The Road to Registration: Bureaucracy, Inequalities, and the Paradox of Compulsory Choice

A dissertation presented

By

Sarah Faude

to The Department of Sociology and Anthropology

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

In the field of

Sociology

Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts

March 2019

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The Road to Registration: Bureaucracy, Inequalities, and the Paradox of Compulsory Choice

A dissertation presented

By

Sarah Faude

ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of

Northeastern University March 2019

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ABSTRACT

In Boston, there are no guaranteed neighborhood schools for families, due to a model of

choice that dates back to the city’s infamous desegregation effort in the 1970s. Today, every

family wishing to enroll their child in a Boston Public School must formally register and then

rank their preferred school choices from a list designed to give every family access to “quality

schools close to home.” Due to the complexity and compulsory nature of the process, all families

must visit a district registration site, known as Welcome Centers, to formally register for and

make their school selections. While much is known about the modern-day persistence of

segregation in schools, as well as the conditions that shape family preferences and participation

in school choice, less is known about how institutional practices outside of schools also

contribute to the enduring inequalities in public education. This dissertation project delves into

that black box of school choice: the bureaucratic details, practices, and processes that make up

school selection, registration, assignment, and enrollment. Through a mixed-methods project that

includes a multi-sited ethnography, fifty interviews with district staff, a multilingual survey of

over 5,000 registering families, and complemented by administrative data, I interrogate

seemingly-neutral bureaucratic procedures, tools, and resources to reveal how institutions

reproduce broader social inequalities. I argue that districts shape families’ access to school

choice and experiences in registration sites and facilitate the unequal sorting of families before

they are finally assigned to schools. I find that raced, classed, linguistic, and gendered

inequalities are mirrored in the everyday implementation of school choice policy in practice.

This dissertation project is comprised of three empirical articles. In the first article, I

examine the conditions and consequences of pre-registration; how it shapes the waiting, service,

and citizenship of clients in the registration sites. I find that pre-registration operates as a tool, a

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spatial logic, and a moralized value system that allows for efficient and racialized sorting of time

and space in the centers. The second article examines the contexts that enable or constrain staff

dissemination of information to families, as well as the resulting information gap. Despite their

intention to help families make well-informed choices, workers are both limited in their access to

and complicit in limiting information that would help inform parents’ school choices. Ultimately,

the absence of institutional interventions to address known information gaps protects the racial

segregation of schools and harms both the highest need families and the staff of color who serve

them. Finally, the third article looks across a range of district efforts to decrease families’

administrative burdens. The accumulation of these initiatives produces “white noise” which

drowns out the particular needs of poor, non-English speaking, immigrant families of color, thus

compounding disadvantage for structurally marginalized registering families.

This research makes important empirical and theoretical contributions to sociological

studies of race, school choice, organizations, and public policy. This project shows how policies,

even those designed by or within progressive organizations, may perpetuate or increase existing

inequalities. Theoretically, I confirm that organizations are racialized even when they focus on

equity, hire diverse staff, and espouse racially progressive values. Empirically, I examine the

underlying institutional mechanisms that make up the more mundane implementation of policies

to show how they consistently reproduce broader racial inequalities. In other words, the process

perpetuates structural inequalities despite changes in staff or even broader assignment policies.

This project, while focused on one school district’s current assignment plan, has important

lessons for the bureaucratic implementation of a wide range of choice and public policy efforts.

While resources or initiatives may be intended for all, they operate as a racial alibi that excuses

and legitimates racialized outcomes.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been made possible through grant support provided by the Department

of Sociology and Anthropology, the College of Social Science and Humanities’ Office of the

Provost, and the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) Research Seed Grant.

First, I want to thank my dissertation committee, Steven Vallas, Linda Blum, Matthew

Hunt, and Shelley Kimelberg, who mentored, shepherded, and pushed me at the various stages of

this long and winding process. Steve- Thank you for looking out for me, from my first year to

my final year, in your many roles as department chair, graduate director, teacher, and then as my

advisor and chair. Thank you for your candor, enthusiasm, and willingness to stick through the

process with me as I figured out how to translate the messiness of the world into my burgeoning

sociological voice and point of view. Linda- You have been a huge part of my transformation as

a writer and feminist scholar. You are unwaveringly dedicated to your students, and I am

honored to be one of them. Thank you for always listening carefully for the sociological

implications that I often accidentally buried between the lines, and encouraging me to protect

space for my respondents to speak and be heard. This project is stronger because of your

feedback and time. Matt- Thank you for your precision and willingness to spend many meetings

helping me translate my messy quantitative data into rigorous scholarship. Thank you also for

your support of my research, through both collaborative opportunities and by helping me

navigate the bureaucracy for financial support. Shelley- I am unquestionably a better scholar,

researcher, and teacher because of you. Thank you for your unwavering support and your

willingness to be a thought partner, collaborator, and mentor. You gave me the courage to see

my dual practitioner and scholarly roles as a strength rather than a compromise, and this project

exists in large part because of your enthusiasm and support. Thank you for introducing me to the

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Boston school choice context, for getting me on the ground conducting qualitative research early

in my graduate career, and for trusting and valuing my ideas.

I have to thank the many many individuals at the Boston Public Schools who participated

in, supported, and cheered on this project. Thank you to MR, LH, and RH for supporting my

project and helping me navigate the bureaucracy to get the access I needed to do this project.

Thank you to the Welcome Center staff who are the heart of this project and who trusted me to

tell their stories. Thank you for sharing your time and truth with me, for allowing me to pull up a

chair as you worked with families, for calling my attention to the bureaucratic weeds you care

about most that I otherwise may never have seen without your help, and for even feeding me and

offering me rides throughout the process. Special thanks also go to the Welcome Center directors

for letting me spend endless hours with you and your teams during registration and various

meetings, for tolerating my surveys, and for letting me interview you and your staff for many

more hours that I think either of us initially realized. Thank you also to the many district staff

members in various departments who also generously shared their time and expertise with me

and welcomed me and my teal notebook into your offices and meetings.

Overall, the support of Welcome Center staff, as well as those on the 6th floor, provided

me with the home and space I needed to develop as a scholar and advocate for public educational

equity. The dissertation project was at times very isolating, but every time I stepped foot back

into these field sites, I was reminded by you all how much this work mattered and how I had an

army of support cheering me on. You all asked me how my writing was going (CR, BH, KH,

LH), what I was finding (LH, KH, OR, BK, BD), pushed me to keep going (LH, JW, SGB), and

even sat down with me to help me make a timeline to make sure I would finish (NL). Many of

you even showed up for the biggest events in my life, from my father’s funeral to my dissertation

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defense, taking time out of your busy lives to be there to support me. I am so grateful and

honored to be adopted as part of your personal and professional families. Particular thanks go to

the many powerful women educators, both in and beyond BPS, who sustained me through this

project: Lisa, Odelice, Josette, Sonia, Liza, Karla, Kim, Sailaja, Alesandra, Alyssa, Sarah S.,

Maansi, Sarah R., Kate, and Sarah W.

