The road to registration

Abstract

In Boston, there are no guaranteed neighborhood schools for families, due to a model of choice that dates back to the city's infamous desegregation effort in the 1970s. Today, every family wishing to enroll their child in a Boston Public School must formally register and then rank their preferred school choices from a list designed to give every family access to "quality schools close to home." Due to the complexity and compulsory nature of the process, all families must visit a district registration site, known as Welcome Centers, to formally register for and make their school selections. While much is known about the modern-day persistence of segregation in schools, as well as the conditions that shape family preferences and participation in school choice, less is known about how institutional practices outside of schools also contribute to the enduring inequalities in public education. This dissertation project delves into that black box of school choice: the bureaucratic details, practices, and processes that make up school selection, registration, assignment, and enrollment. Through a mixed-methods project that includes a multi-sited ethnography, fifty interviews with district staff, a multilingual survey of over 5,000 registering families, and complemented by administrative data, I interrogate seemingly-neutral bureaucratic procedures, tools, and resources to reveal how institutions reproduce broader social inequalities. I argue that districts shape families' access to school choice and experiences in registration sites and facilitate the unequal sorting of families before they are finally assigned to schools. I find that raced, classed, linguistic, and gendered inequalities are mirrored in the everyday implementation of school choice policy in practice. This dissertation project is comprised of three empirical articles. In the first article, I examine the conditions and consequences of pre-registration; how it shapes the waiting, service, and citizenship of clients in the registration sites. I find that pre-registration operates as a tool, a spatial logic, and a moralized value system that allows for efficient and racialized sorting of time and space in the centers. The second article examines the contexts that enable or constrain staff dissemination of information to families, as well as the resulting information gap. Despite their intention to help families make well-informed choices, workers are both limited in their access to and complicit in limiting information that would help inform parents' school choices. Ultimately, the absence of institutional interventions to address known information gaps protects the racial segregation of schools and harms both the highest need families and the staff of color who serve them. Finally, the third article looks across a range of district efforts to decrease families' administrative burdens. The accumulation of these initiatives produces "white noise" which drowns out the particular needs of poor, non-English speaking, immigrant families of color, thus compounding disadvantage for structurally marginalized registering families. This research makes important empirical and theoretical contributions to sociological studies of race, school choice, organizations, and public policy. This project shows how policies, even those designed by or within progressive organizations, may perpetuate or increase existing inequalities. Theoretically, I confirm that organizations are racialized even when they focus on equity, hire diverse staff, and espouse racially progressive values. Empirically, I examine the underlying institutional mechanisms that make up the more mundane implementation of policies to show how they consistently reproduce broader racial inequalities. In other words, the process perpetuates structural inequalities despite changes in staff or even broader assignment policies. This project, while focused on one school district's current assignment plan, has important lessons for the bureaucratic implementation of a wide range of choice and public policy efforts. While resources or initiatives may be intended for all, they operate as a racial alibi that excuses and legitimates racialized outcomes.