Identificación de riesgos

The adoption of market-based reforms in public education is praised by scholars and policymakers for its potential to reduce inequality (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Empowering Parents Through Quality Charter Schools Act (H.R. 2218, 2011), No Child Left Behind Act, 2001). By empowering parents from marginalized backgrounds to opt out of low-performing and under- resourced schools in favor of private, charter, or magnet school options, these reforms are meant to allow parents to choose schools that better suit their children’s needs and provide greater academic opportunity. In doing so, contemporary educational policies conceptualize school-exit or flight as the primary strategy parents employ to make schools work to their advantage (Scott & Holme, 2016). Indeed, White parents have historically employed school-choice options as vehicles to resist racially diverse schools (Myers, 2004; Renzulli & Evans, 2005; Saporito, 2003). However, Hirschman (1970) contends that consumers dissatisfied with a particular product may also exercise voice when they are unwilling or unable to exit. For example, when faced with desegregation policy contexts, White parents mobilized in protest, lobbied legislators, and employed the use of collective associations in and around schools to halt the integration efforts of schools, districts, and state governments (Alexander, 2010; Lassiter & Lewis, 1998; McRae, 2018; Muse, 1961; Rothstein, 2017). Even today, White parents organize collectively to resist de-tracking policies that might racially integrate school classrooms (Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Wells & Serna, 1996). I hypothesize that parents may not simply acquiesce or relocate

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when dissatisfied with their local public schools. Rather, they may leverage collective forms of involvement or mobilization to secure system-wide change that works in their favor.

But not all parents have the same opportunity to exercise voice when they are dissatisfied with their children’s schools (Abrams & Gibbs, 2002; Fine, 1993; Lareau & Horvat, 1999). Ethnographic evidence reveals how White parents’ collective involvement in voluntary associations can bolster their ability to leverage school resources and relationships as well as advocate for policies and practices that maintain their own children’s advantages (Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Lewis-McCoy, 2014; Murray, Domina, Petts, Renzulli, & Boylan, 2020; Posey- Maddox, 2014). These formal parent organizations provide a form of collective voice for White parents in racially diverse schools to secure their own interests in competitive environments, and may offset their desire to exit or flee racially diverse school options.

To understand if this PTO-empowered collective voice is used by White parents to secure advantages when they matriculate into racially competitive contexts, this study exploits the timing of school desegregation orders to determine the extent to which White-parent voice, or PTO formation and dissolution, is related to race-based constraints on their exit options. Using the presence of PTOs as a proxy for White-parent collective voice, I leverage the timing of court desegregation orders to predict White-parent collective voice when compelled to matriculate into racially diverse schools. Specifically, I use longitudinal administrative data linked to indicators for PTO formation and dissolution among North Carolina elementary schools to examine:

1. How does school-level racial diversity relate to PTO formation and dissolution? 2. How do active district desegregation orders relate to PTO formation and dissolution? 3. To what extent does the availability of choice options associate with PTO formation and

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This study provides evidence that White parents are more likely to exercise voice in racially competitive school contexts and when their ability to flee is limited by the presence of active desegregation policies. My results provide insight into the racialized motivations of White-parent collective involvement in racially diverse schools and have implications for how practitioners and policymakers should enact both school reform policies and parent involvement policies to improve racial equity in schools. Demonstrating this phenomenon in North Carolina suggests that the tendency of White parents to mobilize to control the flow of school resources in socioeconomically diverse contexts may not be isolated to large, gentrifying, urban school districts (Cucchiara, 2013; Posey-Maddox, 2014), but instead driven by racialized concerns in suburban and rural districts in the American South. Put simply, when faced with educational policy pressures that make it more difficult to avoid racial diversity, White parents build power in schools. Collective forms of parent involvement with White parents at the helm may explain why White children reap more educational benefit than Black children from school-based

involvement (Desimone, 1999; McNeal, 1999). Scholars and practitioners should investigate opportunities to build Black-parent political power in schools that center on the needs and interests of Black students.