I want to thank my many colleagues and mentors at Northeastern in both the department

of Sociology and Anthropology and the department of Human Services, which have been my

professional homes over the past seven years. Liza Weinstein- thank you for your constant

dedication to all of your students, particularly your commitment to helping reveal the hidden

curriculum. Also you should know that this dissertation was written in no small part because of

the summer writing group communities you set up. Mindelyn Buford- thank you for your

encouragement, especially at the formative stages of my proposal. You pushed me to start and to

have courage bringing together my disparate ideas. Thank you for helping me constellate. Len

Albright- thank you for your advice to listen for and go where the action is. The story I’m able to

tell is because I spent time on the ground, showing up, and talking to people involved in

education advocacy. Chris Chambers- thank you for your generosity: your brilliance, your

laughs, and your time. You were such an important sounding board at various stages of this

process, and you pushed me to not be afraid to speak the truth and helped me figure out how to

survive any consequences and fallout of doing so. I am a braver, more thoughtful, and more

critical scholar because of your mentorship. Emily Mann- who I am as a teacher and researcher

is in large part thanks to you. You’ve given me infinite professional opportunities over the years,

and have found a way to be a constant support and friend through it all. Thank you for your

endless support, advice, and encouragement.

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Thanks also to my many students, colleagues, and mentors in Sociology and Human

Services for their friendship, humor, and kindness. Thanks in particular to Lori Gardinier for

your professional research and teaching opportunities and for always treating me like a colleague

and friend all while you mentored me. Thank you to two women who were there with me from

the start: Ethel Mickey and Anjuli Fahlberg. You both have given me so much advice and

support over the years, and I am so grateful to call you colleagues and friends. Thank you to

Natalia Stone for your camaraderie. Thank you to Hannah Flath for your boundless

organizational skills, enthusiasm, and humor. You breathed life back into this project and helped

me remember why it was important to tell these stories. Thank you to the many amazing

individuals who’ve supported me, taught me, and made me laugh along the way: Gail

Waterhouse, Lauren Richter, Miguel Montalva, Meghan Doran, Silvia Dominguez, Gordana

Rabrenovic, Mollie Pepper, Lourdes Vera, Madelyn Glasco, and Maria Robson. Thank you to

our department’s office staff, Joan Collins, Pam Simmons, Mary Ramsey, and Tracy Johniken,

for finding a way to answer all of my many questions. Thank you for your patience, creative

problem solving, and the many shared laughs as you helped me navigate this place.

Thank you to my writing group, who sustained me, encouraged me, read drafts upon

drafts of brave messy writing, and helped me make sense of this crazy journey. I am so grateful

that my writing group and my closest friends aligned to be one and the same: Wallis Adams,

Rebekah Getman, Sam Maron, and Aeshna Badruzzaman. Wallis- thank you for showing me it is

possible to be a whole human and do this work. Sam- thank you for believing in my purpose and

helping me navigate this place without losing sight of what I care about most. Rebekah- I am so

grateful you are my forever friend. I’m excited to continue taking over the world with you and to

see your brilliance make the world better for everyone. Aeshna- I am pretty confident that I am

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only able to even write an acknowledgements section, this final part of my dissertation process,

because of you. Thank you for the sweets, tea, homemade beer, and careful edits. We did it!

Finally, thank you to my family for supporting me during this long process. This has been

a labor of love and heartache, and you have been with me through it all. I am also blessed that

there are so many of you I am blessed to have as family, too many to list here. But I would be

remiss to not spend a brief moment on my “core four.” Mom- thank you for teaching me to care

about a world that is bigger than I am and to take my work seriously. You live your life with

intention and a fierce commitment to making sure that those who come after you are better off.

Paul- thank you for your humor and for cheering your nerdy older sister along. I am so glad that

we are on the same team. Aunt Ann- I cannot believe that you read every single page of not only

this, but of nearly everything I wrote in graduate school. Thank you for your curiosity, sharp

editorial eye, commitment to education, and love. Dan- when you met me, I was an “aspiring

doctor” who was so overwhelmed by the world and what I wanted to do in it that I did not even

know that there was room for true love and partnership. You have offered me more of both than I

ever imagined were possible. Thank you.

Finally, while writing this dissertation, I was often reminded of my dad’s favorite

Shakespeare quote: “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” I know that I have not quite

mastered his art of storytelling, and will never have his encyclopedic recall, but I did work hard

to channel his courageous life of speaking up and speaking out. Thank you, Dad, for giving me a

childhood that was surrounded by books, art, magic, and history.

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Table of Contents

Abstract of Dissertation .................................................................................................................. 2

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... 5

Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... 10

Chapter 1: The Road to Registration ........................................................................................... 14

On Studying the Mundane ........................................................................................................ 17

Thank You for Choosing Boston Public Schools ..................................................................... 21

The Road to Registration .......................................................................................................... 31

Appendix A: Welcome Center Staff Interview Protocol .......................................................... 34

Appendix B: Context Staff Interview Protocol ......................................................................... 38

Chapter 2: “Is that the white line?”: The Racialization of Waiting in a Public Bureaucracy ..... 41

Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... 41

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 42

Literature Review ...................................................................................................................... 43

Logics Governing Unequal Waits for the State .................................................................... 43

Unequal Participation in School Choice .............................................................................. 46

Research Context ...................................................................................................................... 48

The Unique Diversity of Round One Kindergarten Registration .......................................... 48

Data and Methods ..................................................................................................................... 51

Registration Data .................................................................................................................. 51

Ethnographic Observation .................................................................................................... 52

Staff Interviews ...................................................................................................................... 53

Analysis ................................................................................................................................. 53

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Pre-Registration: Tool, Logic, and Value System .................................................................... 54

Part 1: Who Are Pre-Registering Families? ........................................................................ 55

BPS Express: An Origin Story .......................................................................................... 55

Who Uses Pre-Registration Today? .................................................................................. 57

Part 2: Efficiently Segregated Spaces and the Legitimation of Legitimate Waiting ............ 59

Resistance ......................................................................................................................... 67

Part 3: Barriers to equalizing pre-registration: persistent inequality ................................. 70

“What Kept You From Pre-Registering?” ........................................................................ 71

Unequal by Design ............................................................................................................ 73

Institutions’ Role in Sustaining Barriers on the Street-Level ........................................... 75

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 79

Appendix A: Round 1 Family Survey, in English (2017) ........................................................ 83

Appendix B: Demographic Characteristics of Current/Former Front-Facing Staff ................. 85

Chapter 3: White Lies and Other Strategies: How Front-Facing Staff Cope With the Illusion of

Choice ........................................................................................................................................... 86

Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... 86

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 87

Colorblind Racism, Choice, and Organizational Practices ....................................................... 88

Challenges Embedded in the Promise of Choice .................................................................. 91

School Choice Bureaucrats ................................................................................................... 92

Background ............................................................................................................................... 94

School Choice, Quality, and Segregation in Boston ............................................................. 94

Welcome Centers, Registration Specialists, and the Process of School Choice ................... 95

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Methods..................................................................................................................................... 97

Ethnography .......................................................................................................................... 97

Interviews .............................................................................................................................. 98

Survey .................................................................................................................................. 100

Data Analysis ...................................................................................................................... 101

The Jobs of Welcome Centers and Their Staff ....................................................................... 101

System Access ........................................................................................................................ 105

Bureaucratic Burnout ......................................................................................................... 105

Segregated District ............................................................................................................. 108

Well-Informed School Choices ............................................................................................... 115

“Every School is a Quality School” ................................................................................... 116

Risky Business ..................................................................................................................... 125

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 130

Appendix A: Sample Choice Lists from 2017 Registration Season ....................................... 133

Chapter 4: White Noise: The Raciolinguistic Marginalization of the Administratively

