Are Chicago charter schools serving local neighborhoods or the whole city? Evaluating educational and geographical accessibility based on segregated urban contexts

Bu, Qingyu

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115695 Copy

Description

Title

Are Chicago charter schools serving local neighborhoods or the whole city? Evaluating educational and geographical accessibility based on segregated urban contexts

Author(s)

Bu, Qingyu

Issue Date

2022-04-20

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Mendenhall, Ruby

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Mendenhall, Ruby

Committee Member(s)

• Leicht , Kevin
• Lleras, Christy
• McDermott, Monica

Department of Study

Sociology

Discipline

Sociology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Charter Schools
• Ethnic and Racial Studies
• Sociology of Education

Abstract

For the past 30 years, charter school reform has gained universal support in public education in the United States. Following the neoliberal notion of free choice, charter schools are public schools with private school characteristics. Charter schools require no tuition and offer admission for students without geographical school districts. For its proponents, charter schools equalize racial inequality in education by giving students of color (SOC) more chances through lottery admission. Technically, the charter schools’ lottery admission system should give SOC more access to public education caused by fixed school district boundaries in traditional public education or traditional public schools (TPS). Therefore, relevant stakeholders such as educational administrators, students, and parents believe that charter schools have the ability to eventually solve educational segregation. However, although the lottery admission system is implemented, charter schools market themselves based on location preference and the intention to admit SOC from the surrounding neighborhoods. In addition, parents also have a strong preference for geographical proximity, which means they tend to send their children to nearby charter schools because of a shortage of transportation resources. This situation generates inquiries about whether charter schools can truly admit students without location bias or whether they will keep targeting students from surrounding neighborhoods in the same way as the TPS. This dissertation investigates the extent to which charter schools admit SOC from the surrounding neighborhoods, using the Chicago public school system as an example. Based on spatial mismatch theories, this multi-method dissertation combines data from charter school websites, publicly available census records, and other relevant Chicago public records. The results show that charter schools hide their local preferences in pictures and provide stronger neighborhood accessibility to students from local neighborhoods than traditional public schools. This dissertation contains a total of eight chapters. The introductory chapter defines the research question and explains the significance of the study. The second chapter gives the historical background, discussing the development of Chicago’s public school system for the past 150 years. The third chapter discusses previous studies and theories related to the research; Chapter 4 describes the general methods used in the research. Next, Chapters 5 through 7 detail the methods and results, with each chapter covering one part of the analysis. Finally, Chapter 8 presents the discussion and conclusion. For the three analytical chapters, Chapter 5 analyzes the contexts that make charter schools attractive for students from local neighborhoods. Connecting the textual and visual information from charter school websites and demographic information from the surrounding neighborhoods, I found that school websites craftily reveal their preference for local students in their school profile pictures. Then, in Chapter 6, I evaluate the charter schools’ accessibility for local students. Using neighborhood demographic proportions to predict the schools’ demographic proportions, this chapter reveals that charter schools attract more students from surrounding neighborhoods than their traditional public school (TPS) counterparts. Finally, Chapter 7 focuses on how the TPS shake-up (i.e., school closure or transition into a different school) could impact the local accessibility of Chicago charter schools. The results indicate that the TPS shake-up not only resulted in an increase in neighborhood accessibility for students of color (SOC) in charter schools but also caused the systematic departure of SOC from charter schools. In conclusion, applying both quantitative and qualitative methods, this dissertation provides new theoretical and methodological understandings of evaluating charter school accessibility for local students.

Graduation Semester

2022-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Qingyu Bu

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