married	2	5.6%
Race/ethnicity
White	30	83.3%
Black	3	8.3%
Hispanic	1	2.8%
Other	2	5.6%
Education (highest degree attained)
High school diploma	1	2.8%
Associate’s Degree	1	2.8%
Bachelor’s Degree	5	13.9%
Graduate or professional degree	29	80.6%
Employment Status
Full-time	23	63.9%
Part-time/student	5	13.9%
Not currently employed outside home	8	22.2%
Homeownership status
Homeowner	32	88.9%
Renter	4	11.1%
Status of school-age children (n = 44)
Enrolled in BPS	32	72.7%
Enrolled in private elementary school	11	25.0%
Enrolled in suburban public school	1	2.3%
Median household income (n = 28)^a		$125,000

Note. ^aEight respondents either did not provide information, or gave vague responses (e.g. ‘a lot’).

In 2013, the Boston School Committee approved a new plan for assigning students to schools. This was the culmination of a series of community meetings, advisory sessions, and analyses of data that were highly publicised and quite contentious. To supplement the data from my interviews, I examined publicly available records (official documents, press releases, and meeting minutes) from BPS and the City of Boston, as well as media accounts of the structural shifts taking place within BPS, primarily from the Boston Globe, the city’s largest daily newspaper. I conducted targeted searches in the Globe through the ProQuest article database; these searches yielded 41 articles published between July 2006 and March 2013, including (to the best of my knowledge) every article published by the Globe between April 2010 and March 2013 related to the proposals, meetings, and final decisions regarding changes to Boston’s student assignment system.

Urban development in Boston and student assignment in the post-busing era

Student assignment in Boston has, for over four decades, been a politically explosive issue laden with race and class conflicts. Boston has struggled with a reputation for racial unrest for decades, dating back to the mid-20th century fight to desegregate its public schools. In 1974, Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the city to integrate its schools through the busing of students between heavily white neighbourhoods like Charlestown and South Boston and heavily black neighbourhoods like Roxbury. Protests erupted across the city, particularly in traditional white ethnic enclaves, and thousands of white families removed their children from BPS (Formisano, 1991). In 1989, Garrity returned student assignment decision-making power to the local school board, but he ordered that they must not allow the schools to become re-segregated (Bordas, 2006).

With its new power, BPS began a system of ‘controlled choice’, which operated by drawing three sprawling geographic assignment zones, each of which contained land in both black and white neighbourhoods. Responding to lawsuits from white students who alleged that this ‘controlled choice’ plan had resulted in their exclusion from their own neighbourhood schools, BPS moved toward reducing (and, ultimately, eliminating) race as an explicit criterion in student assignment (Bordas, 2006).¹ Although racial considerations were officially removed in 1999, the geographic zones that had been put into place under the ‘controlled choice’ plan remained, resulting in the perpetuation of a massive student busing operation that transported thousands of children every day to schools several kilometres away from their homes.

Under this system, student assignment involved a complicated – and, for many families, extremely stressful – process, organised around an annual lottery. The city maintained the three large assignment zones begun during the ‘controlled choice’ era. Each family’s home was located within a specific assignment zone, but also within what was known as a ‘walk zone’, a circle that extended out from the family’s house to a radius of 1.6 kilometres (one mile) for elementary school students, 2.4 kilometres (1.5 miles) for middle school students, and 3.2 kilometres (two miles) for high school students. Families could choose from any school within their assignment zone, as well as any school in their walk zone, even if it fell outside the boundaries of the assignment zone. Moreover, several middle schools and K-8 schools, as well as all high schools, had citywide access, so that any family could apply. Thus, at the elementary school level, families tended to have at least a dozen schools from which they could choose. In registering for enrolment, families ranked their preferences among the schools for which they were eligible. Preferences for admission were granted to students who lived within the walk zone, as well as to students who had siblings already enrolled in the school.

This system had been extremely controversial for decades. It was typically favoured by minority families, who disproportionately inhabited neighbourhoods with underperforming public schools (Orfield, 2013). Indeed, black and Latino parents, particularly those from lower-income neighbourhoods, were largely wary of the recent overhaul of the student assignment system when proposed by BPS (Boston Public Schools, 2012). Yet the policy was highly unpopular with civic leaders, who criticised its logistical inefficiencies (specifically the fact that thousands of BPS students were bused across the city daily), and with affluent parents, who desired easier access to higher-performing schools in their neighbourhoods, which could presumably serve as community anchors, bring neighbours together, and incubate a spirit of gemeinschaft. Moreover, critics alleged, the lottery system was unpredictable and left families in the lurch, not knowing which school their kids would attend, and not guaranteeing anyone a spot in a high-quality school (Vaznis and Andersen, 2012).

