“To Be Strict on Your Own”: Black and Latinx Parents Evaluate Discipline in Urban Choice Schools

School Sites

During the 2012–2013 school year, the first author conducted fieldwork at Dream Academy, ² a high-performing no-excuses charter school in a medium-sized, deindustrialized Northeastern city. The city at the time had limited school choice options: Only three other charter schools existed, including one that had been placed on probation. The year before, three charter schools in the city had been closed for disciplinary problems, low attendance, and poor student performance. As such, Dream Academy was an oversubscribed charter option; it served roughly 250 students in Grades 5 to 8 and had a waiting list with roughly the same number of students. Two thirds of Dream Academy students were Black and one third were Latinx; 84% qualified for free or reduced school lunch. The school staff, by contrast, was predominantly White, middle-class, female, and relatively new to teaching, including seven Teach for America teachers and alumni. The previous year, Dream Academy retained less than 50% of its teachers, its lowest retention rate since the school started, reflecting the demanding work culture and high teacher turnover rates found in other no-excuses schools (Torres, 2014).

As a self-proclaimed no-excuses school, Dream Academy closely followed no-excuses practices, including an extended school day and year, data-driven instruction, intensive teacher coaching, and a highly structured disciplinary system. From the moment students entered the school, they were greeted by a handshake and then required to walk on a specific tiled square in the hallways in silent, straight, forward-facing lines. They were escorted in and out of their classrooms; forbidden from wearing bracelets, necklaces, and patterned socks; and given special hand signals to request tissues, pencils, water, and bathroom privileges. Reflecting the school’s sweating-the-small-stuff approach, school behavioral records from the 2012–2013 school year indicated that teachers assigned over 15,000 infractions; on average, students received approximately one infraction every 3 days. The most common infractions during the 2012–2013 school year were for not submitting homework (N = 5,399), not following directions (N = 2,653), and talking at inappropriate times (N = 1,687; Golann, 2016). Nearly three quarters of these infractions resulted in a detention. Out-of-school suspensions were much less common. In Dream Academy’s second and third years, 15% and 17% of students were suspended, respectively, but in 2012–2013, Dream Academy reduced these suspensions to 8%. The student attrition rate (i.e., the number of students who left the school prior to the end of the school year) in 2012–2013 was 3%.

The second author conducted a year of fieldwork in 2013–2014 at two public Montessori magnet schools in another medium-sized, deindustrialized Northeastern city with follow-up visits at the second school in 2014–2015. While she had no prior connections to her research site, a collaboration with Birch’s principal on a school project in another city facilitated permission to conduct research at both school sites. The two schools were part of a system of 48 interdistrict magnet schools, a handful of charter schools and roughly a dozen neighborhood schools, and were among the most sought-after choices in the district, maintaining long waiting lists. Birch Montessori enrolled roughly 250 students, approximately a third Black, one fifth Latinx, 30% White, 10% Asian, and 5% multiracial or other; a third qualified for free or reduced school lunch. At Vine Montessori, approximately one quarter of students were Black and one third were Latinx, one quarter were White, 10% were Asian, and 5% were multiracial or other; nearly half of the students qualified for free or reduced school lunch. ³ Though both schools were more racially diverse than Dream Academy, they still enrolled a majority of students of color. At the time, Birch went from preschool to sixth grade while Vine went from preschool to fourth grade. The school administrators and staff were racially diverse, but there were only three teachers of color across the two school campuses.

Like the no-excuses school, and in contrast to the popular perception that Montessori enables children to do whatever they want, Birch and Vine followed Montessori practices in order to create highly structured learning spaces. Teachers delivered Montessori lessons that each repeated a series of prescribed movements in sequence. Even the smallest behaviors were taught in this way such as pushing in a chair and putting work away. Children practiced the silence game to learn to move quietly through the classroom without disturbing their classmates’ work. In contrast to Dream Academy’s use of infractions, however, Vine and Birch Montessori relied on proactive approaches to maintain this system of order including explicit lessons on behavior, peer modeling, and natural consequences. Such classroom practices were supported by a pull-out positive-behavior intervention specialist supplied by the district, though few students spent time in his office. This system paid off in a relatively small number of serious disciplinary incidents, although parents sometimes still expressed concern about disruptive children. Birch Montessori had six suspensions that year (all were Black students) for a suspension rate of 3.2%, which was one sixth the overall rate of the district. Vine Montessori Magnet had zero suspensions. While student attrition data were not included on state reports, Birch lost 20 elementary students the previous year (approximately 9% of the student body) after many years of low attrition, and school staff were trying to understand the cause.

