and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology with minors in urban education and Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, a Leadership Alliance Fellow, graduated cum laude, and received top departmental honors for her senior thesis at Penn. Brown is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Spelman College. Prior to her position at Spelman, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.
Brown applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Kindergarten Panic describes one mother’s search for a diverse New York City elementary school. Jaime attended schools in the southern United States that were integrated through mandated busing. This diverse educational experience serves as an important context for the school she desired for her son. As Jaime went on school tours, she came to the haunting realization that though New York City was diverse, the schools were heavily segregated and often tracked along racial/ethnic lines.Visit Bailey Brown's website.
Jaime’s story appears in Chapter 3 "You Don’t Really Feel the Diversity" which discusses how parents considered the racial/ethnic makeup of schools. The chapter focuses on the concept of “racialized school decision-making" labor. I demonstrate that Black, Latina/o and immigrant families take on more labor to identify safe and racially-inclusive schools for their children. While most white parents did not express concerns about a school’s level of racial inclusivity directly, I include Jaime’s story on page 99 to offer a perspective on the few white middle-class parents who saw their resistance towards tracked and heavily segregated schools as an intentional “social justice” decision. For this reason, readers who open to page 99 would learn a lot about central themes in Kindergarten Panic, particularly how parents develop preferences for school and how the school search requires an investment of time and energy.
Landing on page 99 in Kindergarten Panic also highlights several important contributions of the book. Jaime's intensive and multi-method search strategy reflects that for all parents the school search requires labor. Further Jaime’s role as a mother also reflects key gender norms undergirding school search processes—that mothers take primary responsibility for the school search. At the same time, Jaime’s social position as a white middle-class mother is reflected in her ability to search more strategically for schools, research several school options and approach diversity not as a safety concern but instead as an added benefit. Jaime’s story broadly demonstrates that parents’ individual search experiences varied and that how parents are able to search for schools is shaped by gender, race, class and neighborhood.
Across Kindergarten Panic I argue that while the increase in school choice options in early elementary school was intended to broaden opportunities, these new school options place a greater burden on parents, increasing expectations to search for schools intensively and increasing the labor of school decision-making. Each chapter highlights how these factors differently shape parents’ school choice journeys. I conclude that school choice policy must take seriously persistent inequalities in school access in order to better design and restructure school choice programs to ensure greater equity.
--Marshal Zeringue
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