In 2013, after years of trying and failing, the city’s leaders finally succeeded in removing many of the last vestiges of the 1970s-era busing system, and implemented a new system for assigning students to schools. Despite concerns, particularly by low-income residents and people of colour, over the potential for exacerbating educational inequalities, city leaders’ rhetoric regarding this decision focused on a return to ‘neighbourhood schools’ and the creation of a simpler, more efficient, and more cost-effective student assignment system. Throughout the process, many municipal and business leaders drove home the argument that a return to neighbourhood schools would prove instrumental in the city’s quest to attract and retain ‘talent’– that is, new professional families, who have frequently expressed reluctance to live in the city lest their children be forced to attend an unacceptable public school.

Gentrifier parents and the preference for neighbourhood schools

Among middle-class respondents interviewed between 2009 and 2012, the lottery and the busing system were highly unpopular.² While respondents expressed a range of concerns when asked about their priorities regarding their children’s education, proximity to home repeatedly emerged as a theme in interviews. For middle-class parents who moved to the city as adults and inhabited trendy gentrified neighbourhoods, neighbourhood schools served as an amenity that helped to bolster community cohesion and contributed to the atmosphere that they were trying to cultivate. As Carla,³ a resident of the fashionable South End neighbourhood, reported, it was the nearness of her local elementary school that most appealed to her. While Carla sent her daughter to a public school, it was the proximity of the school, not its BPS affiliation, that mattered most to her. ‘If we had an amazing private school two blocks away … I’d be making that happen,’ she asserted. Academic excellence was, of course, a key concern for these parents, but the ways in which a high-quality school in the neighbourhood could make their lifestyle, home, and community more valuable were foremost on the minds of many respondents. As Pat, a resident of Dorchester, explained:

now that I am familiar with the school that we happened to get … and we happen to be in the walk zone for it, and it’s fabulous, I consider that a selling factor for the house.

Middle-class parents’ neighbourhood school preferences were guided by community considerations and by convenience factors. Both of these matters came into play for Meredith, a mother of a three-year-old son from Jamaica Plain:

I would love him to go to school down the street or in an area … where we weren’t commuting a huge distance to take him to school or where he wasn’t spending an hour on a bus a day. And … that would be really sweet to be able to have 50% of the kids in his class be local.

Along with voicing their support directly for neighbourhood-oriented student assignment patterns, many parents explicitly opposed the alternative, the busing of students across the city to attend school. Louisa, a resident of Boston’s tight-knit North End neighbourhood, made clear that being able to send her children to a high-quality neighbourhood school was so important that she was adamantly against even applying to a public elementary school several kilometres from her house, even though it is generally considered to be among the best in Boston:

A lot of kids from this neighbourhood go to the [high-performing public school], but I wanted a neighbourhood school. And if I didn’t get it here, I probably would have moved.

For Louisa, the quality of the education that her children would receive was extremely important, and indeed, the neighbourhood school that she settled on does excel in student achievement and has one of the longest waiting lists among elementary schools in BPS. Even so, educational quality was not the sole, or even the top, criterion in her decision-making. Rather, like other components of urban living, she believed that the school should serve to bring members of the neighbourhood together:

I grew up in a small community … And you’re supposed to be able to live and work and shop and go to your library, all in one area.

The fact that her local elementary school was able to serve as a community asset, while still providing her children with a quality education, convinced her that it was the best place to send her kids. Moreover, she contrasted her positive community-based experience in a neighbourhood school with the perceived detriment to community that busing brings about.

While concerns over neighbourhood schooling and outright opposition to the idea of busing were voiced by parents from neighbourhoods across the city, they were most acute in Charlestown, a physically isolated neighbourhood separated from the rest of Boston by the Charles River and Boston Harbor. Charlestown was at the centre of the 1970s busing controversy, as black students bused to Charlestown High School were met with widespread denigration and violent reactions from the neighbourhood’s white residents (see Lukas, 1985). White Charlestown parents, generally from low-income families, who protested school busing in the 1970s, frequently invoked ‘neighbourhood schools’ as a mantra in their opposition to the city’s court-ordered desegregation effort.

