Siting Schools, Choosing Students? Protecting White Habitus Through Charter School Recruitment

Abstract

While many scholars agree that charter school enrollment contributes to segregation between schools, the role of siting decisions in recruitment to non-urban charters has been overlooked. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork to examine student recruitment in three charter schools, this article demonstrates how personnel used intentional site selection, geographic lottery priorities, tailored programs, and other recruitment strategies that catered to local communities and created predominantly white spaces. This study builds on existing knowledge about white flight between schools but from an organizational perspective, illustrating how school personnel can work to create and sustain white habitus to recruit families. These findings also contradict ideals about school choice; while charter schools are ostensibly available to families regardless of where they live, I find that charter school personnel targeted, sited in, and tailored recruitment to the pool of prospective families they wished to attract-predominantly white areas. The article contributes to the literature by demonstrating the importance of charter school organizational practices to school segregation.

Students' Academic Habitus and Its Relation to Family Capital: A Latent Class Approach to Inequalities among Secondary School Students1

“…Habitus may differ by social class, cultural resources, and ethnicity, or in the European context, more often to immigration (Cui 2015; Horvat 2001; Riel 2021; Schneider and Lang 2014). Bourdieu (2001) discussed gendered norms and expectations as being socially constructed and internalized by social actors as part of their habitus, which subsequently plays a role in the reproduction of gender inequalities in the education system.…”

Race, Geography, and School Choice Policy: A Critical Analysis of Detroit Students’ Suburban School Choices

“…The strategic behavior of schools and districts, spurred by the pressure to compete for student enrollment and per-pupil funding (Jabbar, 2015), is also racialized. Schools often strategically locate themselves in order to serve a particular racial demographic (Henig & MacDonald, 2002; Riel, 2021). Schools also engage in racialized recruitment campaigns, with language and images in their advertising that implicitly (or explicitly) signal which racial groups they are seeking to attract (Hernandez, 2016; Wilson & Carlsen, 2016).…”

“…On the "supply side," how do charter schools respond to racial geography when making strategic decisions about location and student recruitment (Riel, 2021)? Do these decisions vary based on their mission or profit orientation (Henig et al, 2005), target populations (Eckes, 2015), connection to a local or national network (Gulosino & Miron, 2020), or perceptions of the competitive market environment (Jabbar, 2016)?…”

Racialized Organizations in Racialized Space: How Socio-spatial Divisions Activate Symbolic Boundaries in a Charter School and a Public School

“…In the American educational system, the expansion of school choice policies and charter schools has been shown to reproduce racial segregation and educational and economic inequality (Chapman 2018; DeSena 2006; Dixson, Buras, and Jeffers 2015; Reece and O’Connell 2016; Renzulli and Evans 2005; Rich, Candipan, and Owens 2021; Riel 2021). As scholars have shown, charter schools—schools that are publicly funded but independently run—emerged out of white backlash to the desegregation mandates of Brown v. Board of Education during the Civil Rights era, cloaking anti-Black racism in the neoliberal discourse of marketplace theory and “individual choice” (Fuller 2009; Kohli, Pizarro, and Nevárez 2017; Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; Seamster and Henricks 2015; Stovall 2016).…”