Panelists: 

Adrienne Atterberry, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Syracuse University

Siqi Tu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity

Bailey Brown, Postdoctoral Researcher in Sociology, Princeton and Assistant Professor of Sociology, Spelman College

Fangsheng Zhu, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Harvard University

 

Discussants:

Kimberly Goyette, Professor of Sociology, Temple University

Natasha Warikoo, Professor of Sociology, Tufts University

 

Titles and Abstracts:

Paper #1. Parental Aspirations, Schools, and the Limits of Flexible Citizenship: Examining Elite Return Migrants’ Schooling Decisions

Adrienne Atterberry, PhD Candidate at Syracuse University, Sociology

This article examines how return migrant parents navigate primary and secondary educational options in Bangalore, a city in southwest India, by addressing the following question: What factors do return migrant parents consider when making schooling decisions? Through analyzing interviews with return migrant parents from 37 different families, I argue that they make school choice decisions according to the logic of transnational concerted cultivation, which gives youth the skills to pursue their educational and professional interests anywhere in the world. However, in the process of crafting their children’s transnational futures, parents encounter stumbling blocks as they make the transition from high school to college and encounter higher education regulations that do not account for their children’s unique situation.

 

Paper #2. In Search of the “Best” Option: Why Upper-Middle-Class Families in China Send Their Children to Private American Secondary Schools

Siqi Tu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity

This paper focuses on unpacking the processes of how a rapidly rising group of urban upper-middle-class Chinese families decide to send their only children to the United States on their own for private secondary education. I analyze the socio-historical background of such choice and lay out these families’ various paths to opting out of the neoliberal school-choice market in China and eyeing the American private secondary education as the “best” option. Based on in-depth interviews with thirty-three parents in several Chinese megacities, I demonstrate that Chinese urban upper-middle-class families choose such a transnational educational choice as a silent exit from the anxiety-ridden Chinese education system. Situated in the socio-historical transformation of contemporary Chinese society, the reasons for exiting range from dissatisfaction with the political narrative to educational aspiration of a “well-rounded” education and resistance against the test-oriented pedagogical practices at school. This ethnographic research provides a unique perspective to engage with works on elite education in a global context and enriches hitherto the theorization of the global middle classes.

 

Paper #3. Intensive Mothering and the Unequal School Search Burden

Bailey Brown, Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton/Assistant Professor at Spelman College, Sociology

Expanded school choice policies have weakened the traditional link between residence and school assignment. These policies have not only created new school options for families, but new labor for families to manage and divide. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 90 mothers and 12 fathers of elementary-aged children, the author demonstrates that mothers overwhelmingly absorb the school search burden. Partnered fathers take a secondary role, and single, primary caregiver fathers invest less time and energy in the search for schools than do single mothers. Mothers appealed to standards of intensive mothering in explaining their extensive efforts, but with important differences across class and race and ethnicity. Working-class mothers emphasized self-reliance and self-sacrifice as they made school decisions. Middle-class mothers invested time and energy in the search for school information and intervened persistently with schools during the school choice process. Notably, working-class and middle-class Black and Latinx mothers did not see this process as completed upon matriculation, and intensively monitored their children’s school experiences to protect them from experiences of marginalization. These findings identify an important source of gender inequality stemming from modern educational policies and suggest new directions for research on school choice.

 

Paper #4. Choosing Schools via Gaining Local Citizenship

Fangsheng Zhu, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Harvard University

The existing literature has yet to fully document and theorize how parents choose schools against residence-based school assignment. Primarily drawing on 90 parent interviews conducted in the Beijing metropolitan area, I found that parents adopted formal and informal strategies to gain their local citizenship for school access. Complicating existing research, families’ capacities to choose schools were not easily determined by social classes or hukou status, but by their abilities to gain local citizenships. Middle-class and upper-middle-class parents were better equipped to expand or switch local citizenships via formal strategies, while working-class parents were constrained by their economic resources and could only use informal strategies that required pre-existing strong ties. Failing to gain new local citizenships resulted in local school choice, which limited local families to default options and forced domestic migrant parents to send their children back home. Overall, families with more capabilities to gain local citizenships sent their children to more reputable schools. By documenting how families strategized against residence-based school assignment, this paper contributes to understanding educational inequality in context of spatial inequality.

 

Please email jviator@fas.harvard.edu for the Zoom link. You can also join the mailing list to automatically receive all Zoom invites.