In interviews between 2009 and 2012, upper-income parents living in a newly gentrified Charlestown once again frequently adopted the ‘neighbourhood schools’ mantra in discussions of their preferences regarding student assignment, and in particular regarding their vehement opposition to busing. However, respondents were quick to distance their attitudes regarding schooling, race, and busing from the racist image of Charlestown families in past decades. Referring to the factors weighing on Charlestown parents’ decisions about school enrolment and residential location, Emily, a mother of two from the neighbourhood, explained, ‘I think the whole busing sort of situation, and proximity, is a big point for a lot of people.’ Charlotte, a Charlestown resident, explained that part of her reluctance to enrol her children in Charlestown High School revolved around the lack of a local community spirit at the school, which she attributed, in part, to cross-city busing:

It seems to me that most of the kids at Charlestown High are not from Charlestown. So that the busing thing seems like an added kind of bad factor in some way. I mean, I guess in my mind I have this image that you should go to the schools that are right near you, and it makes so much sense to me that [with a neighbourhood school] you’re very involved, and it’s a much more open school, it’s a community.

For residents of Charlestown, the antagonism toward school busing was generally directed at the deleterious effect that they believed it had on community cohesion. Even so, the racial overtones of the appeal for ‘neighbourhood schools’ cannot be ignored, particularly in a neighbourhood like Charlestown, which remains one of the most heavily white areas of Boston, even as it has largely shed its exclusively working-class Irish image. While respondents from Charlestown rarely discussed race explicitly, a shift toward neighbourhood-based students would likely lead to a significant increase in the white population of Charlestown’s schools.

Middle-class respondents did value the idea of ‘choice’, or, in the words of many, ‘having options’. Typically, however, they spoke of their ‘options’ in terms of residential mobility, not in terms of student mobility. With significant financial resources at their disposal, most had the ability to leave the city altogether if they were dissatisfied with the schools available to them. In their quest for schooling ‘options’, they prioritised having a choice in close proximity to their home. Carla, who remarked that she would consider leaving Boston to find higher-quality public schooling options in the suburbs, was ultimately satisfied when she found a top public elementary school near her South End home. She was most excited that the dense community that her family found in the South End would allow her daughter to walk to school, a prospect that she found extremely enticing, and far superior to the possibility of putting her on a bus:

We really, really like the idea … that she could walk to school and walk home … I only took a school bus one year of my life, and I hated it … And the fact that kids in Boston have to spend, you know, 20% of their day for some kids, on a bus, or on transportation, drives me nuts.

Although BPS students are not guaranteed a spot in their local neighbourhood school, the ability to walk to a local school has consistently been used in Boston as a selling-point to affluent families in gentrified neighbourhoods. For example, middle-class families have hosted BPS ‘house parties’ aimed at persuading others to take on the challenge of transforming a local school. At a party in a gentrified section of Jamaica Plain, the Boston Globe (2006) reported that 18 residents, whose ‘professions … could have matched any found in affluent suburbs’, listened as a representative from the office of the mayor ‘urged participants at least to investigate the schools within the 1-mile “walk zone” of their homes.’ While hesitant, many seemed responsive to her overtures:

‘It’s good to know I might not be leaving Boston,’ said Riaz Ahmed, an investment manager and father of a 6-week-old infant. Others at the house party echoed his opinion. Boston schools, once the spur to call a moving van, may yet turn out to be a reason to stay. (Boston Globe, 2006)

Still, despite activist parents’ best efforts to improve and promote their local neighbourhood schools, the BPS lottery left them uncertain that their children would actually be admitted to those schools. This uncertainty served as a disincentive for middle-class parents to engage in this type of family-driven reconstruction of public schools. By reforming the assignment system and moving back toward neighbourhood schools, municipal officials in Boston hoped to satisfy the desires of these types of parents and to spur these kinds of grassroots campaigns to convince middle-class families with children to remain within the city. In the following section I explain how, after several failed attempts to overhaul the city’s student assignment system, municipal leaders in Boston finally succeeded in changing the decades-old zone model in 2013.

The return to neighbourhood-based student assignment in Boston

Civic leaders had for many years been concerned that the uncertainty of the school lottery was dissuading middle-class families from sending their kids to BPS. Mayor Thomas Menino and BPS leaders had made consistent efforts for nearly two decades to overhaul the three-zone model, which was implemented in 1989 and had been maintained nearly intact despite the removal of explicit racial considerations in 1999. Menino, who first took office in 1993, promised as early as 1996 that he would utterly reshape BPS, in particular by changing the student assignment system. He issued a challenge early in his tenure for residents to ‘judge me harshly’ if his reforms were not implemented by 2001 (Anand, 1996).