Disadvantaged ............................................................................................................................. 135

Abstract ................................................................................................................................... 135

Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 136

Literature Review .................................................................................................................... 138

Administrative Burdens and Disadvantage in Public Policy .............................................. 138

Raciolinguistic Exclusion in Education .............................................................................. 140

Serving Linguistically Diverse Students In Boston Public Schools ....................................... 142

Methods................................................................................................................................... 146

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All Families Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others .......................................... 150

District Initiatives To Decrease Administrative Burdens For Families ............................. 151

Delays, Omissions, and Errors: Decreasing Learning Costs for Multilingual Families ... 156

Uneven Outreach: How to Reach a Multilingual, Multiethnic, Segregated City ............... 160

Unequal Technology ........................................................................................................... 166

The Consequences of White Noise: Improving Access vs. Hand-holding .......................... 170

Discussion and Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 172

Appendix A: Flyer for the Piloting of Pop-Up Welcome Centers (Fall 2017) ....................... 174

Appendix B: Vietnamese Survey, Marked up by Staff Member (2017) ................................ 175

Chapter 5: The Paradox of Compulsory Choice ....................................................................... 177

A Final Roll of the Dice .......................................................................................................... 180

Investing in the Illusion .......................................................................................................... 183

Recommendations ................................................................................................................... 186

District Progress ................................................................................................................. 187

Integrate the White Line ...................................................................................................... 187

Redefine and Redistribute Choice List Logics .................................................................... 188

Use Parent Preferences to Counsel Families ..................................................................... 189

Future Research ...................................................................................................................... 189

Diversifying Research on “Choosers” ............................................................................... 189

The Enrollment to School Closure Pipeline ........................................................................ 191

Appendix A: Family School Choice Guide (2017) ................................................................. 193

Appendix B: Home-Based Key Graphic (2018) ..................................................................... 194

References ................................................................................................................................... 195

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CHAPTER 1: The Road to Registration

On Wednesday, December 13th, 2017, public testimony at the Boston School Committee

meeting lasted for more than five hours. It was the same week as a startling Boston Globe

Spotlight series called “Boston. Racism. Image. Reality” that exposed the depth of material and

racial inequality in the city (Globe & Team, 2017). Parents, almost all of them white despite

representing less than a fifth of Boston Public School parents, had come in droves in response to

the prior week’s Boston School Committee meeting when members unanimously voted in favor

of a policy that would allow for a system-wide shift in the start and end times of schools. The

policy, at its core, seemed a mundane and logistical one: exchange the start and end times of high

schools with those of elementary schools, so that younger children could go to school earlier and

older children could start school later. On that day in December, from seven until after midnight,

more than eighty families stepped up to the microphone to testify for their allotted two minutes.

After interrupting the opening remarks from the district’s Superintendent Dr. Tommy Chang

numerous times including with shouts and jeers of “you do not represent us!”, parent after parent

testified. A white mom shouted into the microphone: “I am hereby rejecting your official offer.”

The room erupted in applause, cheers, and a standing ovation. A middle-aged white dad in a suit

and tie, more than two hours into testimony said that he was there to speak for a “Spanish

woman” in the room who was too “intimidated to speak.” Behind him, a small child clumsily

held up a sign much bigger than he, painted by an adult, which proclaimed in Spanish in an

awkward word for word translation of “Support Working Families.” The final testimony of the

evening was from a white dad with a British accent who argued that even Charles Dickens would

have found this policy appalling.

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In rapid-fire two-minute increments, the testimony of white parents fell into predictable

patterns. First, they listed their credentials for being an authority— lawyer, veterinarian, tax

attorney—only a handful stated credentials related to education, policy, or other relevant fields.

Second, they stated their unequivocal objection to the policy, not as intended but as defined;

parents wanted high schoolers to go to school later but did not consider that things might change

for their elementary school students to make that possible. Third, they insisted that they were not

just speaking for themselves, those who were privileged and could (and would) make other

choices, but for the many less advantaged families who could not be there that night. They

pleaded for equity in the process, all while dozens had themselves travelled to the meeting,

located in predominately black and brown low-income Roxbury from predominately affluent

white West Roxbury, via two private coach busses sponsored by a Massachusetts State Senator.

While the few parents of color also expressed concern with the unfairness of the process, because

they were so overwhelmingly outnumbered, their voices seemed drowned out by the white noise

of white parents who used them as props to legitimate their own testimonies. Even the mostly

white progressive parent group opted to not testify, upon observing the racialized dynamics of

the school committee room. White parents’ testimonies were clear: they had left the system

before and would do so again if the system did not listen to their demands. While the parents

protested, I could see the coach busses from the windows of the district headquarters; I watched

them circling the building like birds of prey. This was a different, albeit familiar, Boston bussing

story.

During the hours of testimony, I shuttled between the crammed doorway of the School

Committee’s chambers, the overflow room next door full of white families, and the third district

conference room staffed by women of color who mostly worked for the Office of Engagement.

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They had been assigned the task of standing by in preparation to deescalate families and let them

know how the transfer process worked if they wanted to pick a school in the district with more

amenable school hours. The staff tried to make the room both inviting and informative. They

placed themselves at each table alongside new colorful registration guides and cards with

information about how to visit schools. These different rooms were so visibly segregated that

when another staff member of color walked into the conference room, he pointed to me as the

only white person in the room (we were already acquainted through my fieldwork), and said, “I

didn’t know you were one of us! Are you a minority?” The whole room broke out laughing,

perhaps relieved for any humor amidst the evening’s tension.

Zero parents ever came to transfer or get information about schools. The charter busses

returned to West Roxbury. On Friday, December 22nd, the Superintendent announced via an

online letter that the district would not implement the new start times for the district in the 2018-

2019 school year.

In response to the evening of testimony, a district staff member and woman of color

wrote and then later shared this poem with me. It is printed here with her permission.

Subtle

This day had no subtlety, Not even the wind could find a gentle breeze The air was cold Your heir was colder The words slung, and all a sistah could see Was black bodies swinging With a Northern ease Strange fruit hanging from your evergreen trees Not in the if, not in the ands, not in your buts You circle your prey and do so with ease Wolves in sheeps clothing But that ain’t nothing new or a big reveal

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It’s the lash of tongue And the unmitigated gall To treat me and mine like we are nothing at all But this revolution will be televised You see they say...they speak for you But hear not a word I say They speak for you But scared to come ‘round the way You speak for me, but not at all Cause not Shakespeare nor his sonnets Can hide all that racism you boil It’s not here you say, not in 2017 no way We are liberal, and progressive Plus all lives matter any way But then you spew your venom with an ever familiar linguistic drawl Your covet overt hate for this beautiful melanin Reminiscent of lashes you bore into my ancestors skin Do you see what I see Well stop living so out loud with those threats that you had for me Do us all a favor, and let’s return you to whoever sent you post haste, quickly Subtle you say, nope that’s not the way you chose to play this...outwardly offensive and you thought I was going to take it. You are racist! I ain’t nobodies negro, nor your Mamie You can take your privilege and your tears And here’s a cup to catch them, Chile please! If the threat of time, surfaces all the -isms that rule your life and the very air you breathe Imagine what it’s going to feel like when you realize, much too late, my capacity... But don’t worry or fret, truth is your real enemy... Subtlety, nope... lack of it actually is the very essence of the air you breathe!

