This dissertation proceeds step-by-step, integrating literature, theory, data, and discussion as it goes, in eight chapters. This approach is necessary to integrate properly the context of the French case and the evidence from the study.
Chapter 2 discusses the qualitative methodology. In line with Ball (2003), the population of interest is middle-class parents of school children. I use semi-structured interviews, recruiting middle-class parents by word-of-mouth at three typical public middle schools in three typical towns in the Parisian suburbs (van Zanten 2007b; Ben Ayed and Broccolichi 2009; Augustine and Virot 2012). I interviewed 29 parents during the fall 2016 and spring 2017 school sessions. A model of school choice processes and criteria and the need to work around French precepts on school choice and race frame the inquiry and the construction of the interview guide. I am interested in how parents explain and justify their lives and actions within the social structure and ideological frameworks in which they interact. The study’s timing is of note. There were multiple terrorist events, a divisive election with an antiimmigrant presidential candidate, a wave of massive migration from Africa and the Near East, and a stagnant economy in which
unemployment remained high. They comprise an incipient situation that parallels what Swidler (1986) calls an unsettled cultural period and which becomes unintentionally part of the study. In Chapter 3, I focus on changes in migration, immigration, and policy that instigate school choice
and define the school marketplace of this study. Despite official restraint, school choice has gained impetus because of a confluence of three factors over the past three decades, a movement of middle-class parents into the Parisian suburbs, a policy relaxation regarding the school sector, and the repopulation of the suburbs with immigrant and ethnic groups. The chapter describes the three towns and three middle schools where I interview parents and brings context to the places that the parents inhabit and to the lives they live through observational and other data (Lamont and Swidler 2014). Known by pseudonyms, the schools and towns are Legacy, a traditional, high scoring school in Riviereville, a well-to-do town; Arche, a mixed3 school with tracked, elite
courses that middle-class children largely fill in increasingly middle-class Petiteville; and Haven, a mixed school in highly mixed Centreville, whose classical music academic program is a
magnet for middle-class students from elsewhere.
Building on the work of Ball (2003), I explore in Chapter 4 the processes by which middle-class parents engage in school choice. After I discuss how school choice works in France, I turn to the school choice process among the parents. Based on the parental accounts, I develop four empirically grounded, qualitative types (McKinney 1969; Kluge 2000), the chapter’s main contribution. The base of the types is agency, expressed through two dimensions of action— enrollment and residence—and two dimensions of reasoning—ideology and attitudes. The four types are Adherents, Assenters, Appraisers, and Avoiders. Staying put assigned schools, Adherents and Assenters tend to think and act according to what is best for society, while Appraisers and Avoiders, who contemplate on and exercise their options, tend to think and act according to what is best for children. In addition, the chapter looks at how parents get
3 I use the term mix or mixed to express what in English is considered diversity in composition of
information, especially from their social networks, which appear less purposeful among these parents than similar networks among U.S. school parents. Finally, it explores schooling options parents considered and the degree of parental contingency.
In Chapter 5, I address the criteria that middle-class parents use in school choice. Criteria are the aspects of schools that parents value for the education of their children. I find that parents have many packages of criteria by which they evaluate schools. Two themes arise inductively from the profuse and diverse criteria that parents name as important to them for the school their children attend. One of the themes is the academic quality of schools; the other is the school context, in line with much of the school choice literature (Coleman and Hoffer 1987; Chubb and Moe 1990; Mickelson et al. 2008; Cucchiara and Horvat 2013; Felouzis et al. 2013). Parents highly rate mix, behavior and teaching as school criteria, but social, ethnic, and cultural mix is more problematic. Parents are divided over the merits of this criterion, as well as that of the quality of teaching and pedagogy, but not of student behavior. The explanation is grounded in the ideologies and attitudes that underlay the types. They are tied to other, longstanding societal notions about mix and teachers, reducing the effect of the types on criteria.
Chapter 6 takes a conceptual detour to address the effect of social class anxiety on school choice as an explanation to the role of race in school choice. Social class in France is considered the primary legitimate form to study social stratification, not ethnicity or race. Thus, it is
essential to understand how class is related to school choice before preceding to race. In addition, anxiety would appear to be highly salient because of events that transpired in France in and around the time of the interviews. It is necessary to understand if the many events, expressed as global risk, increase parental anxiety and change schooling plans, in accordance with Ball (2003) and Beck (1992). They evidently have not. It has not led to the wholesale trampling of minorities
in blind pursuit of the best schooling. Parents instead use the hopeful language of a satisfactory life, not of class struggle or social closure. These parents act on their social class position, though, through the schools and classes in which their children are enrolled. This chapter’s important contribution is three spectrums of individual dispositions from parental accounts. Parents range from the philosophical to the psychological, the collectivistic to the individualistic, and the resolute to the uncertain.
