Maia Cucchiara

Perils and Promises: Middle-Class Parental Involvement in Urban Schools:

Given recent trends, middle-class families may become an increasing presence in urban districts. Such parents could help secure badly needed resources and raise expectations. This study of parental involvement in two urban schools suggests that middle-class parental involvement may be more complex than often assumed. The authors find that middle-class parents bring myriad resources to urban schools and can be catalysts for change. However, the relationship between parental involvement and widespread benefit was mediated by parents’ own goals and perspectives as well as by the larger social context. Furthermore, compared to a more individualistic approach to parental involvement, a collective orientation is more sustainable and has greater potential for benefiting all children in the school, without regard to their social class.

Choosing selves: the salience of parental identity in the school choice process

With the proliferation of choice policies in education, parents are increasingly positioned as ‘consumers’ tasked with choosing the ‘best’ school for their children. Yet a large body of research has shown that the process of selecting a school is far more complicated than policy-makers and researchers often predict. This article uses ethnographic data on middle-class parents in a large city who are considering sending their children to a diverse neighborhood public school to further develop our understanding of school choice. Drawing from sociological research on consumption as a social and cultural process, we examine the intersections between parents’ choice of a particular school (i.e. consumption) and their own identity construction. Our data show that the act of choosing a school can become, for parents, a means of expressing and enacting a particular identity. In this case, the intersections between identity and choice pushed many parents – invested in seeing themselves as liberal urbanites – towards an urban public school. We suggest that similar dynamics could have different outcomes for other groups of parents and that the symbolic nature of the school choice decision has broader relevance and merits further study.

“I’ve Never Seen People Work So Hard!” Teachers’ Working Conditions in the Early Stages of School Turnaround

School turnaround—a reform strategy that strives for quick and dramatic transformation of low-performing schools—has gained prominence in recent years. This study uses interviews and focus groups conducted with 86 teachers in 13 schools during the early stages of school turnaround in a large urban district to examine teachers’ perceptions of the social and organizational conditions within their schools. The study shows that some turnaround schools provided more positive working conditions than others, particularly with respect to organizational function and culture. It further finds a strong association between teachers’ perceptions of school-level working conditions and support for school turnaround.

Seeking a ‘critical mass’: middle-class parents’ collective engagement in city public schooling

A growing body of literature has begun to explore the individual identities, motivations, and school choices of middle-class, typically white, parents who choose to reside in socioeconomically and racially mixed central city neighborhoods. Drawing on qualitative research in three US cities, we argue that a focus on middle-class parents’ collective engagement in schooling is particularly important in under-resourced urban contexts. In these environments, we show, middle-class parents’ use of social networks often extends beyond basic information-sharing about school quality to encompass a range of activities undertaken with other families ‘like them’ who have also chosen to enroll their children in an urban public school. We find that, in some instances, middle-class parents’ collective actions can benefit an entire class or school. Yet in other instances, their activation of social capital can contribute to processes of social reproduction in urban schooling by excluding or marginalizing low-income students and their families.

Thinking Locally: Attending to Social Context in Studies of Marketing and Public Education

A generation ago, billboards, flyers, or radio spots advertising a public school would have been unusual and surprising. Now they are an increasingly regular feature of the educational landscape. As schools compete for students and resources in the new educational marketplace, they increasingly look to market themselves to prospective parents (and funders). The ways educational organizations use marketing to develop and promote a particular identity, recruit or exclude students, and navigate new systems of competition and accountability are thus critical elements of schooling in the 21st century. This is especially the case in urban areas, where choice policies are more common. In this issue, the authors have usefully unpacked key dynamics around the marketing of public educational services.1 Because this is a relatively new area of study, their insights can and should inform future scholarship on marketing and public education, helping us to understand both the range of activities involved and the consequences for families, schools, and communities. In this commentary, I will first discuss two of the contributions this collection of articles makes that are particularly important to the field: demonstrating the disconnections between theories of marketing and the on-the-ground realities, and revealing the centrality of identity to the marketing process. I will then argue that future research, building on these findings, should pursue a highly contextualized understanding of educational marketing.

Enter the Alternative School: Critical Answers to Questions in Urban Education

the concept and practice have evolved over time. In other ways, however, the volume’s focus is actually quite narrow. The role of governments in enabling or restraining corporations receives little attention, perhaps reflecting an assumption that states have become less relevant in recent decades. Although various authors mention that corporations may adopt CSR in order to preempt government regulation, they do not examine how pressures such as anticorporate protest or labor disruption might shape firms’ stances on public policy. More generally, the chapters say relatively little about how workers, social movements, and alternative institutions like worker-run enterprises and cooperatives contest (or might contest) corporate power. I would also argue that the book neglects some of the implications of its own findings. Many of the authors note (often in passing) the manifest inadequacies of CSR initiatives: ‘‘only a tiny portion of all the major corporations in the world are members’’ of these voluntary initiatives (p. 12), and membership requirements themselves are often quite minimal (as of this writing UNGC members include Shell, BP, Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Nike, among other shining examples of human rights and environmental responsibility). But the authors tend to avoid the logical follow-up questions. Looking beyond CSR, how might workers and social movements best target corporations? Can states be made to play a meaningful regulatory role? And can the modern corporation, and the capitalist system itself, ever be made compatible with human and planetary needs? To be sure, some CSR initiatives have brought modest improvements to people’s lives; understanding why corporations join and how the CSR field has evolved, as the book helps us do, can thus be useful. But with two or three exceptions among the chapters, certain fundamental questions about corporate capitalism remain unasked. To some extent, this narrow focus on CSR may reflect Tsutsui and Lim’s assessment of what’s possible. They predict that voluntary ‘‘global CSR frameworks . . . will continue to be the prime locus of legitimation and contestation among actors seeking a social regulation of the global economy’’ (p. 19). In an era of unprecedented corporate threats to life itself, that is a frightening prospect indeed.

The Unacknowledged Disaster: Youth Poverty and Educational Failure in America

ed by its radical liberal political sensibilities. As for shortcomings, I would have preferred short introductions on the background of each setting and then a more synthesized main body that discussed each setting together around particular themes such as the different ways in which ‘‘outsiders’’ were conceived and how risks could be relativized in the face of more significant threats, like the constant specter of hurricanes in Galveston. It would have been useful to have had a more direct account of change over time. How was opposition sustained over such a period, and what changes did that involve? There is no mention of how the wider national and regional context may have impacted and interacted with the author’s meso focus. I wonder if anyone felt it necessary to engage with an ‘‘American’’ vigilance against foreign threats and how this was reconciled with more immediate sensibilities. It seemed odd to make no mention of a distinctive Californian regulatory and political environment (arguably more akin to a European than a ‘‘typical’’ American one) or a Texan selfidentity that may have shaped the— presumably not exclusively—Galveston-based identification with progress and the like. And I wondered how reaction was informed by the cultural cleavage between Republicans and Democrats. The largely self-created threat of terrorism is here to stay for the foreseeable future as something that can animate and reorganize society on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s important that the processes involved are carefully unraveled, and Beamish has done an exemplary job here in directing our attention to processes at the local level. In doing so he has opened up and denaturalized social reaction in the best traditions of sociology. We can hope that others will engage with his contribution, particularly looking to move in the comparative direction that Beamish has shown to offer so much. The Unacknowledged Disaster: Youth Poverty and Educational Failure in America, by Bruce J. Biddle. Rotterdam, NLD: Sense Publishers, 2014. 316 pp.

Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities

28.00 paper. ISBN: 9789462095199.