ON STUDYING THE MUNDANE

The educational policy climate of today is no longer characterized by images of

individuals hurling racial epithets and rocks at children of color while they walk or are bussed to

integrating public schools. However, even in diverse school districts and diverse schools, racial

inequality not only exists but thrives, “despite the best intentions” (Lewis & Diamond, 2015). In

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1974, Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled in Morgan v Hennigan that the Boston School Committee

was guilty of de jure racial segregation. The evidence was damning, the bigotry clear. More than

forty years later, the Committee faced dozens of mostly white families (in a district that is less

than fifteen percent white) and ultimately tabled a policy that would have changed the start and

end times of schools system-wide. White families shouted for hours about how impossible and

inequitable the change would be. While this seems to be a far cry from the white families who

once screamed “Nigger go home! Here we go Southie!” (Irons, Murphy, & Russell, 2014), in the

eyes of the women of color relegated to a room where they were told to brace for and be

prepared to serve these shouting white families, not enough has changed. The situation was

familiar, generations old, and unquestionably violent. In the words of one of these women, as

captured in the first stanza of her poem Subtle: “The words slung, and all a sistah could see / Was

black bodies swinging / With a Northern ease / Strange fruit hanging from your evergreen trees.”

The start and end times proposal would not have changed which schools were available

to parents in the choice process. It would not have changed any students’ current school

assignments or even the algorithms involved in making assignments. Nevertheless, the district’s

attempt to change one part of the system and the protest that ensued is linked to a broader

complex history of race, class, segregation, and schooling in Boston. It is well documented that

public schools, in Boston as elsewhere nationwide, remain segregated (Ayscue & Greenberg,

2013; Ayscue, Siegel-Hawley, Kucsera, & Woodward, 2018; Orfield, Frankenberg, Ee, &

Kuscera, 2014). New policy efforts to overhaul assignment patterns have not only failed to undo

segregation but have even made it worse (Ayscue et al., 2018; Boston Area Research Initiative,

2018; Buras & Apple, 2005; McDermott, Frankenberg, & Diem, 2015; Vaznis, 2018). While

these concerns over major policy reforms and the segregated schools they produce matter, they

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are only one part of the complex web of interlocking systems that produce and sustain

segregation today.

As the start and end times debacle unveils, much of the battle for educational equity is

not always (or perhaps intentionally no longer) just in large visible symbols of injustice. The

battle to sustain inequity can even appear paradoxically as a fight for equity. To understand the

current manifestations of white supremacy, and the ways in which it has transfigured and

transformed in diverse, well-intentioned, institutional spaces, it is necessary to look closely and

carefully at all parts of these systems. When trying to understand unequal systems, we must look

to the mundane, not just the profane.

This dissertation delves into the black box of school choice: the bureaucratic details,

practices, and processes that make up school choice, registration, assignment, and enrollment. In

Boston, there are no guaranteed neighborhood schools for families to attend because of its

particular legacy of desegregation. As a result of this compulsory model of school choice, every

family wishing to attend Boston Public Schools must make choices and formally register for

school by visiting one of four registration sites, known as “Welcome Centers.” To increase

transparency and to help families navigate this complex system, the district has worked hard to

explain their bureaucratic processes to families, including through images that map out “The

Road to Registration” (Image 1). Boston Public Schools is reflective of the challenges their

families face in completing this process. They openly depict registration not as a step, but as a

complex, winding, and multi-step “road” that begins when a family arrives at a registration site

and ends when a child is ultimately assigned at a school. Unfortunately, as I will demonstrate,

compulsory access to school choice does not mean equal access, or even similar paths or

experiences within the same bureaucratic process. While the road to registration reflects the

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physical, in-person interactions between families and the district, it by no means captures all of

the ways that the district shapes, restricts, and manages how families interact with compulsory

choice itself.

Despite this effort at transparency, not all possible paths to registration are visible on this

map. Invisible are all of the barriers and information sources that delay, confuse, and complicate

the process (DeArmond, Jochim, & Lake, 2014; Delale-O’Connor, 2018b; Fong & Faude, 2018;

Horvat, Weininger, & Lareau, 2003; Lareau & Goyette, 2014; Rich & Jennings, 2015). Equally

invisible, however, are additional bureaucratic practices that help the district manage the

For the most current school hours, visit: www.bostonpublicschools.org/belltimes

Meet with a Registration Specialist who will review residency documentation and all other documentation required to enroll in BPS; once reviewed, the Specialist will begin the registration process.

Your application travels on to an Assignment Specialist where it has a final review. Your child is then assigned a seat in a school. Once assigned, if your child is eligible for a bus, transportation enrollment happens automatically and your assignment notice will be mailed to your home.

If your child has an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), your application then travels to the Special Education Department. There, trained staff will review your child’s IEP and identify a school that can best serve your child’s needs.

Students, accompanied by parent(s), will take the language assessment on the date and time scheduled. After, the tester will make school recommendations based on the level of proficiency of the student.

The Road to Registration

NACC: Newcomers Assessment & Counseling CenterSPED: Special Education

Choice and Registration Guide2019-2020 School Year Edition

A resource for incoming and current BPS families seeking a new school, program, or placement.

Image 1: Front Cover of District Information Guide, 2017

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congestion and flow of cases as thousands of families navigate this road simultaneously (Herd &

Moynihan, 2018; Leidner, 1993; Lipsky, 1980; Watkins-Hayes, 2009). For some “lucky”

(structurally advantaged) families, these are shortcuts that streamline their path to assignment.

The goal of this project is to make the full road to registration visible in order to then examine

how these additional layers contribute to unequal access and experiences of families as they

navigate school choice. These layers do not exist in a vacuum however, their origin story goes

back decades to the contentious history of desegregation in the city. The next section very briefly

outlines the evolution of assignment history in Boston, from desegregation and busing to the

present, as well as where this research projects fits within that history.

THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” -Lee Atwater, campaign consultant to Ronald Reagan, 1981

***

Here are the facts: Number one: We now have more high-performing schools in our city than in the past. Number two: We know that parents in every part of our city want and deserve choice. Number three: We cannot continue to spend more and more money on transportation at the expense of education. I have asked the School Committee and Superintendent Johnson to review the school transportation plan and recommend the necessary changes.

-Mayor Thomas M. Menino, Mayor of the City of Boston, 2008

***

Boston made national headlines in the 1970s during what is now infamously known as

the “Boston busing crisis.” Violence and protests dominated both headlines and many racially

22

segregated, working-class neighborhood streets in reaction to the mandatory busing imposed by

the 1974 Morgan v Hennigan desegregation order. The trial was about the district, managed at

the time explicitly by an elected School Committee, failing to provide equitable access to

education for the students under its care. This issue of educational equity was defined at the time

by a coalition of black community groups as “the absence of discriminatory pupil placement and

improved performance for all children who have been the objects of discrimination” (cited in

Bell, 2004, p. 5). At the center of this court case was whether or not the actions that district

actors took constituted an “unjustifiable failing to adopt or implement policies reasonably

available to eliminate racial segregation” in the Boston Public Schools (Garrity, 1974). This

research poses this concern once again, decades after it was first adjudicated in a court of law: is

the district unjustifiably failing to adopt or implement policies reasonably available to them in

order to eliminate racial segregation?

