Her training focused on the sociology of education, urban sociology, and urban education. Her work on this project began with an interest in the ways broader urban trends-such as gentrification and revitalization-affected schools, as well as with the many conversations she heard in her own city neighborhood about where parents were sending their children to school.erin MCnaMara horvat is an associate professor of urban education at Temple University; e-mail: horvat@temple.edu. Her research agenda has explored how race and class shape access throughout the educational pipeline, focusing especially on the role of social and cultural capital in shaping families' interactions with schools, often drawing on Bourdieu's theoretical framework. She has been motivated by a desire to understand how interactions between individual and structural forces shape educational outcomes and life chances, including explorations of how race and class affect school and college experiences, college access, and high school dropout and reentry.

Middle-class flight from urban public schools to suburban districts or private schools is a key source of educational inequality. Recently, however, a number of studies have focused on middle-class and upper-middle-class families who have made a different choice, opting to remain in the city and send their children to neighborhood public schools. While the movement of advantaged families into urban public schools has received positive attention in the media, this growing body of research tells a more complicated story. Middle-class families -with their economic, cultural, and social capital -can bring important resources to schools, resulting in widespread benefits. However, their engagement in urban public schools can also lead to marginalization and exclusion. We review the emergent literature on this topic, highlighting four themes: (i) parent preferences, identities, and values; (ii) the role of marketing campaigns and informal networks in attracting the middle class; (iii) the nature and consequences of middle-class parent engagement in urban schooling; and (iv) the relationship between neighborhood change and school change. We conclude by outlining a research agenda aimed at deepening our understanding of the mechanisms by which middle-class parent engagement in urban schooling may serve to mitigate, reproduce, or exacerbate educational inequalities.Sociological scholarship on urban education frequently focuses on the inequities experienced by low-income students in large city school districts. Recently, however, a growing body of American and European literature has called attention to the decisions of middle-class and upper-middle-class parents, 1 particularly Whites, to consider and/or enroll their children in socioeconomically mixed or predominantly low-income urban public schools (Billingham and

There is an ample scholarly and popular literature describing the rise in “anxiety” among middle‐class parents. This paper draws from a study of urban middle‐class parents who were considering sending their children to public school. Focusing on one neighborhood and its school, it describes the impact of anxiety on the choice process. It further examines the emergence of a counter‐movement among parents who saw their choice of the school as rejection of contemporary “helicopter parenting.”