In Chapter 7, a clouded picture emerges on the role of race in school choice. The parental accounts indicate that the parents do not intend to act on race in their lives and children’s
schooling. Of theory reviewed in Chapter 1, the reasoning and actions evident here are mostly in line with Lamont and Molnár (2002). They describe how groups form boundaries against the “other” and justify and protect the boundaries through collective repertoires. Of the historic theories, however, not much easily corresponds with Omi and Winant (2001) and their historic, deterministic thesis. Bonilla-Silva (2013) contends that Americans use slippery language to evade racial references, if not to obscure racism, what he phrases as “now you see it, now you don’t.” Though his frames likewise have little applicability here, I contend from the evidence that for these middle-class French parents, race is matter of partial or non-recognition, not obscuration, or “how who see it, how you don’t.” Two sides exist to the racial coin, however. On one side is the supposedly blameless actions of French parents to act for the good of society and their children, and on the other side is what immigrants, carrying their own globalist
perspectives, may only view as but racism.
To this point, this dissertation proceeded step-by-step, integrating literature, theory, data, and discussion, chapter by chapter. Chapter 8 is the capstone that presents a conceptual model of school choice and the role of race within it. The model contains three societal strata in which
parents engage with schooling, those of individual dispositions, social structure, and ideology. It accounts for the effects of recent events and the hidden effect of race on school choice. I make concluding points about the role of race in school choice and explain the importance of this study and potential lines of future research, as well as discuss the study’s limitations. I argue that despite all the differences that exist between the French and U.S. case, it still comes down to the appearance of racism in the role of race in French school choice.
2 STUDY METHODS
In this qualitative study, I seek understanding of the attitudes and behaviors of middle- class parents as they relate to school choice and race (Lofland et al. 2006). Following Ball (2003), the study’s population of interest is middle-class parents of school children, sampled at three typical middle schools in the Parisian suburbs where middle-class parents live (van Zanten 2007b; Ben Ayed and Broccolichi 2009; Augustine and Virot 2012). To convey the lived
experience of the parents, I additionally collect descriptive data (Lamont and Swidler 2014). The selection of parents with children in middle school is purposeful. The French middle school, or collège, is a common school that lasts from the equivalent of 6th through 9th grade in the United States. It is a pivotal institution in French schools, after which students enter different high schools based on their academic success and vocational interests (Auduc 2013). French middle-class parents are highly aware that middle school shapes their children’s academic success and future progress (van Zanten 2003). For those reasons, the public middle school is often the subject of school choice research in France (see, for example Felouzis et al. 2005; Poupeau, François and Couratier 2006; van Zanten 2009; van Zanten 2012). For practical reasons, I did not interview parents with children in private school, not unlike other French
researchers. Getting the cooperation of private schools is much more difficult than for public schools. Parents in these schools also are scattered residentially because private schools have no school sectors, making it difficult to contact and interview parents.
Qualitative methodology is appropriate to this research because I am interested in social relationships and in “thick description” (Geertz 1973; Weiss 1995). The study is structured through a theoretical model that guides the inquiry on the process and criteria of school choice. That model frames the semi-structured interviews, conducted with a multipart interview guide on choice, risk, and race. Semi-structured interviews are the proper method because, though I have specific questions about processes, at the same I want to gain a grasp of the reasoning of the parents, giving them some breadth in their answers (Fontana and Frey 1994; Weiss 1995). Such a form of interview is also a reliable means of eliciting information on attitudes, and to a lesser degree, on behavior, if placed in a social context (Lamont and Swidler 2014).
Here, I explain the methodology and the study design. The chapter is organized along five issues that arise from the research question. The first of the five issues is the selection of towns and schools for the interviews. Second is data gathering, including the development of an interview schedule based on the study’s theoretical model. How the study samples parents is the third issue. The issue of language and the problems that language entails, both in the interviews and subsequent analysis, is the fourth. The fifth is the interviewer’s position in transnational research and how that position enables and impedes the work. Additionally, the timing of the research is further consideration, a study that occurred when France was under a state of emergency, and which has important consequences. I address these issues in turn below.