Data Collection

In order to connect with parents, both authors attended a number of parent association meetings and observed formal and informal gatherings, including parent-teacher conferences, drop-off and pickup, and school events. To supplement our ethnographic observation, we interviewed 25 Black and Latinx parents from Dream Academy and 28 Black and Latinx parents at Vine and Birch Montessori schools. To sample parents, the second author used a random number generator linked to the roster of families and selected 50 families to interview. She interviewed 43 parents from 31 families, plus an additional 7 interviews purposively sampled by selecting parents who were parent association volunteers or spent a significant amount of time at school. For this article, she analyzed the responses of the 28 Black and Latinx parents interviewed. The first author recruited parent interviewees through letters sent home with students in the two fifth- and eighth-grade classes she regularly observed as well as through in-person solicitations during parent-teacher conferences. Although the parents we interviewed cannot generalize to represent the parents in the school population, both authors observed that parents had a range of perspectives around discipline and expressed varying levels of satisfaction with the schools overall.

Our article is one of the first to examine how a socioeconomically diverse group of urban Black and Latinx parents perceive school choice options after enrollment. Because many working-class and low-income parents are often faced with constraints in choosing schools (Rhodes & DeLuca, 2014; Smrekar, 1996), we suggest that more can be learned about parental preferences by shifting focus to the postenrollment period.

As Table 1 shows, the no-excuses sample included 18 working-class and 7 middle-class parents, while the Montessori sample included 16 working-class and 12 middle-class parents. ⁴ In terms of race and ethnicity, the no-excuses sample had 22 Black and 3 Latinx parents while the Montessori sample had 19 Black and 9 Latinx parents. By interviewing both middle-class and working-class Black and Latinx parents, we include a broader sample of parents than previous studies of parenting and school choice, which have focused largely on working-class Black and Latinx families. In our analysis, however, we did not observe significant differences in how parents’ social class affected their disciplinary preferences, nor did we note significant differences between Black and Latinx parents, although our small sample size for each group limited this analysis.

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Table 1

Parent Interview Sample

Characteristic	Dream Academy (“No-Excuses”)	Birch and Vine (Montessori)	Total
Race/ethnicity
Black	22	19	41
Latinx	3	9	12
Social class
Working-class	18	16	34
Middle-class	7	12	19
Residence
Urban	25	23	48
Suburban	0	5	5
Total no. of interviews	25	28	53
Activities observed	Parent meetings, parent-teacher conferences, parent activities at school	Parent meetings, formal and informal parent gatherings including student drop-off and pickup

Interviews were semistructured and covered topics such as school choice, perception of school practices, and parents’ participation, satisfaction, and connectedness to other parents. ⁵ All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed and ranged from 20 minutes to over 2 hours with follow-up conversations with several interviewees to check emerging findings. As an Asian middle-class female and a White middle-class female, the first and second authors both were of different racial backgrounds than the parent sample interviewed for this study. This difference may have limited rapport and candor around topics relating to race, although our frequent school presence and the fact that we were known to their children helped them to feel more comfortable with us. In the majority of interviews, parents were forthcoming about both school discipline and discipline at home. Throughout the research, we reflected individually and together about the way in which our interviewees’ comfort and discomfort with us may have influenced that data we collected.

Analysis

Because we treated our data as two separate case studies, we first separately analyzed our data, each taking an inductive approach to coding and analysis to understand participants’ views. We then each generated an extensive list of focused codes through several rounds of iterative coding, which was subsequently refined and grouped into thematic categories. Through several rounds of discussion, we agreed upon three thematic categories that incorporated the majority of the codes related to how parents’ perceived school discipline: behavioral discipline, self-discipline (where we included self-advocacy), and academic discipline.

