Disability, Race, and the Geography of School Choice: Toward an Intersectional Analytical Framework

Abstract

School choice research has provided some initial understandings of how parents choose schools. Parents’ school options are bounded to differentiated choice sets—the menu of school options that parents construct when making school selections. The geographical location where families live and schools are located and families’ race and class differences appear to play a role shaping the constriction of choice sets. In this article, we describe a theoretical framework to address two limitations of research on school choice sets: limited attention to students with disabilities and dichotomization of space and place. We advance a framework that fuses critical notions of space with critical notions of disability and race. This framework allows theorizing on how the construction of school choice sets is shaped by structural and individual factors related to the interactions of students’ race and disability and geographical location.