In severing the link between residential address and school assignment, school choice policies have the potential to decrease school segregation and increase educational equity. Yet this promise is ...undermined when school choice creates greater opportunity for those who are already privileged while limiting access to students from historically marginalized groups. This study combines data from a new survey of local open enrollment policies in Metro Detroit, student-level administrative records, and geographic data to critically analyze the local discretion provided in Michigan's interdistrict school choice policy in relation to the goals of access to schools of choice, desegregation, and educational equity. I found that local school districts implement provisions of state policy in ways that restrict access to Black and economically disadvantaged students while creating pathways of opportunity for others. Districts are incentivized to implement these restrictions because of the inequities built into the state school funding formula and the racialized geography of Metro Detroit that is mechanized in district and county boundaries to restrict access. This study has implications for the regulation of local school choice markets and the role they play in increasing equitable public school opportunities.
The purpose of this study is to advance our thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice policy. To do so, we present a critical race spatial analysis of Detroit students’ ...suburban school choices. To frame our study, we describe the racial and spatial dynamics of school choice, drawing in particular on the concepts of opportunity hoarding and predatory landscapes. We find that Detroit students’ suburban school choices were circumscribed by racial geography and concentrated in just a handful of schools and districts. We also find notable differences between students in different racial groups. For all Detroit exiters, their schools were significantly more segregated and lower quality than those of their suburban peers. We propose future directions for research on families’ school choices as well as school and district behavior at the intersection of race, geography, and school choice policy.
Many problems that we conceptualize as "educational" have multiple causes that cut across students' ecosystems. Yet, most education reforms are targeted narrowly at schools, educators, and students. ...Supporting educators and community leaders in conceptualizing educational problems from an ecological perspective and designing policies in alignment with that conceptualization is critical to improving student outcomes. This study documents the macro-, meso-, and micro-level institutional conditions that shaped how educators and community leaders conceived of the problem of absenteeism in response to research framed ecologically. Our findings highlight the challenges researchers may have in influencing ecosystemic policy solutions, but they also provide insight into potential pathways for doing so through research partnerships.
Background/Context: Chronic absenteeism has received increased attention from educational leaders and policy makers, in part because of the association between attendance and important student ...outcomes. Student attendance is influenced by a range of student-, school-, and community-level characteristics, suggesting that a comprehensive and multilayered approach to addressing chronic absenteeism is warranted, particularly in high-poverty urban districts. Given the complexity of factors associated with chronic absenteeism, we draw from ecological systems theory to study absenteeism in Detroit, which has the highest rate of chronic absence of major cities in the country. Purpose/Research Questions: We use administrative and public data to advance the ecological approach to chronic absenteeism. In particular, we ask: (1) How are student, neighborhood, and school characteristics associated with individual absenteeism? (2) How are structural and environmental conditions associated with citywide rates of absenteeism? Our study helps to fill a gap in the research on absenteeism by moving beyond a siloed focus on student, family, or school factors, instead placing them in relationship to one another and in their broader socioeconomic context. It also illustrates how researchers, policy makers, and administrators can take a theoretically informed approach to chronic absenteeism and use administrative data to conceptualize the problem and the potential routes to improving it. Research Design: Using student-level administrative data on all students living and going to school in Detroit in the 2015--2016 school year, we estimate a series of multilevel logistic regressions that measure the association between student-, neighborhood-, and school-level factors and the likelihood of a Detroit student being chronically absent. We also use publicly available data to examine how macrosystemic conditions (e.g., health, crime, poverty, racial segregation, weather) are correlated with citywide rates of absenteeism in the 2015--2016 school year, and we compare Detroit with other large cities based on those conditions. Findings/Results: Student-, neighborhood-, and school-level factors were significant predictors of chronic absenteeism in Detroit. Students were more likely to be chronically absent if they were economically disadvantaged, received special education services, moved schools or residences during the year, lived in neighborhoods with more crime and residential blight, and went to schools with more economically disadvantaged students and less stable student populations. Macro-level factors were also significantly correlated with citywide rates of absenteeism, highlighting Detroit's uniquely challenging context for attendance. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our ecological understanding of absenteeism suggests that school-based efforts are necessary but not sufficient to substantially decrease rates of chronic absenteeism in Detroit and other high-absenteeism contexts. Policies that provide short-term relief from economic hardship and aim to reduce inequalities in the long-run must be understood as part of, rather than separate from, a policy agenda for reducing chronic absenteeism.