Unfortunately, the answer is not that simple. The limited progress in the decades

following Brown v Board, while viscerally contested, were further truncated by a series of

Supreme Court rulings in the years after Morgan v Hennigan which eroded the spirit of the 1954

ruling. For example, the 1974 Millikan v Bradley supreme court ruling introduced discriminatory

intent as a means of distinguishing between de facto and de jure segregation; districts and

municipalities would not have to desegregate unless it was proven that they intentionally caused

the racial segregation of its schools, no matter how segregated they may be. Years later in 2007,

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, ruled that race-conscious

assignment plans were unconstitutional. Given these shifting and constricting federal restrictions,

the path to implementing policies that are either legally available or “reasonably available” is

unclear.

23

Nevertheless, the history of desegregation is of paramount importance for assessing the

current policy examined in this project, because in many ways it echoes the concerns of the

original Black plaintiffs in the 1974 Morgan v Hennigan case. This research examines the extent

to which (and the contours of how) the current Home-Based assignment plan resists or maintains

“discriminatory pupil placement” under the guise of equity and choice. Boston is no longer

subject to legal desegregation oversight because it achieved unitary status in 1987. This legal

designation freed the city from court mandated desegregation oversight because the district was

at that point declared by the court to be “operating an integrated, unitary system,” as opposed to

a segregated one (Orfield et al., 2014, p. 27). Then from 1989 to 2013, Boston operated under a

three-zone model called “The Controlled Choice Plan” which privileged proximity, siblings, and

up until 1999, race. In 2012, then Mayor Menino announced in his State of the City speech that

the zone system would be replaced by “a radically different student assignment plan- one that

puts a priority on children attending schools closer to their homes” (Menino, 2012).

Menino’s proposal is now the current assignment policy of Boston Public Schools. It is

called the Home-Based Assignment Plan and was developed by a graduate student at MIT to

provide “a customized list of school choices for every family based on their home address”

(Boston Public Schools, 2016b). The new plan was first implemented in the 2014-2015 school

year and markets that two of its goals are “Ensuring Quality” and “Valuing Family.” In the plan,

every family has a minimum of six schools on their list (although the average is between ten and

fourteen schools), and every list is to include at least four “high-quality” schools (as measured by

standardized test scores) to ensure that all families have a range of choices irrespective of the

quality of schools in their immediate neighborhood(s).

24

The new policy’s language of providing high-quality schools close to home for all

families is a far cry from the overt racial hostility of a Boston School Committee that

intentionally segregated its schools and was found guilty of de jure segregation in 1974.

Nevertheless, under this plan, schools are re-segregating in Boston (Boston Area Research

Initiative, 2018; Vaznis, 2018). I began this section by juxtaposing Mayor Menino’s proposal to

cut transportation and reimagine the assignment system with that of Atwater’s Southern Strategy

to point out that while the rhetoric may be vastly different, the outcomes are not. Now, as before,

schools are segregating. Menino’s well-received comments about cutting transportation costs is

framed as a budgetary change, an unnecessary and excessive expense. However, in Boston, cuts

to transportation are cuts to the number of busses that were once court-mandated to integrate the

students of Boston. To be clear, in a city with rapid gentrification and increasing racial and

economic neighborhood segregation, advocating for fewer busses is advocating for fewer

integrated schools. Today, as before, the right to a quality public school education is linked with

historical patterns of access and opportunity. However, today these efforts cost the city and its

families a lot of paperwork, headache, and money to ultimately produce segregated schools

albeit under the complex guise of compulsory choice.

This project draws from across, and contributes to, three different sets of literature: that

on school choice, service organizations and public policy actors, and intersectionality. While

school choice literatures look across the levels of policy (Ayscue et al., 2018; McDermott et al.,

2015), process (Holland, 2015; Sattin-Bajaj, Jennings, Corcoran, Baker-Smith, & Hailey, 2018),

and individual choices (André-Bechely, 2005; Lareau & Goyette, 2014), most are situated in the

latter category. In particular, scholars have looked into how parents gather information and make

decisions about schools. They find that some degree of familiarity with the schools influences

25

the choices families make, whether that awareness is in terms of reputation, demographics,

quality, or a combination of factors (Beabout & Cambre, 2013; Cucchiara & Horvat, 2014;

Goldring & Hausman, 1999; Holme, 2002; Kimelberg, 2014; Lareau, Evans, & Yee, 2016;

Saporito & Lareau, 1999). Middle-class parents give particular weight to the reputation and

status of schools, privilege the information they receive from their high-status peers when

making school choice decisions (Holme, 2002; Kimelberg, 2014; Kimelberg & Billingham,

2012; Roda & Wells, 2013), and are more likely to put a premium on the quality of schools as

measured by test scores compared to their less-affluent peers (Goldring & Hausman, 1999;

Goyette, 2008; Hastings, Kane, & Staiger, 2005). More affluent parents also tend to have

stronger and larger networks to access information about educational options (Horvat et al.,

2003; Schneider, Teske, Roch, & Marschall, 1997), compared to lower-income families whose

networks are typically more limited and less connected to formal networks that include

professionals or experts (Neild, 2005; Weininger, 2014).

Structural conditions therefore shape not only the choices that individual families make,

but also the ways in which they have access to institutional processes and local policies. Scholars

have found that low-income families, families of color, immigrant families, and non-English

speaking families are more likely than their affluent peers to have school choice experiences that

are disempowering or constrained by factors such as transportation, paperwork, deadlines,

information, and translations (DeArmond et al., 2014; DeLuca & Rosenblatt, 2010; Fong &

Faude, 2018; Haynes, Phillips, & Goldring, 2010; Mavrogordato & Stein, 2016; Neild, 2005;

Pattillo, Delale-O’Connor, & Butts, 2014; Rhodes & DeLuca, 2014; Rich & Jennings, 2015;

Sattin-Bajaj, 2014a, 2014b; Valdés, 1996). Nevertheless, with more information and institutional

support, all families have been shown to choose higher-performing schools (André-Bechely,

26

2005; Bancroft, 2009; Corcoran, Jennings, Cohodes, & Sattin-Bajaj, 2018; Delale-O’Connor,

2018b; Dougherty et al., 2013; Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018; Wao, Hein, Villamar, Chanderbhan-

Forde, & Lee, 2017; Yettick, 2016)

Scholars point out that “one of the central assumptions about choice is that everyone will

know about all the available options and how to assess the appropriateness for their children.

But it is clear that this assumption does not reflect reality” (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013, p.

262). As school choice continues to proliferate, it is increasingly urgent that we better understand

the ways that institutions may shape and can even intervene to help all families navigate and

successfully complete school choice processes. This dissertation contributes to a small, but

growing body of research on the ways that bureaucratic actors and institutions (schools or

districts) also shape school choice outcomes. These studies on bureaucratic actors and

institutions have been focused almost exclusively on guidance counselors who help students

navigate high school admissions processes (Corcoran et al., 2018; Sattin-Bajaj, 2014a, 2014b;

Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018) or postsecondary options (Bahr, Gross, Slay, & Christensen, 2015;

Belasco, 2013; Rosenbaum, Miller, & Krei, 1996). School districts and their role in school

choice and assignment practices, however, have rarely been the focus of scholarly attention (for

exceptions, see Honig, 2006; Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018; Wao et al., 2017). Districts and the

employees who work with families in them, are critical and underexamined components of the

perpetuation of segregated schools today.