While he accomplished many of his reforms, the reformulation of the student assignment system remained elusive for years. Despite widespread agreement that the system of cross-city student busing was expensive and inefficient (Vaznis, 2009b), parents and representatives from low-income minority neighbourhoods expressed grave concerns that a return to neighbourhood-based student assignment in a city with vastly unequal schools would end up leaving poor black and Latino students in the lowest-performing schools (Vaznis, 2009a). In 2009, on orders from Mayor Menino, Superintendent Carol Johnson floated a plan to shift from the three-zone model to a new five-zone model; even this relatively modest change, however, sparked a flurry of controversy and was eventually abandoned (see Janey and Ortiz, 2009). Meanwhile, a collection of civil rights organisations that had agreed to partner with Johnson to develop a new plan abruptly withdrew as it became evident that suggested reforms would not reduce inequality or improve poor minority students’ access to high-quality schools (Vaznis, 2010).

Having failed in 2009 to transform the student assignment system, Johnson and Menino tried again in 2011, promising a ‘simpler, more customer-friendly school choice system’ (Vaznis, 2011). Sixteen years after the ‘judge me harshly’ challenge, Menino once more threw down the gauntlet at his annual State of the City address, promising within a year to implement a ‘“radically different” assignment plan that “puts a priority on children attending schools closer to their homes”’ (Boston Globe, 2012).

Menino and Johnson appointed an External Advisory Committee (EAC), consisting of 27 civic leaders from varying backgrounds, to make recommendations on a new plan. This commission and BPS leaders held a series of community forums in neighbourhoods across the city to hear residents’ concerns and to present a series of proposed plans for a new student assignment model (Boston Public Schools, 2012). A divide emerged between different communities in Boston. As the Boston Globe reported from the results of community surveys:

[r]esidents of Charlestown, downtown, parts of Dorchester, East Boston, and West Roxbury are more likely to say they want their children to attend a school in their neighborhood. Those in Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, Mattapan, and Roxbury prioritize safety over proximity. (Ebbert, 2012)

While both BPS and the Globe portrayed these disagreements as merely stochastic neighbourhood-level differences in priorities, they glossed over the profound race and class implications of the results. Indeed, a closer look at the data (Boston Public Schools, 2012) indicates that of the five reasons that survey respondents could select as the ‘most important’ for choosing a school, ‘close to home’ was chosen most frequently by respondents in Downtown Boston, the West End, the North End, North Dorchester, Charlestown, and West Roxbury. With the exception of North Dorchester, these were all among the wealthiest and whitest neighbourhoods in Boston. Meanwhile, the neighbourhoods prioritising safety included Mattapan and Roxbury, the most heavily black neighbourhoods of Boston.

In September, BPS unveiled five proposals for a new student assignment system. Each proposal divided the city into more, and smaller, assignment zones than the three-zone model, all of which would restrict parental choice and would send students, on average, to schools closer to home. The most ambitious proposal scrapped the zone model altogether, instead automatically assigning every student to the school with an open seat closest to his or her home, thus effectively eliminating parental choice altogether (Vaznis and Andersen, 2012). After concerns over the restriction of parental choice were raised by residents of lower-income neighbourhoods, the EAC began to look askance at all five proposals (Vaznis, 2012).

Instead, they became increasingly interested in a new, and fundamentally different, plan offered by an MIT graduate student. This model would use a computer algorithm to give each student at least four schools near his or her home from which to choose. If all four computer-generated choices were deemed ‘low-quality’ according to various academic performance metrics, the model would automatically add at least one higher-quality school to that student’s options (Vaznis, 2012). In February 2013, the EAC overwhelmingly endorsed a variation of this model, known as ‘Home Based: A’, with 20 of the 27 members voting in favour (Vaznis, 2013b). The School Committee approved the proposal in March, and it received ringing endorsements from many civic leaders, including the mayor and the superintendent, who called the plan ‘a groundbreaking transformation’ that ‘finally connects the dots between choice and quality in a system where we are still working to improve our schools’ (Johnson, 2013; see also Vaznis, 2013a).

