Emory College sociologist Janeria Easley was relatively new to Georgia and still trying to decide what school district would work best for her family when she enrolled in a course from the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science in 2021.
Easley, who is also an assistant professor of African American studies, took advantage of the computational science training to build an online experiment to see how other Black parents were navigating school decisions.
The findings, recently published in The Urban Review, revealed that when selecting a school for their children, Black parents did not pick schools with higher test scores alone. Instead, when making a choice, Black parents focused more on whether schools might over-discipline, underestimate or exclude their children from academic or extracurricular opportunities.
“Qualitative research suggests word of mouth is more important,” Easley says. “This advances that conversation via data.”
Easley specializes in demographic research, especially in understanding racial stratification. The school preferences project expands her work to understand the role of school disparities with two waves of data.
First, she and co-researchers from the University of California-Davis, University of Texas and University of Virginia built school profiles based on datasets from Great Schools and Niche, two sites that help parents compare available K-12 schools.
The researchers then added another layer of data, looking at disciplinary records from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection.
The data was used to create profiles of schools based on academic achievement, suspension rates and discipline rates. A large national sample of Black parents rated the profiles of schools with overall high academic achievement and low suspension rates but had either one, both or neither of racial academic and discipline gaps.
The findings showed that Black parents were less interested in enrolling their children in the profiles with racial disparities in discipline and academic outcomes.
The most robust finding showed that for Black parents, the main deterrent would be the profile with racial gaps in both academics and suspension rates.
“Given a choice, these parents chose options based more on how their child might be treated or feel that they belonged, not on resources,” Easley says.