While underexplored in school choice literatures, many scholars have long studied policy

implementation and the role that bureaucracies and their actors play in shaping service provision

(Acker, 1990; Blau, 1972; Bridges, 2011; Crozier, 1979; Hays, 2004; Herd & Moynihan, 2018;

Leidner, 1993; Lipsky, 1980; Ray, 2019; Selznick, 2011; Watkins-Hayes, 2009; Weber, 2012).

27

These scholars have paid particular attention to the tensions between the routinized labor and

autonomy of staff in shaping client outcomes (Diamond & Lewis, 2018; Feldman & Pentland,

2003; Leidner, 1993; Lipsky, 1980) and this research has looked at both public and private

service industries ranging from policing to fast-food (Armenta, 2016; Baines, Cunningham, &

Shields, 2017; Korczynski, 2009; Leidner, 1993). Many scholars have explicitly engaged with

issues of service provision in relation to the state’s increasing control over marginalized

populations through bureaucracies whether in the context of welfare reform in the United States

(Abramovitz, 2000; Danzinger & Seefeldt, 2000; Edin & Lein, 1997; Fisher & Reese, 2011;

Hays, 2004; Reese, 2005; Schram, Soss, Fording, & Houser, 2009; Soss, 2002; Watkins-Hayes,

2009) or in public bureaucracies more broadly in the Global South (Auyero, 2012; Gupta, 2012).

Two central themes emerge in these literatures that this dissertation adds to: that of critical

feminist approaches that look at the subordination of marginalized women (e.g. Bridges, 2011;

Hays, 2004), and a second approach that looks at the ways that bureaucracies structure

citizenship (e.g. Lipsky, 1980; Yang, 2005). Given the diversity of registering families in the

case of Boston, both threads of inquiry are relevant. I find that the implementation of policy

operates in ways that shape citizenship, particularly deservingness of bureaucratic resources such

as time and information, akin to welfare studies which critique the systematic subordination of

one group: “overwhelmingly women, disproportionately non-white, single parents, and of

course, very poor” (Hays, 2004, p. 20).

Finally, I draw on and contribute to critical intersectionality research, particularly

research that focuses on the salience of race in the organization and opportunity hoarding of

resources, inequalities, and experiences in the United States. In line with this tradition, I view the

school district as a racialized organization (Ray, 2019) that maintains racial inequality by

28

privileging whiteness in both institutional contexts (Alexander, 2012; Bridges, 2011; Haney-

López, 2006; Moore, 2008) and its discursive framing of policies and practices (Bell &

Hartmann, 2007; Berrey, 2015; Bonilla-Silva, 2010). In order to situate school choice systems in

the post-civil rights context of today, it is important to look at the colorblind ways that “choice”

itself is able to be “highly effective at exacerbating the racist hegemony” (Vaught, 2011, p. 91).

Given that low-income families of color are disproportionately headed by single-mothers and

those who work as registration specialists are predominantly women and/or staff of color, the

process of school choice must be examined through an intersectional lens. Intersectionality is a

particularly useful tool to make visible and interrogate “the overlapping and conflicting

dynamics” of inequalities (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013, p. 788). Neoliberal policy framings

of school choice as a process participated in by genderless and raceless “families” and

implemented by genderless and raceless “district employees” miss these important dynamics.

While situated in these different subfields, it is important to highlight that what I am

exploring also explictly reaches back to desegregation court orders themselves. In the years

following Brown v Board of Education (1954), it was districts (or their authorizers/controllers)

who were tried for, and many times found guilty of, de jure segregation of children. The

defendants were not algorithms, neighborhoods, or other faceless parties. The defendants were

district officials, superintendents, school committees: the lead actors who drove decision making

about how institutions would manage the threshold that divided parents and the schools their

children ultimately could attend. Defendants were the individuals who designed, operationalized,

and sustained practices that segregated students in schools across the United States.

When attempting to remedy these segregative practices, courts sometimes put into place

oversight bodies to track and supervise the implementation of desegregation orders. In Boston,

29

following the 1974 desegregation case, they were required to have a court supervised

“Department of Implementation.” They were described as “the actual mechanism for school

system implementation, supervision and coordination” (Boston City Archives | Department of

Implementation : Boston Public Schools: Desegregation-era Records Collection, n.d.). Despite

this critical, court-appointed role, little is known about the contemporary manifestations or

legacies of these departments. Welcome Centers, the heart of this ethnographic study of school

choice, are a contemporary iteration of that Department of Implementation. In fact, my fieldwork

introduced me to at least three staff members who began their work at the district as employees

in the original Department of Implementation. Sociological literatures on organizations and

public policy are therefore useful complements to scholarship on school choice, because they

explore the local level of policy implementation and the role of public bureaucracies on service

provision (Blau, 1972; Bridges, 2011; Crozier, 1979; Hays, 2004; Herd & Moynihan, 2018;

Leidner, 1993; Lipsky, 1980; Watkins-Hayes, 2009).

In order to better understand how district actors and their organizational routines mediate

between parent preferences and school segregation, I specifically ask three questions:

1. How do institutional processes (re)produce inequalities?

2. How do district staff perceive their work and the families they serve in relation to

these processes?

3. How do staff perceptions further exacerbate or mitigate these inequalities?

I answer these questions in several complementary ways. Because the registration process in

Boston is a time sensitive process (see Fong & Faude, 2018), I used the district timeline to

inform the timing of my fieldwork. Therefore, I observed over the course of one “school choice

season”, from late fall 2016 until September 2017 (Image 2). Observation over this time revealed

30

different district practices, challenges, families, and changes connected to the school choice,

enrollment, and assignment processes. However, it also held constant year to year variation that

accompanies the constant changes across the district overall, such as (but certainly not limited to)

school closures, program modifications, and shifts in school accountability levels that can

otherwise fluctuate from year to year.

Image 2: Boston Public School District Choice Season Calendar, Compiled by the Author

This project draws on one year of participant observation amounting to over one

thousand hours spent in district meetings, public meetings, and registration spaces where families

made choices and registered for school. I conducted fifty semi-structured interviews with district

staff whose jobs were directly connected to school choice, registration, and assignment

(Appendices A and B). I also conducted a survey in partnership with Welcome Center staff to

better understand the characteristics, information sources, school preferences, and barriers to

registration for families registering on time (January 2017), late (summer 2014, 2015, 2017), and

a subset of families making choices due to a school closure (December 2016-January 2017).

Finally, I collected and analyzed more than one hundred district documents related to school

choice, registration, and assignment, as well as historical documents and reports that referenced

or evaluated these processes. The triangulation of these different data sources allowed me to

SCHOOL CHOICE SEASON

2016-2017

Round 1

PreK, K, 6, 7, 9

January

Round 2

All Grades

February- March

Round 3

All Grades

April-June

Start of School

Late Registration

All Grades

Summer

School Preview

November-December

31

directly answer my research questions and provide unique insight into district practices and their

role in school choice inequalities.

THE ROAD TO REGISTRATION

In each of the chapters that follow, I delve deep into the black box of the bureaucracy of

school choice. In each chapter I interrogate seemingly neutral, mundane, bureaucratic

procedures, tools, and resources, to reveal how institutions play a significant part in the

perpetuation of broader social inequalities. Despite arguably good intentions in their design, the

lack of district investment of time and resources to expand access sustains a cavernous gap

between those who benefit from interactions with the district and those who do not. In each case,

these resources operate to further stratify access to the process of school choice, despite a

concern for expanding opportunities and promoting equity for all families. I argue that

institutions shape families’ access to the school choice process, experiences in the registration

sites themselves, and perpetuate the unequal sorting of families before they are finally assigned

to schools. I find that raced, classed, linguistic, and gendered inequalities are mapped onto the

everyday implementation of school choice policy in practice, effectively “launder[ing] racial

domination by obscuring or legitimating unequal processes” (Ray, 2019, p. 10).