There are a few differences in our samples that we wanted to highlight. First, Dream Academy was a middle school while Birch and Vine included a preschool and elementary school. The age differences between the children might influence how parents evaluate forms of discipline, for example, they might prefer more structure when children are younger. Second, Dream Academy was a charter school while Birch and Vine were interdistrict magnet schools. For some parents, these school types figured in their selection process, although this distinction was not salient in their discussion of school discipline. Third, Birch and Vine as magnets were required to draw a racially diverse set of parents from a city and surrounding suburbs, and as a result, they had more White families as well as lower levels of poverty among families than Dream Academy. This led us to carefully examine whether the patterns we were seeing were related to racial and social class differences.

Like Cucchiara and Horvat (2009), we see opportunities alongside the challenges of combining two case studies, in the ability to expand our theoretical understanding of discipline across a broader set of families and sites. We used the differences in our cases to both highlight variation in parents’ understandings of school structures and to identify common patterns found across schools. In the findings, we sought out and represented discrepant cases to address threats to theoretical validity, attending to possible variation by parents’ social class and race/ethnicity, as well as students’ grade level and type of school attended. We triangulated what parents told us about school disciplinary practices and structures with what we observed during our school visits. Finally, we engaged in a process of review and reflection with colleagues and each other (Patton, 2005; Rubin & Babbie, 2016).

Behavioral Discipline

Parents at both the no-excuses and Montessori schools saw one important aspect of discipline as teaching students to follow rules. They viewed this both in terms of creating a safe and orderly environment for learning within the school as well as preparing their children to follow societal rules outside of school. We saw similar preferences articulated among the Black and Latinx parents we interviewed in both types of schools despite differences in the ages of students at each school, and the varying school racial and socioeconomic compositions.

As described earlier, both the no-excuses and Montessori schools had elaborately structured behavioral expectations. These systems of rules were praised by parents as providing their children with an orderly environment that was a welcome change from the relative lack of safety and order many of their children had experienced in neighborhood schools. Sharae, a working-class Black single mother, heavily researched her choice prior to enrolling her children at Dream Academy. “I was looking . . . into Dream Academy and I said, how was it organized, how was it structured, why is it structured?” Having been through boot camp herself as an adult, she felt that Dream Academy’s “boot camp” structure would be beneficial for her sixth-grade son.

Parents at Birch and Vine Montessori also noticed the order in their schools, commenting on the quiet that pervaded the schools and the number of students on task. Oliver, a middle-class, Black parent with a preschool-age daughter, noted how “they’re able to learn more because there really isn’t an interruption” in contrast to his own experience as a child in the district where “you’re just waiting for that interruption.” Several working-class Latinx parents admiringly described Montessori students as “little working machines” in the classrooms and “little soldiers” as they lined up to go to the lunch room. They valued a behavioral system that taught their children to be quiet and follow the rules.

Beside providing order in school, parents also recognized that learning to follow rules and learning to defer to authority were important skills in the workplace, especially for the working-class jobs that many of these parents held (Bernstein, 1971; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). Laquana, a working-class Black single mother of three boys, had no problem with Dream Academy’s strict rules because she felt that “there’s rules everywhere.” Unlike some other parents, she accepted that children should comply with rules at school just as adults have to follow rules at work. “I mean, like if they don’t bring their homework in, they get detention. You have to do your homework,” she commented. “You have to show up to work when you get older. You have to clock in at a certain time or whatever.” Other parents related school rules to having to wear work uniforms or having to restrain oneself in a meeting. Steph, a middle-class Black Dream Academy mother who worked as a client services manager, understood that even if students disliked or disagreed with the school’s expectations, rules were part of the reality they would need to learn to accept. “Wherever you go, there’s always going to be rules that you’re going to have to follow that you may not agree with 100% of the time,” she said. “But even as adults we deal with it and we go from there.”