Racial Inequality in Parent Exit and Parent Voice

Despite the history of school choice as an avenue for White parents to flee racially diverse schools, market-based reforms in education presumably reduce school inequalities by empowering a greater share of parents to choose high-quality, well-resourced schools

(Empowering Parents Through Quality Charter Schools Act (H.R. 2218, 2011), No Child Left Behind Act, 2001). These intra-district choice policies allow families from disparate social strata

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similar ability to choose preferred schools without the constraints of relocating their residence or paying for private school. This differentiation within public school districts is thought to

encourage racial integration through magnet school offerings and mission specialization that draw affluent, White families into schools in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). Parents in the marketplace are presumably able to exercise exit when they are dissatisfied with the quality of their educational product by opting into other school options within their district that better fit their children’s needs and interests. According to the virtues of the free market, this exit provides feedback to schools that are being exited, which should either prompt them to innovate and improve their quality—and, thereby, their ability to compete—or close down altogether, thereby improving the quality of the public-school district stock overall (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Hoxby, 1994).

Although these contemporary policies are designed to level the playing field between advantaged and disadvantaged families, the ability to exit is still not distributed evenly. White parents’ financial, social, and symbolic capital facilitates their selection of neighborhoods and schools with more resources, higher-achieving peers, and more qualified teachers (Lareau & Goyette, 2014). On the other hand, centuries of residential and educational separate-and-unequal policies, political disenfranchisement, and structural economic oppression have relegated Black families to poorly resourced schools and neighborhoods with lower levels of achievement (Anderson, 1988; Anyon, 1997; Oliver, Shapiro, & Shapiro, 2013; Wilson, 1987). Even with more choice and the de-coupling of individual schooling preferences from their neighborhoods, White parents continue to secure the highest quality school options because of imperfect

information, charter school marketing choices, and uneven social networks (Bifulco & Ladd, 2007; Holme, 2002; Roda & Wells, 2013).

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Additionally, White parents’ decisions to exit are rarely tied to measures of school quality such as academic performance and resources, but rather driven explicitly by the threat of

attending schools with Black children. White parents’ decisions to exit are driven by school racial diversity (Bifulco & Ladd, 2007; Card, Mas, & Rothstein, 2008; Goyette, Farrie, & Freely, 2012; Saporito & Lareau, 1999), but instead, proxies for race (e.g. proportion of students

receiving FRL) (Billingham & Hunt, 2016), and school reputation shared among networks of White parent groups (Holmes, 2002). Renzulli and Evans (2005) find, for example, that White parents are more likely to opt out of traditional public schools when they attend schools in more racially integrated districts. Fiel (2015) finds that White parents flee in direct response to the increasing salience of race and ethnicity in schools, giving credence to the idea that White families in racially diverse settings sense a racial threat to their social or political status. When assigned to racially diverse schools, White parents opt out in favor of more racially homogenous private, parochial, and charter school options (Lareau & Goyette, 2014; Renzulli & Evans, 2005; Saporito, 2003).

However, in certain contexts, White parents are unable to flee their local, more racially diverse public school option. For example, rural areas often have few schools—and, therefore, few schools of choice—due to their lower population and school funding (Bryant, 2010). There is a strong correlation between current and subsequent private and charter school options in and around rural districts; therefore, there is some market rigidity in rural areas where differentiation has been slower to emerge (Renzulli, 2005). Districts in the U.S. South are large and

consolidated, making inter-district flight more difficult and increasing the likelihood that schools are more racially diverse (Clotfelter, 1998; Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Diem, 2017).

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ordered desegregation mandates. After the Massive Resistance campaign in response to the orders from the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decisions of 1954 and 1955 to dismantle separate and unequal schools, district-level desegregation orders that mandated busing or other strategies to rid the district of vestiges of segregation resulted in the most effective attempts to desegregate schools throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Billings, Deming, & Rockoff, 2014; Johnson, 2011; Reardon, Grewal, Kalogrides, & Greenberg, 2012). Although these orders were still associated with some level of White flight from traditional public school districts (Clotfelter, 1976), districts in which these orders remain active may still provide obstacles for White parents who wish to flee their more diverse assigned school option.

