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Kathyrn Pfeiffer

Family Resources, Race, and School Decisions in Context

Dissertation Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that race and family socioeconomic resources are associated with school resources at the elementary and secondary levels in the U.S.  To date, however, educational researchers have yet to develop a detailed, contextualized model of the processes through which families choose, or are “stuck” with, different schools.  This dissertation explores the impact of race, family socioeconomic resources, and state educational contexts on the school decisions that parents make for their children, including public vs. private schooling and residential moves across neighborhoods and public school districts. 

The analyses are based on a nationally representative sample of black and white children and their families, including parents and grandparents.  Data are drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and its Child Development Supplement (CDS).  An oversampling of blacks allows for black-white comparisons. 

The results indicate that both parental wealth and grandparental wealth are particularly important for children’s private school attendance, while more traditional measures of socioeconomic status, including parental income, education, and occupational status, are less so.  Additionally, the findings suggest that state educational contexts of racial segregation in schooling and school resource inequality shape the impact of race and broad family resources on school decisions.  For instance, I find that in states with more racial segregation, black families are more likely to seek private school alternatives than in more racially integrated states.  Also, more advantaged families are significantly less likely to opt for private schooling in states with more resource inequality across school districts than in states with more equalized school funding. 

The results have important theoretical implications for stratification theory and research.  First, the analyses suggest that it is essential to consider intergenerational family wealth in addition to more traditional, achievement-based indicators of socioeconomic status when assessing the role of family resources in providing educational opportunities for children.  Models that do not consider such factors risk underestimating the impact of family resources.  Second, the results are consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of the “fourth generation” of stratification research, which stress the role of institutional contexts in shaping stratification processes.  Students and families do not make school decisions in a vacuum.  State educational contexts structure the impact of race and broad family resources on school decisions.  Finally, the findings also have implications for the theory of Effectively Maintained Inequality (EMI).