However, while parents were supportive of the schools having clear behavioral expectations and teaching children to follow rules, they also felt that there should be reasonable limits to the rules. In this regard, Black and Latinx parents were satisfied with the ordered environment combined with student autonomy at the public Montessori school, particularly in contrast to the zero-tolerance policies used by other urban schools (Losen, 2014). It was striking that Black and Latinx parents at the two public Montessori magnet schools made few comments about disciplinary interventions, except to note their absence in the Montessori setting. Rita, a middle-class Black mother whose daughter attended Birch until fifth grade, favorably observed the disciplinary contrast between Birch Montessori and the urban public school where she worked where “our first response typically appears to be ‘okay, you’re suspended.’” Birch, in her view was “more child–appropriate,” and she wished that these types of school environments were the norm rather than the exception. Recalling a conversation with a fellow educator on the disciplinary practices of the local no-excuses charter in the city, her colleagues argued that a military-style model worked for African American children because it reflected what they experience at home. Rita felt that her child’s Montessori experience had allowed her to question this assumption, one she otherwise might have agreed with:

Why is it that a certain population have to have so much structure in order to be successful compared to another population? And then why is it that the school, or, it’s almost like the government, has to be the ones kind of like dictating and saying what that structure needs to look like?

Experiencing the environment of a public Montessori school led Rita to question a strict disciplinary model for children of color and its implementation by schools and local and state governments.

While we expected parents in the no-excuses schools to show stronger support for strict behavioral discipline, especially as they had selected into this model, we found that more than three quarters (N = 19/25) of parents we interviewed at the no-excuses school expressed uneasiness over the school’s sweating-the-small-stuff behavioral approach and the assigning of consequences for minor misbehaviors. While researchers have found that schools that enroll predominantly students of color are more likely to have strict disciplinary codes and high levels of security (J. D. Finn & Servoss, 2014; Losen, 2014; Servoss & Finn, 2014), our findings of parental dissatisfaction complicate earlier studies that suggest that parents deliberately choose these schools for their strict structure (Calvo, 2007; Schneider et al., 1998). By interviewing parents after their children enrolled, our study reveals a more nuanced understanding of parental preferences regarding discipline that parents were better able to articulate as they became more familiar with the school’s practices.

Esmeralda, a middle-class Latinx mother who had enrolled her daughter in Dream Academy upon a teacher’s recommendation, grew frustrated with the constant calls she received from the school about her daughter’s behavior. One time, she was told that her sixth-grade daughter was being benched (a form of in-school suspension where students wear a yellow shirt and lose privileges like talking with other students) for laughing during a fire drill. Another time it was for humming. She recounted a phone conversation she had with the school over the incident:

I said, “Wait, did she”—I said, “Did she curse?” No. I said, “Did she disrespect another student?” No. I said, “Did she disrespect you?” No. She was humming. I said, “Okay, what did she do all day?” She was working all day. I said, “She hummed. She was happy. Don’t call me again.” I did not feel bad when I hung up.

Although she went on to tell her daughter to comply with school rules, in her phone conversation, she demonstrated resistance to school practices, feeling that the school went too far in imposing such a rule-bound culture. In a highly structured context, parents sought a balance for the right amount of rules, and readily perceived when rule-following became excessive and beyond what was required for order.

In cases where rules seemed racially weighted, parents came to view the system of behavioral discipline as an intrusion rather than a necessity. Lanita, a Black mother who worked as a secretary, bristled at what she saw as the school trying to take over as in loco parentis in disciplining children. Invoking metaphors of White do-gooders, Lanita recounted a lunchtime incident in which the principal, a White man, yelled in her eighth-grade son’s face for refusing to pick up an Oreo ⁶ , which her son insisted was not his. Lanita criticized the principal for treating her son as though he controlled him:

My child is not your slave. [The principal] just thinks—I always say he think he’s the “great White hope” to come save the Black folks, that’s what I think he thinks about himself. It’s just his arrogance that I don’t like . . . Don’t feel like you doing me a favor, ‘cause I appreciate what the school is doing, but it’s not just you.

While supportive overall of the school’s behavioral efforts, Lanita saw a racial power dynamic in play when White teachers and administrators treated Black children as though they were “saving” them. Rayna, another working-class Black mother, expected her sixth-grade son to be respectful and follow rules, and saw the school as overstepping its place in trying to regulate her son’s behaviors. “Don’t just act like they’re, like you raising—I don’t know how to say it—I can’t even, I don’t even know what they’re trying to do,” she began. “I’m not sending him to get babysit, for you to tell him to do this and do that.” Parents like these interpreted the school’s disciplinary practices as going beyond maintaining order to encroaching on what they saw as the parents’ primary responsibility to teach their children how to behave.

