Abstract - Michael Eng

The study of school choice is a growing field in sociology.  Parents’ decisions reflect the development of cultural capital and reinforce social class differences.  However, the manner in which these differences are reproduced is poorly understood, especially since the growth of alternatives to public school in the past decade.  What methods do parents use when choosing schools?  What are they looking for?  How is this different for each social class?  How do parents' impressions influence the selection of alternatives to the neighborhood public school?  In this study, school choice was analyzed through qualitative interviews with twenty parents of four-year-old children, conducted in the fall of 2008 in New York City, primarily in the borough of Brooklyn, by eight members of a senior seminar research class in sociology.  The parents were in the process of choosing an elementary school for their children for the upcoming 2009-2010 academic year.  The study found that socio-economic status was a major determining factor in which methods parents used in choosing schools, while the location of a neighborhood public school heavily influenced both the impressions that parents had about it and the challenges that they perceived their child faced in getting admitted into their goal school.  Parents in high-class neighborhoods tended to have better impressions of their local schools than parents in low-class neighborhoods, and focused on different aspects of the school.  Parents of high socio-economic status used more research methods and had a higher likelihood of being “choosers” (selectors of alternate schools) and “checkers” (those who examined school ratings).  The study also found two contradictions with previously conducted studies: parents with higher socio-economic status tended to do more research on schools than those with lower socio-economic status, and all parents felt their public zoned school was a “goal school”.  Our small sample does not allow for the results of this study to be generalized, but it may suggest that, in Brooklyn,  upper-class parents send their children to local public schools despite large amounts of research, and lower class parents send their children to alternative schools — a reversal of what occurs elsewhere in the country.

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