In chapter 2, “‘Is that the white line?’: The Racialization of Waiting in a Public

Bureaucracy,” I draw on administrative data, a subset of surveyed families, staff interviews, and

ethnographic observation in registration sites to delve into the history, access, and outcomes of

the district’s pre-registration tool. In this chapter I examine the conditions and consequences of

resources that shape waiting, service, and citizenship in the registration sites. I find that while it

is optional and technically “available” to all families, pre-registration facilitates the same

racialized, gendered, linguistic, and class-based sorting that scholars expect to find in voluntary

32

school choice processes or concentrated in public waiting rooms. Pre-registration operates as a

tool, a spatial logic, and a moralized value system that allows for the efficient and racialized

sorting of time and space in the centers.

In chapter 3, “White Lies and Other Strategies; How Front-Facing Staff Cope with the

Illusion of Choice,” I examine the contexts that enable or constrain staff dissemination of

information to families, as well as the sustained information gap that the district perpetuates as a

result. This chapter utilizes interview data from 37 front-facing staff, participant observation in

registration sites, and a subset of surveyed families. I argue that the routine withholding of

school choice information is not just a symptom of street-level bureaucratic work conditions as

the literature might suggest, but also a mechanism of colorblind racism. However, given the

social locations of most staff as women of color, I also find that the equal treatment of clients

occurs even when staff are aware and unhappy with the inequitable outcomes it perpetuates.

Despite their charge and intention to help families make well-informed choices, workers are both

limited in their access to and complicit in limiting access to information that would help inform

school choices. Ultimately, the absence of institutional interventions to address known

information gaps protects the racial segregation of schools and harms both the highest need

families and the staff of color who serve them.

Chapter 4, “White Noise: The Raciolinguistic Marginalization of the Administratively

Disadvantaged” looks across a range of district efforts to decrease administrative burden on

families. While the first two empirical chapters were deep dives into specific attempts to mitigate

inequalities (time by designing pre-registration; information by hiring and deploying multilingual

staff of color strategically across different centers), this chapter looks at the cumulative effect

that all of these initiatives have on the families navigating Boston’s compulsory choice system. I

33

find that rather than decrease the administrative burden for all families, these initiatives actually

compound disadvantage for the non-English speaking, non-white, non-elite families participating

in the process. Using interviews with fifty district staff, ethnographic observation, and document

analysis, I find that the accumulated effect of these initiatives is a “white noise” which drowns

out the particular needs of poor, non-English speaking, immigrant families of color.

Finally, chapter 5 summarizes the overall research project, reasserting how the

cumulative impact of district efforts in a compulsory choice model reify the inequalities present

in any school choice system. Taken together, these chapters show how school choice policies,

even those that are designed with equity in mind, may be far less effective in reducing

inequalities than their advocates claim. Specifically, while contentious policy shifts may change

the specific choices “available” to families, the underlying district mechanisms have not

fundamentally changed much in recent decades, and even when they do, they consistently fail to

bridge opportunity gaps. In other words, the process of choice, registration, and assignment

reproduces structural inequalities despite changes in staff or even politically contentious

assignment policies.

34

APPENDIX A: Welcome Center Staff Interview Protocol

[GIVE RESPONDENT INFORMED CONSENT FORM & REVIEW TOGETHER]

Warm-up

1) How long have you lived in Boston? a) If just moved: Where did you move from? What brought you to Boston? b) If here since a child: Did you go to BPS yourself? Which schools? How did you end up

there? What was your experience like?

2) Where do you currently live? What do you think of your neighborhood? Do you own/rent? 3) And do you have a family that lives with you or that lives in the area? Would you mind

telling me a little bit about them? a) If they mention kids: What are their ages? Genders? Races? Where do/did they go to

school? How did you come to attend that/those school(s)? Did you go through that process while working here? What Center did you go to? How was that experience?

History with BPS and the Welcome Centers 1) What is your current role/title in BPS/at the Welcome Center?

a) How long have you had that role/title? b) Did you ever work here (at a WC or in BPS) in any other roles/titles?

2) What brought you to this job? a) What kinds of jobs were you looking for? How did you learn about it (network)? How

was it advertised/described to you? 3) Do you work here full-time or part-time?

a) if full-time: have you always worked full-time here? b) if part-time: have you always worked part-time here? do you have other jobs or

volunteer positions? what kinds? what are they like? 4) What’s a typical work week like for you? Does it vary over the year? In what ways?

5) Which centers have you worked at? For what periods of time? In what capacities?

Experience Working at the Welcome Center(s): Overview

1) Can you tell me a bit about your experience working at ______ Welcome Center? a) What do you do there? [find out differences if at more than one space/role] b) It seems like all of the welcome centers are a little different. How would you describe the

culture of this welcome center? (Compare if more than one). What do you think is unique about how this center works / the staff’s personalities/strengths/weaknesses/roles?

2) How would you describe the goals of your work as it relates to school choice, enrollment, and assignment?

35

a) What are the strengths and weaknesses of those goals? b) How do you view your role is in this process? What do you hope you do? (probe for

social worker ←→ efficiency engineer) c) Do you feel there are any ways that you might unintentionally work against the

institutional or your personal goals? d) How do you know if your work is going well in contribution to these goals? Not?

3) What does “school choice” mean to you? If you were designing it, what would it look like / what would be different?

Experience Working at the Welcome Center(s): Parent Experiences 4) What types of parents do you typically serve? What are their backgrounds? Where are they

from/ where do they live? What types of questions do you get asked? Do the questions you get asked (type or quantity) seem to vary by a certain “type” of parent?

5) Can you walk me through what a parent experiences at this center? a) As parents move through the center, what makes this process faster/slower for them?

(probe about staff variation and family variation) b) How long do you think families typically wait? What’s the fastest you’ve

seen? Slowest? (also probe for days of week, times of day, and/or seasons; also probe for staff #s or staff quality)

c) I’m curious about the different experiences and types of families who are on the different paths within centers (pre-registration, appointments, regular, same-year/late registration). Can you tell me a bit about what you notice about how those work and who is in each group here?

d) What kinds of questions or concerns do parents bring up about schools and registration? i) How do you handle these?

e) What kinds of questions do you ask the parent? i) Are there any constraints to the amount or type of questions you feel you can ask the

parent? [if yes: what are they? where do they come from?] f) What kinds of information do you provide the parent?

i) Are there any constraints to the amount or type of information you feel you can give the parent? [if yes: what are they?]

6) What does an ideal interaction with a parent look like? a) Do you think that your colleagues all agree? What other things might they

include/exclude? 7) What do families ideally know before they arrive?

a) Does this vary by: year, parent, demographic, neighborhood, center? b) What’s your experience with this? How often does this happen? How does this make

you or your coworkers feel? What do you (or your coworkers) do when this happens?