Despite the pedagogical differences of the Montessori and no-excuses schools, and their differences of student age and socioeconomic and racial composition, across schools, the Black and Latinx parents we interviewed wanted the same thing. They appreciated how behavioral systems of rules resulted in a safe and quiet learning environment for their children; they also wanted rules and consequences that were logical and not punitive. The parents in the Montessori setting were satisfied, but the no-excuses parents felt uncomfortable when the school seemed overly focused on behavior management.

Self-Discipline

Researchers have observed that Montessori and other progressive pedagogies offering higher levels of student freedom are popular urban options for middle-class White families (E. Brown & Makris, 2018; Debs, 2019) while no-excuses schools primarily serve Black and Latinx low-income students (Furgeson et al., 2012). In our school sites, the enrollment of between 25% and 30% White students in the Montessori magnet schools and the near-complete absence of White students at Dream Academy confirmed the first part of this pattern, but in contrast to previous research, the Black and Latinx parents we interviewed at the no-excuses school also valued structures that developed self-reliance in their children. Parental preference for discipline thus was not simply a matter of wanting their kids to learn to conform to rules; it was also about helping them make their own responsible choices that would help them to be strong self-advocates out in the world. While cultivating children’s self-advocacy skills has been associated with middle-class parenting styles (Lareau, 2003), and therefore we might have expected it to be prioritized more by parents in the socioeconomically diverse Montessori magnet schools, we found that both middle-class and working-class Black and Latinx families at both sets of schools saw benefits to their children developing their own agency. With respect to self-control and self-advocacy, parents at the Montessori schools expressed satisfaction with the school approach, while a number of the Dream Academy parents were critical.

At the two public Montessori schools, children were given frequent opportunities to build their self-control through long 3-hour work blocks during which children from the youngest ages chose their own work from a series of lessons that they had previously been given, chose how long they spent on each project, and chose when they took breaks. The morning snack was even put out family style, and children were expected to regulate their portion size so that everyone would have enough food. At older ages, children could go work in small groups in the hallways or outside. Simone, a middle-class Black mother whose children attended the Montessori magnet from preschool through the middle of elementary school, remembered being struck by her first time observing in a Montessori classroom. “They were so quiet, and they were so busy,” she noted.

And I saw them moving around the classroom, every now and again being guided by a teacher, but more often like they knew what they were supposed to do and they just did it . . . so I was in awe that children at that age could manage themselves.

Even though none of these parents described seeking out Birch and Vine specifically to cultivate self-control, their experiences in Montessori magnet schools helped them to recognize its value.

In addition to self-regulation, Montessori parents also praised the freedom and autonomy granted to their students that allowed them to work independently, learning skills that they felt would be valuable in the long term. Just as the children learned to initiate their lessons at school as well as complete practical life activities in class (e.g., cutting an apple, putting on their own coat, sweeping, and washing dishes), children also wanted to practice these skills at home. Shawn, a single Black father who was not employed, noticed how his 7-year-old son insisted on making his own sandwiches, observing that he had “done gained that independence where he want to do everything on his own. He don’t really want you to help him.” In response to frequent skepticism by friends and family, Kayla, a Black single mother with two daughters in preschool and third grade at Birch observed that “some people were just a little put off by the fact that they had so much freedom . . . ’cause some people don’t equate freedom with structure. And sometimes it works. In this setting, it works.” In her view, the Montessori classroom could be a structured space of explicit behavioral and academic expectations while still giving children a significant amount of freedom.

As a result of such autonomy, parents in the public Montessori schools noted their children’s level of confidence, even at very young ages. Kayla noticed how comfortable her daughters were speaking to other adults: “People have conversations with them and won’t even realize that [she’s] 5 years old . . . because of the stuff they talk about and how well they speak.” Similarly, Asuncion, a Latinx mother who worked as a nursing home assistant, observed her daughters’ academic self-assurance:

She teaches me also, she corrects me. And then I come and I confirm with the teacher and she says, “No, she was right, this is how we do it in school.” And I still learn along with my 5-year old.

Parents felt such self-assurance and the increasing freedom granted to students paid off in the long term, as students learned to speak up and initiate conversations and activities, echoing research on the link between Montessori, executive functioning skills, and long-term academic success (Diamond & Lee, 2011; Lillard & Else-Quest, 2006; Rathunde & Csikszentmihalyi, 2005). In one elementary classroom, students planned, cooked, and decorated for a surprise bridal shower for their teacher without any parent assistance. Fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students planned their own field trips several times a year based on interests they had developed in the classroom.