In other contexts, White parents have resisted flight from racially diverse schools,

choosing instead to matriculate into urban public schools that have high proportions of Black and Hispanic students (Posey-Maddox, 2014). Young white “gentrifiers” feel strongly about enrolling their children in public schools in urban communities due to the schools’ close proximity to public transportation, amenities, and their places of work, as well as the schools’ affordability (Billingham and Kimelberg, 2013). White parents embody a sense of loyalty to neighborhood schools and possess a collectivist ideology committed to investing their resources in creating a better school-community for all students living in the catchment area (Cucchiara, 2013b).

According to Hirschman’s (1970) theory of exit, voice, and loyalty, when parents who are dissatisfied with their school options are unwilling or unable to exercise the exit option, they may exercise voice. Voice is the “attempt at changing the practices, policies, and outputs” (p. 30) or the articulating of one’s own self-interests. Parents may exercise voice when the costs of exit are too high; for example, when private school or relocation options are expensive, or when they feel loyal to their school-communities. Voice as a mode of feedback on product quality can be just as

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or more effective as exit when those using voice have a sufficient degree of collective power (Hirschman, 1970).

Collective forms of parent involvement may provide a political voice to White parents in schools with few viable alternatives to, or those feeling loyal to, their more racially diverse school assignments (Henig, Hula, Orr, & Pedescleaux, 1999; Ogawa & Dutton, 2007). After all, White parents are more likely to be on school committees and join PTOs (McQuiggan & Megra, 2016; Robinson & Harris, 2014). Additionally, Lareau, Weininger, and Cox (2018) demonstrate how, by working collectively to exercise voice, White parents are able to secure benefits beyond what any individual parent working alone can provide to their own child. They cite an example of an elite school district in which White parents formed coalitions and mobilized to oppose plans to re-district two high schools. These parents employed their human capital by drawing on their writing skills, professional expertise in using data and figures to make arguments, ability to generate media coverage, online and academic research skills, and roles as experts on the issue at hand. These parents also drew on their professional networks and political acquaintances to influence the outcome of redistricting. They also employed forms of symbolic capital to sway district leaders; they questioned the legality and virtue of the decision and sometimes used intimidation tactics such as threatening the jobs and appointments of district leaders and school board members.

In the same way that White parents have more economic power to flee diverse schools, collective voice in schools is most effectively wielded by White parents, as they have more resources and political power. White parents leverage their involvement in collective organizations to advocate for policies and resources that would benefit their own children (Lewis-McCoy, 2014; Murray et al., 2020; Posey-Maddox, 2014). White PTO parents can act as

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gatekeepers, determining who has access to key decision-making processes and who is included in school affairs (Murray et al., 2020). Lewis and Diamond (2015) describe how, in one school, White PTO parents directly constrained who had a platform in school operations by employing strategies such as maintaining meetings at locations and times that were unfeasible for Black families.

Additionally, White parents are the more valued consumers in educational markets, prompting school leaders and districts to respond more readily to their requests. Under pressure to compete in the educational marketplace, urban public schools and districts campaign for White parents to return to them from suburban and private options (Posey-Maddox, 2014; Cucchiara, 2013b). Urban schools and districts explicitly work to appeal to the racialized

preferences of White parents by rebranding, campaigning, displacing poor and minority families, prioritizing admission to highly desirable schools for White families, raising academic standards, focusing on test score growth, and increasing differentiation both within and between schools (Cucchiara, 2013; Lipman, 2002; Pearman & Swain, 2017). Market pressures to appeal to White parents contribute to the introduction of choice policies that spawn a variety of charter and magnet school options with specialized missions, audiences, and educational models to offer differentiation and competition. Schools of choice are explicitly designed and marketed to White parents’ customized choices for their children. Moreover, parents actively select these schools without them being the default neighborhood option. Therefore, these schools may be more likely to provide a satisfactory product thus eliminating White parents’ need to exercise voice.

