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Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools : = Public Montessori, Fit and Conflict in the Era of School Choice.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools :/
Reminder of title:	Public Montessori, Fit and Conflict in the Era of School Choice.
Author:	Debs, Mira.
Description:	1 online resource (336 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 79-01, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International79-01A.
Subject:	Early childhood education. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9781369619270

Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools : = Public Montessori, Fit and Conflict in the Era of School Choice.
Debs, Mira.

Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools :Public Montessori, Fit and Conflict in the Era of School Choice. - 1 online resource (336 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 79-01, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2016.

Includes bibliographical references

One of the fundamental social problems in America is how to create racially diverse schools. While policy makers are slow to fix underlying housing segregation or return to busing, creating racial diversity through school choice is widely popular across the political spectrum. How can school choice create more racial and socioeconomic diversity, instead of increasing segregation? School choice scholars have emphasized how structural obstacles and parental resources combine to disadvantage poor families. Such research has given little attention to the school choices themselves. Many urban American public schools offer educational themes to attract families and create racially diverse schools, yet there is little research examining how parents experience a school theme. The concept of "conflicted fit" is introduced to describe the experience of parents who feel aligned with the school theme on some dimensions and at odds on others. To illustrate the negotiation of fit, I examine one case where school diversity intersects with school choice, public Montessori schools, which have been around since the 1960s and currently number over 500 public schools nationwide. Montessori is a progressive educational pedagogy that emphasizes letting children learn at their own pace in multi-age classrooms and using hands-on materials developed over a century ago by Maria Montessori. Though parents negotiate a fit at all types of schools, the process is particularly salient in Montessori schools because the distinctive pedagogy acts as both a force of attraction for some parents and of repulsion for others. In the first study of public Montessori and school diversity, I use a multi-method approach, including two years of participant observation at two school sites, interviews with 81 parents, school administrators and policy makers, archival research and an original database of the student demographics of the 703 public Montessori schools opened over the last 50 years. I examine why public Montessori schools have such salience as sites for school diversity and racial contestation, how parents negotiate a fit both during and after their children enroll, and the way in which this interpretive process impacts their connection with the school community. The findings indicate the enduring racial and socioeconomic diversity of the public Montessori sector. In contrast to researchers who have argued that parents of color do not support progressive, open-ended forms of education, I use archival and interview sources to detail how parents and educators of color have repeatedly created Montessori programs as culturally responsive education for communities of color. But some public Montessori schools also have exclusionary enrollment practices, and several schools around the country that began with racially diverse student populations have experienced white gentrification, leading to some backlash in communities of color. In addition, interviews at two public Montessori magnet schools demonstrated that parents had a wide range of responses to the pedagogy, becoming either true believers, conflicted parents or satisfied good-schoolers. In particular, almost half of the parents of color experienced public Montessori as a "conflicted fit" where they valued the social learning but were concerned about academic rigor. Rather than suggesting inherent incompatibility to particular racial groups, this interpretive conflict reflects the need to examine the diversity of the Montessori teaching force, the balance between Montessori fidelity and adapting to the needs of individual students and families, and for educators to talk about education in ways that are meaningful for a variety of audiences. The findings complicate current discussions of school choice that have largely overlooked the impact of the particular choices themselves. The findings suggesting the importance of incorporating parent and student's experience of school choices as complex, interpretive and ongoing evaluations into broader discussions of structural obstacles and parental resources. The project concludes with recommendations for supporting parents of racially and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds in theme-based choice schools like Montessori.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9781369619270Subjects--Topical Terms:

557157
Early childhood education.
Subjects--Index Terms:

CharterIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools : = Public Montessori, Fit and Conflict in the Era of School Choice.
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