Although Dream Academy served older students in the fifth through eighth grades, the school gave students far fewer opportunities to exercise self-discipline. In the classroom, for example, teachers dictated when students could talk, leave their seats, raise their hand to participate, or ask questions during the lesson. This tight monitoring of student behavior was particularly frustrating to parents like Wesley, who pointed out that this might discourage students seeking help: “When [my seventh grader] finds out she can’t raise her hand or get the attention or the help she gets very frustrated and so she clams up.” As a middle-class Black father who had attended a New York City private school, he believed always being quiet was counterproductive to student learning. This is consistent with research: Students’ help-seeking behaviors result in more attention from teachers and greater learning opportunities (Calarco, 2011; Streib, 2011). Similarly, Lanisha, a working-class Black mother of an eighth-grade girl at Dream Academy, noticed that the students seemed withdrawn from their learning. As someone who regularly mentored a group of female students in the school, she was more enmeshed in the school community than the typical parent. “Even in the class that they’re cut off, you know, and that’s kind of embarrassing,” she remarked. “That’s kind of like, ‘I don’t have a voice, I don’t matter’ type of thing that the kids could be feeling.” Although she professed to otherwise liking the school and its staff, she thought it was important for students to have opportunities to speak up.

This absence of opportunities for self-advocacy led Dream Academy parents to be apprehensive that their children would grow up to become what some Black parents called “robots” or “little mindless minion[s], just going by what somebody says.” It made them concerned that their children were being trained with the wrong skills for their ultimate educational goal. As Tiffany, a working-class Black parent of an eighth-grader, explained, “The kids aren’t trying to go to the Army. They’re trying to go to college. And there’s a difference.” Tiffany recognized that colleges expect students to show more initiative, as they need to independently manage their work, approach their professors during office hours, and participate in class discussions (Collier & Morgan, 2008; Karp & Bork, 2012). She expressed concerns that disciplinary structures never changed for her daughter throughout her time at Dream Academy. “Maybe when they get older you can, like, loosen up on some of the rules,” she suggested. “They’re going to high school next year—make these rules have a purpose. [By seventh grade], it’s kind of hard to accept rules that you kind of see as dumb, and why do they have it?” For this parent, the persistence of rules throughout Dream Academy’s middle school felt like an increasing mismatch with the preparation necessary for high school and college.

The lack of opportunities for self-advocacy also made parents concerned that their children were missing out on skills they would need to learn in order to be active, engaged citizens. Cherisse, a middle-class Black parent and an elementary school teacher, sought to raise her fifth-grade daughter with the same principles of self-representation and solidarity that guided her own choice to participate in her teachers’ union: “I don’t want anybody to dictate. I want my child to feel like she’s in a democracy,” she declared.

Did you use your voice? That’s what I’m trying to teach her. Will it always come out the way want it? No. But you can’t say too much if you don’t get up and be a part of it and don’t let anybody silence you. Not even your teacher.

Consistent with Cherisse’s perspective, educational scholars have questioned whether the highly regulated environment of no-excuses schools prepares students to express their opinions, challenge authority, or collaborate with others, skills needed to participate in a democratic society (Ben-Porath, 2013; Lamboy & Lu, 2017).

Just over half (N = 13/25) of Dream Academy parents expressed reservations that the school’s tight controls did not afford their children sufficient opportunity to develop independence, have a voice, or learn to advocate for themselves. Others, however, felt that it was less important that children at this age learn to speak up, like Itsairis, a working-class Black mother:

You don’t need any freedom [in fifth grade]. Freedom in the wrong hands at that age is dangerous, so no . . . The way it is for . . . elementary and middle school is fine, because I feel like it can discipline them enough to be able to handle high school without getting caught up in the fun of it, you know?