The expression of voice among White parents in racially diverse schools may offset the need for White flight. When a critical mass of consumers expresses their dissatisfaction with the product, the likelihood of change grows. For example, Posey-Maddox (2014) describes a

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grassroots movement of White parents mobilizing to host information campaigns to encourage their White neighbors to also enroll in their local public school and join the school’s PTO for greater collective power. In this and similar cases, White-parent collective voice facilitated by the PTO was used as leverage to get school staff and administrators to bend to their interests and funnel resources and opportunities directly to their children, effectively facilitating opportunity hoarding and maintaining racial inequality (Cucchiara, 2013; Lewis-McCoy, 2014; Murray et al., 2020; Posey-Maddox, 2014).

Research Question and Hypotheses

To understand whether White parents resort to voice when exit is not an option, this study examines PTO formation and dissolution as a function of school-level racial diversity and

racialized constraints to White parents’ exit options. Applying Hirschman’s (1970) theory of exit and voice to the behavior of White parents facing a perceived racial threat implies the following hypotheses:

1. White parents may exercise voice for the same reasons they would exit (Hirschman, 1970). Given the propensity for White parents to flee racially diverse schools, I hypothesize that school level racial-diversity also prompts White parents to exercise voice through PTOs. Thus, school-level racial diversity is positively associated with PTO formation.

2. When White parents are unable to flee, they may be more likely to exercise voice. I hypothesize that active district-level desegregation orders that limit White-parent flight encourage White parents to exercise voice through PTOs. Thus, active district

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3. When White parents are able to flee, they may be less likely to exercise voice because they attend more satisfactory schools (Hausman & Goldring, 2000). I hypothesize that the availability of choice facilitates White-parent flight and discourages White-parent

mobilization through PTO formation. Thus, greater proportions of charter- and private- school seats will be negatively associated with PTO formation.

White-Parent Political Mobilization and the PTO

Given the ways that White parents secure advantages through PTOs, the

underrepresentation of Black parents in PTOs, and PTOs’ prominent role in desegregation attempts, I argue that these organizations can meaningfully proxy for White-parent voice in schools; particularly in the American South. My qualitative data suggest that even in the most racially diverse schools, PTOs are predominantly composed of White and middle-class mothers (Murray et al., 2020). These organizations were consistently referred to by parents in the author’s sample as a “White, stay-at-home-mom thing” by both Black and White parents (Murray, 2020). Additionally, even in schools where there is more diverse representation, the agenda and budget priorities are largely controlled by the interests of White families (Murray et al., 2020). These findings are consistent with the small literature base on PTOs and school inequality that also find PTOs to be composed of and led mostly by White parents (Lareau & Munoz, 2012; Lewis- McCoy, 2014; Posey-Maddox, 2014).

PTOs have a history of being White-led organizations and of opposing desegregation attempts. White mothers, especially leaders of PTOs, were instrumental to the Massive Resistance to school desegregation, writing opinion columns in major U.S. newspapers and lobbying state political leaders to close public schools rather than carry out orders from Brown v.

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Board of Education of Topeka (McRae, 2017). Even after these overt cries for segregation, White mothers worked in schools through civic organizations as parents, teachers, and community members to maintain a White supremacist agenda (McRae, 2017). Retaining separate Black and White units from its founding until 1970, the desegregation of the National PTA was met with the same resistance and stagnation as the Brown v. Board of Education order to desegregate schools, especially in the deep South (Heath, 2014). During these times, White PTAs, made up of mostly White, non-working mothers, advocated for compulsory education, teacher

professionalization, and increased school funding (Skocpol & Fiorina, 1999).

Alternatively, Black PTOs, affiliated with the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, were primarily composed of Black teachers and administrators working to secure adequate resources for their students in an era of “separate, but equal.” After the National PTA absorbed chapters from the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers in 1970, and school desegregation occurred more rapidly throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Black PTO leadership dissolved, membership declined, and the interests of Black families were

marginalized, leaving a class of students without the advocacy and support that Black PTOs provided (Woyshner, 2009). Although Black teachers and school leaders continue to mobilize, their goals are closely aligned with ensuring job stabilization rather than the pursuit of structural reform or educational change (Henig et al., 1999).

PTOs continue to articulate and secure the interests of White families, particularly in diverse schools, contributing to the maintenance of within-school racial inequalities. For

example, Lewis-McCoy writes about the ability of White parents in PTOs to disrupt the flow of district resources that could close the Black-White achievement gap, since these efforts would