Others were more tepid in their praise, claiming that the new plan did not go far enough to rein in choice and promote neighbourhood schools. The editorial page of the Boston Globe endorsed the plan as ‘a step forward’ (Boston Globe, 2013), but lamented that, at least initially, the proposal would actually do relatively little to move students into schools closer to their homes. John Connolly, a white city councillor from an affluent, suburban-style neighbourhood of Boston who had recently declared his candidacy for mayor and who had based his mayoral campaign almost exclusively on the promise of a return to a system of neighbourhood schools, denounced the plan as a half-measure:

BPS replaced the current convoluted school lottery with a different convoluted school lottery, and, to make matters worse, they removed walk-zone priority … It is cruel to call this bold reform. (Quoted in Vaznis, 2013a)

Connolly did not get the absolutely neighbourhood-specific student assignment plan that he preferred. Indeed, some remnants of the choice and lottery system will remain in place under the new system. In the long run, however, Home Based: A will return more BPS students to schools near their homes. Given the persistent patterns of class and race segregation in Boston, and the spatially segregated distribution of good schools in the city, this is likely to aggravate class- and race-based educational inequality. Yet it will bring the student assignment system more in line with the preferences of gentrifier parents in affluent neighbourhoods, like those who participated in in-depth interviews for this study. In other words, due to the constraint on choice put into place by this city-driven reform effort, families living in gentrified neighbourhoods will have a stronger chance of getting their children into schools within their own neighbourhoods.

Discussion

Scholars critical of contemporary urban school reform efforts frequently point to the potential for aggravated inequalities that can result from reform measures, and in particular they decry the infusion of market principles into traditionally democratic institutions. Reining in market forces, this logic implies, would help to stave off school-based stratification. Drawing on the recent history of school reform efforts in Boston that worked to narrow, rather than expand, the educational marketplace, however, this paper has demonstrated that the constraint of parental choice may just as easily result in an unequal distribution of educational resources. In other words, neither the extension nor the retraction of choice in public schools must necessarily lead to greater or lesser inequality. Rather, given the local social geography of a place, policies that offer parents greater school choice, as well as those that restrict their autonomy, may both work either to aggravate or mitigate stratification.

For gentrified and gentrifying neighbourhoods in major cities, the availability of a high-quality elementary school serves as an institutional anchor that facilitates the transition to parenthood for those residents who had originally moved to the neighbourhood as single people or childless couples. Given that such a large part of gentrifiers’ experience of the city is neighbourhood-centric, expanding their interactions with a new neighbourhood institution with which they are not yet familiar – the public schooling apparatus – may allay their concerns regarding urban living once they have children, allowing them to maintain the relationships they have already developed and supporting the middle-class urban habitus that they have grown into (Billingham and Kimelberg, 2013). The responses from parents interviewed in this paper, as well as research into the school preferences of gentrifiers by other scholars (Billingham and Kimelberg, 2013; Butler and Robson, 2003; Cucchiara, 2013; Hankins, 2007; Posey, 2012), suggest that middle-class newcomers to urban neighbourhoods prefer nearby schools for their children, at least in part because neighbourhood schools contribute to their attachment to their local gentrified neighbourhoods.

While professional parents in urban areas are frequently supportive of other market-driven components of school reform movements (changes to teacher tenure, merit pay systems, etc.), when it comes to student assignment they frequently advocate constraining, rather than expanding, the educational marketplace. This serves not as an example of free-market infiltration, but rather as an example of exclusionary social closure within urban neighbourhoods (see Parkin, 1979). Student assignment plans that match up with neighbourhood boundaries reinforce the social closure mechanisms inherent in neighbourhood segregation. While comforting to those whose neighbourhood situation provides them with advantages, these policies can have exclusionary and unjust consequences for those whose neighbourhood location denies them such advantages (Wells et al., 2009).

The idea of ‘school choice’ is one of the cornerstones of the national educational reform movement. As it relates to students of colour and students from lower-SES families, school choice is portrayed as a civil rights issue, and as a remedy for the social closure practices that the privileged engage in when they send their children to elite private schools whose high tuitions shut out those who cannot pay, or when they move to high-status suburban communities where municipal boundaries wall out underprivileged urban students (Schneider et al., 2000). In much of the Friedmanian rhetoric surrounding educational reform in the United States, then, opening up more options for students – that is, introducing more competition into the educational market – is seen as the best way to promote families’ liberty (Chubb and Moe, 1990).