These parents instead hoped that a structured school environment would put their child on what one parent termed “that structured path”—in other words, their child would develop the kind of habits early in life that would help them be self-reliant and self-disciplined later on when those structures were no longer present. Zakia, a middle-class Black mother of an eighth-grade student, felt that trying to impose such structure on older children would have adverse effects: “They would probably all lose their minds and drop out of school.” Rather, by “spoon-feeding [the younger students], little by little” and showing students that their actions had consequences, Dream Academy could teach them the foundations they needed later to be able “to be strict on your own . . . be self-sufficient and you know, set rules and standards for themselves.” At the Montessori schools, parents saw their children exercising self-discipline on a daily basis at a young age. At Dream Academy, parents had to trust that the behavioral discipline exercised on their preadolescent and adolescent children would someday yield internal control.

Academic Discipline

In addition to teaching students how to follow rules and how to become self-reliant, parents viewed discipline in relation to academic preparation and rigor. At a basic level, parents saw both sets of schools as providing an orderly environment for learning that contrasted with children’s experiences in other schools. However, at Dream Academy, a demanding and strict school environment coupled with the school’s explicit focus on college signaled strict academic discipline and translated to parents as high academic expectations, whereas at the two Montessori schools, greater academic freedom along with the absence of explicit discussion of academic outcomes were worrisome to some Black and Latinx parents.

Dream Academy’s pervasive college pendants and college-themed murals made the school’s academic discipline highly visible. Each classroom was named after a college, and each grade was labeled by the year of their college graduation (e.g., Class of 2024). While Dream Academy parents might have had some conflicts with the school’s disciplinary regulation, they were also reassured that the intense academic discipline, as demonstrated by strict homework and academic expectations, led directly to the school’s clear promise of a college education and upward mobility, a promise that was far more explicit than at the public Montessori schools. During the first open house for families, Ciani, one working-class Black mother, recalled how the school director at Dream Academy told her, “It’s not my job to get your [seventh grader] to the next grade. It’s my job to get him to college.” She thought this perspective was “good thinking” in the sense that “that’s your end goal and that’s what you want.”

Dream Academy staff also explicitly linked school behavioral rules and practices to academic discipline and college preparation, reminding students that “self-control will get you to college” or defending the school’s lateness policy by explaining that college applications would not be accepted if they were a minute late. Even parents articulated these connections. The school, for example, had a homework rule of “neat, complete, on-time, and best effort” where students who turned in assignments with a missing header, a problem left blank, or crinkled pages received no homework credit and a same-day detention. Echoing what teachers told students, Tikia, a Black single mother of four, said of these rules,

It’s teaching them that little things do count. If you go to college, when you go to college . . . if your professor has told you this is how I want it done and you don’t do it that way, they’re not gonna accept it. So I feel like everything is to prepare them for their future.

She approved of the school’s strict policies and practices as keeping children accountable and responsible, preparing them for what she took to be the expectations of a college professor, even if colleges in reality have more flexible expectations than secondary schools (Collier & Morgan, 2008; Karp & Bork, 2012).

For parents who themselves had not attended college, they trusted that these college-educated teachers knew how to get their children there. As Itsairis, a working-class Black parent of a fifth-grade girl, explained, “I’m not a teacher; I didn’t go to school for that. I’m just kind of trusting their way.” Echoing this sentiment, Laquana, the working-class Black mother who recognized that rules were everywhere, defended the teachers to her son as “all hav[ing] their diplomas and college degrees. They’re helping you get there.” Consequently, in these parents’ view, the drawbacks of Dream Academy’s disciplinary practices were far outweighed by both promised future benefits and immediate benefits that they saw in their own children’s academic growth. For example, Esmeralda, the mother who had asked the school to stop calling her, felt responsible for her daughter’s suffering from the stress of school, but she acknowledged that her daughter’s reading abilities had increased dramatically as had her self-discipline in doing her homework each day immediately upon arriving home. The academic rigor of the no-excuses school was perceived as so valuable that many parents deprioritized their child’s discomfort—and at times their own—in favor of persisting.

Similarly, at the Montessori elementary schools, we found that parents were concerned about academic progress, as well as preparing their children for the next level of education. At Birch and Vine Montessori, roughly half of parents positively assessed their child’s academic discipline and progress, particularly in contrast to their peers at neighboring schools. For example, Jacqueline, a middle-class Black mother, appreciated that the teachers knew

that the children are limitless as far as their learning potential is concerned. They don’t hold them back, they will push them as hard as they need to go. So my daughter was counting to a hundred at 3 and a thousand by 4. By 5, she was doing square roots and some division.