School Climate and Student Mobility Pogodzinski, Ben; Cook, Walter; Lenhoff, Sarah Winchell ...
Leadership and policy in schools,
10/2022, Letnik:
21, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
School choice has been accompanied by an increase in student mobility. Although changing schools can benefit students, mobility is often associated with negative student and school outcomes. This ...study sought to better understand the relationship between school climate and the likelihood of student mobility across K-8 schools in Detroit, a city marked by a high level of school choice options. We found conflicting evidence of a relationship between measures of school climate as measured by the 5Essentials survey and student mobility. We discuss these findings in the context of potential sector differences, which may overshadow parental preferences for organizational characteristics.
As US public education enrolment grows increasingly diverse, school choice policies create opportunities to break the link between residential and school segregation. They also create new pathways ...for families to self-segregate into ever more racially isolated schools. This study explores student enrolment patterns in Metro Detroit over a ten-year period to understand the implications of open enrolment policy on school racial and economic demographics. By focusing on the ten suburban districts that enrol the most Detroit resident students, we provide initial evidence that, while those districts increasingly enrol more Black and poor students than their residential population, many students from those districts are also taking advantage of school choice policy to enrol in districts further from the Detroit city centre. The in-flow and out-flow of students from these districts has implications for district budgets; design and implementation of school choice policy; and support for students in transitioning school environments.
Chronic Absenteeism in the School-Prison Nexus Mahowald, James Bear; Lenhoff, Sarah Winchell; Edwards, Erica B ...
The High School journal,
06/2023, Letnik:
106, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Since the incorporation of student chronic absenteeism rates into state school accountability systems after the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, schools have adopted new practices to ...improve student attendance and decrease chronic absenteeism. Some of these practices borrow features from behavior management systems such as tiering students, differentiating support and consequences, and taking disciplinary action. This qualitative case study examines how attendance management practices are designed and implemented in a large urban school district and explores the empirical and conceptual relationship between student behavior and attendance management within the "school-prison nexus." We use interviews with parents, high school students, and staff charged with reducing chronic absenteeism to demonstrate how managing students' attendance through intervention plans, student monitoring, and threats of legal action have implicit and explicit parallels to the management of student behavior in schools and could be considered a potential mechanism through which the school-prison nexus functions. We conclude with implications for schools and districts as they seek ways to reduce chronic absenteeism without contributing to the over-surveillance and punishment of high school youth.
Advocacy coalitions have the potential to be a vehicle for community-based education reform in urban school systems, where state legislatures have increasingly adopted top-down policies such as state ...takeover and accountability systems. Yet, coalitions are influenced by and create their own informal and formal power structures that can include or exclude certain stakeholders and perspectives. In this study, the Advocacy Coalition Framework was used alongside critical discourse analysis of interviews, documents, and more than 50 news articles to explore how power and ideology shaped policy in the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren. We find that personal stories, political loyalties, and prior reform experiences shaped the narratives of Coalition members. While discourse from and about the Coalition was narrower in scope and representation during a tough legislative battle, the group’s policy victories and organizational infrastructure created potential for substantive community-led reform in the years following. This suggests that community-based education reform may require advocates to strategically sequence the promotion of diverse stakeholder interests in order to achieve broad coalition goals.
The ways in which the language of reformers intersects with and informs reform implementation is important to our understanding of how education policy impacts practice. To explore this issue, we ...employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the language used by a 21st century skills-focused reform organization to promote its program alongside the language that local actors used to explain its implementation. We examined source materials, field notes, interview data, and publicly available organizational data collected over a five-year period to critically examine how discourse 1) illustrated alignment between the stated and implicit audience for the school reform program and 2) shaped subsequent implementation. Analyses suggest the reform organization promoted itself through a discourse that all students in all reform schools were being prepared for college, career, and civic life. There was a significant misalignment, however, in the discourses regarding the appropriate student audience for the reform. Local actors questioned whether the reform program 1) was suitable for all students and 2) provided necessary supports for all students in all schools. This misalignment led to uneven implementation and resulted in some educators dismissing the goals of the program as unrealistic. Given that educational agencies have considerable freedom to choose among diverse reform programs, our analysis suggests it is important to understand the discourses through which reform organizations advertise models, implementers justify adoption, and educators respond.
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