For higher-status families living in these same lacklustre public school districts, however, the simple formula that choice equals quality becomes more complicated. The confluence of residential segregation in US cities and neighbourhood school student assignment patterns often results in highly segregated school systems with disparate outcomes between schools in neighbourhoods with different economic and demographic compositions (Logan et al., 2008). Like tuition-based private schooling and the overlapping of municipal boundaries and school district boundaries, neighbourhood-based student assignment works as a social closure mechanism. By widening the reach of school catchment areas and moving away from strict neighbourhood-based assignment patterns, districts can attempt to level the playing field. While improving the educational opportunities for families who would otherwise be disadvantaged, liberal school choice can have the perverse (in the minds of many middle-class parents) consequence of giving seats in higher-performing schools within gentrified neighbourhoods to students who do not live in those neighbourhoods. By consequence, non-neighbourhood children sometimes (too frequently, according to many middle-class Bostonians) take classroom seats away from neighbourhood children. In the eyes of the municipal officials whose work was profiled in this paper, as well as most of the parents that Kimelberg and I interviewed, the proper solution to the problem of inadequate neighbourhood schools is not to give parents options beyond their local neighbourhoods, but rather to bring all local schools up to higher standards. But as long as urban residential neighbourhoods remain segregated by race and class, and as long as local school quality tends to be positively correlated with neighbourhood economic status, such a strategy is likely to perpetuate inequality in families’ access to the best schools. Thus, despite critics’ claims that market-driven reforms provide added privilege to affluent urbanites, the evidence from Boston suggests that the retraction of market-driven policies does not necessarily counteract urban inequality.

This is not to say that the infusion of more market-oriented policies into public education does not ever lead to aggravated inequality. Indeed, the ways in which increased parental choice of schools can facilitate the widening of educational disparities has been well documented (e.g. Roda and Wells, 2013; Sohoni and Saporito, 2009). Rather, I argue simply that the potential for inequality that often accompanies greater parental choice should not lead scholars and policymakers to the corollary conclusion that a restriction of parental choice automatically engenders greater equality in schools. It does not. With their prodigious stocks of economic, social, and cultural capital, upper-middle-class families tend to be able to navigate whatever educational landscape they encounter and reserve the most coveted spots for their own children.

Within the specific context of gentrifying urban neighbourhoods, where the cachet of the neighbourhood itself contributes to the urban living experience, the elimination or retrenchment of market forces through the curtailment of parental choice can work to exacerbate inequality in urban schooling. By advocating for a return to local school catchment areas, gentrifier families engage in a process of exclusionary social closure, preserving the resources that they provide to their local schools for their own children and working to limit outsiders’ access to those privileged elementary and secondary schools.

It is not necessarily the intrusion of the market into the public domain that leads to educational stratification in cities, but rather the operation of exclusionary social closure mechanisms championed by affluent urban residents and implemented by municipalities eager to use public schools as an amenity designed to attract and retain prosperous families. This does not mean, however, that the curtailing of choice represents a retreat from neoliberal intrusion into the urban landscape. Rather, to the extent that the manipulation of student assignment policies to appeal to current and potential gentrifiers represents an attempt at ‘selling’ the city to the middle class, it can be viewed as a crucial component of urban neoliberalism (see Hackworth, 2007). Student assignment policies are inherently bound up with conflicts over urban space, and to the extent that cities’ efforts to appeal to affluent parents’ preferences for exclusive, high-quality neighbourhood schools reflect attempts to protect and bolster home values, the curtailment of market pressure (manifested in the ‘choice’ mechanism) actually goes hand-in-hand with the broader neoliberal project of gentrification. Thus, critical scholars and activists seeking to curb rising inequality should broaden their focus, concentrating not just on ‘choice’ in urban education, but more holistically on the various sources of exclusionary social closure and neoliberal encroachment within contemporary American cities.

Regardless of the degree to which parents have choices regarding which school their children will attend, student assignment policies can foster inequality if the desires of gentrifiers and other middle-class residents are explicitly or implicitly privileged over those of low-income and working-class residents. Significant progress has been made toward understanding how market-oriented choice programmes have led to increased inequalities in cities nationwide (e.g. Orfield and Frankenberg, 2013), yet there is less evidence about the ramifications of a return to neighbourhood schools in stratified and segregated cities. Future research should examine the various and often conflicting ways in which the changing demographics of gentrifying cities intersect with evolving school district policies to affect educational inequalities, including disparities in student achievement and attainment, differential provision of school resources, and racial segregation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Shelley McDonough Kimelberg, Meghan Doran, Hava Rachel Gordon, and the anonymous Urban Studies reviewers for insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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