The Politics of Parental Involvement: How Opportunity Hoarding and Prying Shape Educational Opportunity

Abstract

As more state legislatures join the debate on school-choice and parent-trigger legislation, their discussions draw attention to an evolving landscape outside school walls where parental action shapes educational opportunity. Parents wield their political, social, economic, and cultural capital to secure the best educational outcomes for their children. This paper identifies the political frames that distinguish the educational opportunity-seeking behavior of middle-, working-, and lower-class parents. Rational choice and interest group theories are used to explain the politics of middle-class opportunity hoarding by way of tracking and school-choice practices. Policy entrepreneurship and interest group theory provide the frameworks to explain the support for vouchers and parent-trigger laws by lower-and working-class parents as part of their opportunity-prying efforts.

Metropolitan Public School District Segregation by Race and Income, 2000–2011

“…By focusing on segregation between Whites and non-Whites, we did not mean to treat Whiteness as normative or imply that proximity to White students is, ipso facto, beneficial for students of color. Rather, we focused on the segregation of non-Whites from Whites because it is of historical importance; Whites have been primarily implicated in the hoarding of educational and economic opportunities (Lyken-Segosebe & Hinz, 2015;Rury & Rife, 2018;Rury & Saatcioglu, 2011) and have actively perpetrated exclusionary policies, such as redlining, unequal access to mortgages, and real estate agents steering minority home buyers into specific locations (Alba & Logan, 1991;Galster, 1988;Goering & Wienk, 2018). Thus, monitoring changes in segregation between Whites and non-Whites is a useful, if incomplete, barometer of trends in the overall racial/ethnic climate of public schools in the United States.…”

Prepare developed democracies for long-run economic slowdowns

“…Decreasing opportunity for youth via slow growth has the potential to entrench inequality in at least two ways. First, decreasing opportunity may create fear of downward mobility among richer families that catalyses support for policies that entrench class privileges 87,88 . (Firms may analogously support polices that erode competition or labour rights; such erosion has occurred in the United States since its mid-twentieth-century growth peak 89,90 .)…”

2019 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture Education Research and the Disruption of Racialized Distortions: Establishing a Wide Angle View

“…Even when we have studied the organizational and structural inequalities that riddle schools and place some students and not others at heightened educational risk, our analyses have not until more recently focused on unpacking the motives, pathologies, or dysfunction of those who design, enact, and interpret the policies and routines that pose the risk. As suggested by some of my previous comments concerning the promise of multilevel ethnographies, more recent efforts to analyze everyday racism, including opportunity hoarding, are moving us in the right direction (Essed, 1991;Lewis, 2003b;Lyken-Segosebe & Hinz, 2015;Tilly, 1998). But Black and Brown bodies are not only subject to distortion when we fail to analyze how they are institutionally placed at risk as per cultural biases and social group conflicts over power and access that get articulated on the ground each day.…”