Privileged parents are often depicted as anxious about maintaining social mobility, “opportunity hoarding” desirable schools. Using a qualitative meta-analysis combining seven studies, the authors identify a subset of privileged parents in urban settings, happiness-oriented parents, who instead seek a school setting that prioritizes their child’s social-emotional happiness. In identifying this repeated but understudied phenomenon, they consider the broader implications of these happiness-oriented parents’ choices, focusing specifically on the case of school integration policy. If you’d like to attend this event, please RSVP here: https://bit.ly/3bPQpec
Mira Debs is the Executive Director of Yale’s Education Studies Program and a lecturer in Sociology. Her research and teaching interests include urban education policy, families and schools, progressive schooling and comparative international education. She is the author of Diverse Families, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in the Era of School Choice (Harvard Education Press, 2019) and co-editor of The Handbook of Montessori Education (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Allison Roda is an Associate Professor of Education at Molloy College in the Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning Communities Ed.D. program. Her research and teaching interests are focused on urban education policy, educational stratification, families and schools, and qualitative research methods. She is the author of Inequality in Gifted and Talented Programs: Parental Choices About Status, School Opportunity, and Second-Generation Segregation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and co-author of Making School Integration Work: Lessons from Morris (Teachers College Press, 2020).
Molly Vollman Makris is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Urban Studies at Guttman Community College, City University of New York. She is the author of Public Housing and School Choice in a Gentrified City: Youth Experiences of Uneven Opportunity which won the American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Book Award and the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Book Award in 2016 and co-author of Gentrification Down the Shore (2020).
Judith Kafka is a Professor of educational policy and history of education in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, where she also serves as Faculty Director for the Bachelor of Science in Public Affairs. Dr. Kafka’s research focuses on urban education and the historical roots of current educational policies and practices. She is particularly interested in the ways in which public education serves to both interrupt and reinforce social and economic inequalities in the United States. Her current project explores historical structural and spatial dimensions of educational inequality in the borough of Brooklyn.