For Alejandro, a working-class Latinx father, the comparison was made explicit by looking at the academic progress of relatives, for example,

My nephew don’t know how . . . to read that much. I mean my son can read a book, a 100 pages book in no time. And my nephew, I can give him a 10 pages book and he can be there for 3, 4 hours reading a book.

For these parents, their children were excelling academically, and exceeding their own educational expectations.

But the other half of Black and Latinx parents interviewed at Birch and Vine Montessori magnet had a different take. The remaining parents, from a variety of social class backgrounds, but many with children in the later elementary grades rather than preschool grades, felt their children were not mastering the necessary academic discipline. Both Birch and Vine followed a common Montessori practice of not assigning homework beyond nightly reading throughout elementary school. Yet four parents from a variety of class backgrounds requested homework, in violation of the schools’ no-homework policies.

Working at the student’s pace, which Montessori teachers heralded as a benefit of the approach, could be viewed by the Black and Latinx parents we interviewed as not pushing their children to a high standard (Delpit, 1988). Natalie, a single Latinx mother whose parents took care of her children while she worked as a medical technician, worried that “learning at their own pace . . . might end up not letting her [daughter] go as far as she can.” Natalie was concerned that the school put too much burden on children to motivate themselves: “The [Montessori] teacher would say ‘oh, I wish you would try to challenge yourself a little more’ whereas [at] another school, they would be challenging her more.” Christopher, a middle-class Latinx father who wanted his children to be directed toward significant career goals, also worried that Montessori offered too much freedom of choice. “I just really hope they choose well,” he noted. These comments were notable given that both Montessori schools had significant racial test score gaps beginning with state testing in third grade, though in interviews, no administrators or parents explicitly referenced these “opportunity gaps” (Carter & Welner, 2013) between White and Black/Latinx children and instead focused on efforts to improve parent understanding of Montessori in order to help them better support their children academically.

Interviews and observations, however, revealed that parents had attended numerous education sessions on the Montessori pedagogy but remained concerned. Many of the Black and Latinx parents interviewed considered their own success in traditional school as the reason for their economic advancement, and wanted the school to directly support their children in reaching these same goals. While it is a common desire for parents to hope their children will match their success, for some Black and Latinx parents, this ambition was rooted in their racial experience and identity. Rita, the middle-class Black mother who learned to appreciate the more flexible Montessori structures, aspired to give her daughter “opportunity that we weren’t afforded” and viewed extracurricular activities like piano, violin, softball, and basketball part of what she termed, “trying to make up for history.” In this context, academic achievement carried the additional baggage of past discrimination. A sense that academic discipline was too relaxed was perceived as risky, giving too much power to the child to make the right decisions instead of holding the adults responsible for ensuring that their children were pushed to a consistent high standard.

These parents needed reassurance that their children would be prepared for middle school and on track for college. In contrast to the pervasiveness of college culture at Dream Academy, there was, by intention, little mention of college or even middle school preparedness at Birch or Vine, in part because of the preschool and elementary age-group and also the Montessori philosophy of learning for its own sake rather than for external rewards and punishments. Yet the lack of explicit school discourse around academic success in the school created additional uncertainty for some Black and Latinx parents. Simone, who had marveled at the self-controlled students she observed in a Montessori classroom, ultimately pulled her children out of Birch midway through elementary school because she was concerned that her children were “leveling out behind their peers.” She found silence from the school regarding outcomes after Montessori. “I want to see the graduates. I want to hear what the graduates are doing. What they, where life took them? Where their careers took them?” Similarly, Christopher, the Latinx father who was focused on career goals, worried that the school’s emphasis on gardening was coming at the expense of skills that his daughter needed for long-term success:

I’m trying to prepare her for like modern day stuff like technology, computers and all these advances and medicine, and they’re planting peas! . . . I know it’s important, but like can she read, can she add, can she do computer-based stuff?

Because it was uncommon for Montessori staff to directly address the long-term benefits of Montessori, if parents harbored doubts about the school, they could not fall back on a narrative that the school was preparing their children for middle school or college. For this reason, despite their perception that their children had positive attitudes about school and were learning autonomy, Black and Latinx parents at Birch and Vine were uncertain as to whether these skills would translate into long-term academic success.