Bringing Attention to Inequities in School Choice, Teacher Education, and Suburban Schools

Scholars find poor families of color are disproportionately impacted by high administrative burdens when participating in school choice, but less is known about how institutions shape their access. I find that district efforts to reduce participation burdens instead compounded disadvantage for non-English speaking, non-White, non-elite families. Through an ethnography of Boston’s registration sites, I find that the institutional (in)actions produce a “white noise” that drowns out the particular needs of the most administratively disadvantaged families. Despite efforts to decrease inequity in its process, interventions reproduce known technological, literacy, and language barriers; exacerbating unequal access to school registration.

Research on the importance of social justice for teacher candidates suggests that there is a high need for teacher candidates to develop personal and professional competencies regarding racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity. Using culturally sustaining pedagogy as a conceptual framework, this article presents findings from a qualitative inquiry into the ways that three teacher candidates developed their growing understandings of social justice and culturally relevant pedagogy. Findings show that teacher candidates developed critical lenses for reflection. Further, a critical incident is explored to evaluate the complexities of developing work on culturally relevant pedagogy with teacher candidates.

While much work on educational inequalities focuses on marginalized students in underserved urban schools, there is an urgent need to attend to the suburbs, as they diversify racially and socioeconomically. Responding to that need, this project is an ethnographic study of an affluent suburb and lower-income youth growing up there. Specifically, my dissertation examines the roles social networks play for these low-income and working class ninth-graders as they transition to high school. My preliminary findings, drawn from interview and observation data, suggest that while these students are embedded in an affluent milieu, patterns of inequality nonetheless persist.