Some Relationships Between Selected Schools And Their Neighborhoods And Implications For Seattle School District And City Of Seattle Joint Policy And Program Planning

Author : Nadine Denise Hylton
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (135 download)

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Download or read book Neighborhood Context, Access to Information about School Choice, and the Effect on Choice Participation written by Nadine Denise Hylton and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Public school choice is one of the most widely implemented set of educational policies because of its use to address historic inequities in educational resources and opportunities for K-12 students (Coleman, 1991; Frankenberg & Siegel-Hawley, 2011). Although these educational policies were devised to address inequities and inequalities across and within school districts, the implementation of public school choice has given rise to a new policy problem?inequitable access to information about available choice programs. To this end, this study investigates how neighborhood context (social, economic and demographic characteristics of a neighborhood as well as nested physical and social spaces) affect the sources of information, types of information and information acquisition processes around public school choice. Additionally, this study examines how neighborhood context impact where parents obtain accurate and trusted information about public school choice and how parents utilize the information obtained in their neighborhood to apply to and/or enroll their children in available public school choice programs. Where and how parents acquire information and the quality of information acquired in today's neighborhoods are complex communication processes occurring within social spaces nested within physical places found in neighborhoods. The bifurcated nature of space (physical and social) necessitated the utilization of a sociospatial conceptual framework to explore and understand this nested relationship and its impact on information access. Two schools of thought informed this sociospatial conceptual framework: critical geography and Dynamic Social Impact Theory (DSIT). Critical geography interrogates the relationship between space, access to resources, race, class, and gender (Bourdieu, 1989; Foucault, 1986; Soja, 2010). The critical geography lens was used in this study to inform how resource inequity emerges and why it exists across geographies and groups. DSIT asserts that culture is created through everyday communication and the greater the level of social interaction between individuals in a locale, the more likely they are to influence each other's behaviors and attitudes around an issue (Harton & Bullock, 2007; Latan,̌ 1996; Latan ̌et al., 1995). I specifically employ DSIT's theorization on attribute clustering which holds that socially-influenced attributes, such as behaviors, beliefs, and attitude, occurs when individuals with similar behaviors, beliefs or attitudes are clumped together (DiFonzo et al., 2013). A quantitative case study design was used for this study, which enabled an examination of parents' access to information across several types of public-school choice mechanisms and neighborhoods simultaneously. A convenience sample of 373 parents with school-aged children (i.e., 5-18 years old) enrolled in at least one school choice program in the City of Rochester was obtained. Participants were recruited via mail and in-person at R-Centers in the City of Rochester. Crosstabs, frequency distributions, and cluster analysis utilizing the percentage agreement method was used to describe the relationship between parents' access to information and their neighborhood context. Binary logistic regression was used to determine the extent to which parents' neighborhood context, access to information and demographic characteristics impacted their utilization of the information obtain to apply to and/or enroll their children in at least one school choice program. The cross tabulations indicate that although there are multiple places in a neighborhood where information about public school choice can be found only a subset of places (namely R-Centers, schools, and libraries) are utilized and perceived as trusted sources of information. Results from the cluster analysis indicates that parents residing in neighborhoods that are spatially close heard similar amounts of information about public school choice programs. However, a second cluster analysis on the types of information acquired about school choice indicates that parents in neighborhoods located in the northeast and northwest region of the city acquired similar types of information about public school choice. Parents in this study were likely to talk with family, friends or school officials (i.e., teachers and administrators) about school choice. Additionally, parents primarily heard about non-selective schools in the Rochester City School District and charter schools in their neighborhood. However, parents were least likely to acquire information about selective schools (example: magnet schools) in the Rochester City School District. Logistic regression results indicate that female parents and parents who did not identify as African American/Black or Latina were more likely to use the information acquired in their neighborhood to apply to a public school choice program. However, female parents who identified as African American/Black or Latina were more likely to use the information obtained in their neighborhood to enroll their children in a choice program. Additionally, lower-income parents (i.e., income of $39,999 or below) had a lesser likelihood of using the information acquired in their neighborhood to apply to or enroll their children in a public school choice program. Parents with education beyond a higher school diploma/GED had a higher likelihood of using the information they acquired in their neighborhood to apply to and enroll their children in a school choice program, while parents who were employed either full-time or part-time had a greater likelihood of using the information acquired in their neighborhood to apply to a choice program. Additionally, parents who acquired a greater variety of information about different types of school choice had a greater likelihood of using the information acquired to enroll their children a choice program. Meanwhile, parents with more accurate and trusted sources of information in their neighborhood had a higher likelihood of using the information acquired to apply to and enroll their children in a school choice program. The findings of this study contribute to the school choice, information, and geography research by extending our understanding of how urban parents acquire information about public school choice in the physical and social spaces found in their neighborhoods. Furthermore, this study brings to the forefront how access to accurate and trusted information about school choice programs can level the playing field as parents navigate these systems to learn about opportunities for their children. Methodological limitations of this study include the utilization of a quantitative case study design, an exclusive focus on traditional communication channels and forms of communication, the composition of the sample, and constraints analytic constraints given the types of geographic data collected. Four recommendations for future empirical work on geography and access to information about school choice and for policy are also outlined"--Pages xii-xvi.