“I Went There”: How Parent Experience Shapes School Decisions

Abstract

As school choice expands, families face an increasingly arduous decision-making process around school enrollment. Through interviews with a socioeconomically and ethno-racially diverse sample of 60 parents in Dallas, Texas, we illustrate one key way families negotiate this choice landscape. We find that many parents use their own educational experiences as first-stage decision rules for narrowing the types of schools they consider for their children through experience-motivated replication and experience-motivated avoidance. Parents with positive schooling experiences sought to replicate the type of school they attended for their children, while parents with negative schooling experiences aimed to avoid the type of school they attended. While experience-motivated replication was used by parents across race and class positions, it was most common among White parents who often entrenched patterns of white flight through replication of private or suburban school enrollment. In contrast, experience-motivated avoidance was used by Black parents in our sample as a strategy to disrupt educational inequality for their children by eliminating traditional public schools, where parents reported feeling underserved as children, from their choice sets. This study adds to our understanding of how families negotiate the increasingly complex school choice landscape, and mechanisms for the persistence of intergenerational educational inequality.