36

8) What does a typical registration session with a parent look like? a) Do you think that your colleagues all agree? What other things might they

include/exclude? 9) What do families typically know before they arrive?

a) Does this vary by: year, parent, demographic, neighborhood, center? b) What’s your experience with this? How does this make you or your coworkers

feel? What do you (or your coworkers) do when this happens? 10) What’s unusual?

a) What’s your experience with this? How does this make you or your coworkers feel? What do you (or your coworkers) do when this happens?

11) What, if anything, do you think parents are most happy about their experiences at the Welcome Centers?

12) What, if anything, do you think parents are least happy about their experiences at the Welcome Centers?

13) What are some things that you find gratifying/beneficial about working at the Welcome Centers?

a) If more than one: Does this vary across your experiences at different Welcome Centers? 14) What are some of the challenges that Welcome Center staff face in this work?

a) If more than one: what are some of the differences that you notice? (staffing, busy-ness, types of parents, types of questions, space, resources, information, training, support/leadership)

b) If over time: how have you noticed things change over time? (staffing, busy-ness, types of parents, types of questions, space, resources, information, training, support/leadership)

15) What is most frustrating to you about your job? What do you (or your coworkers) do?

16) What are three traits that you think are most important to be successful at your job?

TRAINING AND PREPARATION

1) What kind of training have you received for this job? What was it like? a) Who runs trainings? What kind of information and/or skills do they provide?

b) Do you think it was helpful? Enough? i) Prepared for types of challenges, parents?

2) What other work or life experiences have also helped prepare you for this job? 3) Is there anything about training that you could suggest to make it more helpful that what is

provided? (probe for timing; dosage; type of information/skills, etc.) 4) Is there anything you would recommend to improve the school choice process from the

perspective of staff? What would you want to see change? What would make things easier for you? More equitable?

37

5) Is there anything you would recommend to improve the school choice process from the perspective of families? What would you want to see change? What would make things easier for them? More equitable?

That’s great, thank you. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you’d like to share with me about this topic? Are there any questions that you think I should have asked that I didn’t?

DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONS / COOL DOWN

1) How old are you? 2) How would you describe your race or ethnicity? 3) Do you speak any languages in addition to English? [if yes: Does that play a role in your

work at the Center?] 4) What is the highest level of education that you achieved? [Name of college/graduate schools

& degree(s) earned]

5) What is your marital status [married/divorced/never married/widowed]? 6) What is the highest level of education that your [partner] earned? [Name of college/graduate

schools & degree(s) earned] 7) Does your spouse/partner work? What is his/her job? How long has s/he had that job? [If

unemployed] What, if any, was his/her job before becoming unemployed? 8) What is your household’s estimated combined annual income (i.e., from all of the people

who live there)? 9) Do you receive any type of government assistance? Welfare, food stamps, housing

assistance, etc.? Have you ever gotten any government help before?

Thank you very much for your time. This has been extremely helpful. As I continue with this research would you be willing for me to follow up with you with any other questions? ________

Would it be possible for me to shadow you as you work with families? __________

Preferred pseudonym: _________________

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APPENDIX B: Context Staff Interview Protocol

[GIVE RESPONDENT INFORMED CONSENT FORM & REVIEW TOGETHER] Warm-up 4) How long have you lived in Boston?

a) If just moved: Where did you move from? What brought you to Boston? b) If here since a child: Did you go to BPS yourself? Which schools? How did you end up

there? What was your experience like? 5) Where do you currently live? What do you think of your neighborhood? Do you own/rent? 6) And do you have a family that lives with you or that lives in the area? Would you mind

telling me a little bit about them? a) If they mention kids: What are their ages? Genders? Races? Where do/did they go to

school? How did you come to attend that/those school(s)? What Center did you go to? How was that experience? [If BPS, get a sense of employee at the time. If non-BPS get a sense if engaged in choice activism at the time]

Work Context/History 6) What is your current role/title?

a) How long have you had that role/title? b) If BPS: Did you ever work here in any other roles/titles? Or elsewhere in ways that are

connected to BPS or school choice? c) If non-BPS: I’m interested in how you got involved with Boston schools and school

choice. Can you talk me through that journey? 7) What brought you to this job/activism/engagement with issues of

assignment/enrollment/choice? i) If a job: What kinds of jobs were you looking for? How did you learn about it

(network)? How was it advertised/described to you? 8) What does your current job entail?

a) Probe for autonomy, restrictions, how it’s changed over time, which families they picture themselves serving, who are they accountable to? Responsible for?

9) Has the current assignment plan come up in your work? If yes… a) How do you view your role is in this process? b) What kinds of questions or concerns do parents/staff/community members bring up?

How do you handle these? How do different departments handle these? 10) How would you describe the goals of your work as it relates to school choice, enrollment,

and assignment?

a) What are the strengths and weaknesses of those goals?

39

b) Do you feel there are any ways that you might unintentionally work against these goals? c) How do you know if your work is going well in contribution to these goals? Not?

Connecting Work and School Choice Policy This research is broadly about the current school choice policy in Boston, but I’m learning that it has changed quite a bit over time and means a lot of things to a lot of people. 1) Can you talk to me about what you know about the history of school choice in Boston?

2) Has your personal/family experience intersected with this history? In what ways? 3) Has your professional life intersected with this history? In what ways?

4) Can you talk to me a little about the current home-based assignment plan? a. What do you think it aims to do? What are its goals?

b. Do you think it achieves those goals? What do you think it actually does? c. What are its strengths? How might it be an improvement?

d. What are its weaknesses/areas of concern? How might it be a step backwards? e. How do you think families perceive the current system?

f. How do you think front-line workers in the district perceive the current system? g. Other perspectives?

h. Who do you think benefits most from this plan? Benefits least? i. How is it different from previous plans? Do you think it’s better/worse now than it

used to be? In what ways? j. What do you think it would look like if the goals of the home-based plan were

accomplished? Failing? 5) What does “school choice” mean to you? If you were designing it, what would it look like /

what would be different?

TRAINING AND RECOMMENDATIONS 6) What kind of training do you think district staff should have about the current school choice

system?

a) Probe for Welcome Center/front-facing, executive cabinet, other departments 7) Is there anything you would recommend to improve the school choice process from your

perspective? What would you want to see change? What would make things easier for you? More equitable?

8) Is there anything you would recommend to improve the school choice process from the perspective of families? What would you want to see change? What would make things easier for them? More equitable?

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9) That’s great, thank you. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you’d like to share with me about this topic? Are there any questions that you think I should have asked that I didn’t?

DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONS / COOL DOWN

10) How old are you? 11) How would you describe your race or ethnicity? 12) Do you speak any languages in addition to English? [if yes: Does that play a role in your

work?] 13) What is the highest level of education that you achieved? [Name of college/graduate schools

& degree(s) earned]

14) What is your marital status [married/divorced/never married/widowed]? 15) What is the highest level of education that your [partner] earned? [Name of college/graduate

schools & degree(s) earned] 16) Does your spouse/partner work? What is his/her job? How long has s/he had that job? [If

unemployed] What, if any, was his/her job before becoming unemployed? 17) What is your household’s estimated combined annual income (i.e., from all of the people

who live there)? 18) Do you receive any type of government assistance? Welfare, food stamps, housing

assistance, etc.? Have you ever gotten any government help before?

Thank you very much for your time. This has been extremely helpful. As I continue with this research would you be willing for me to follow up with you with any other questions? ________ Preferred pseudonym: _________________

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CHAPTER 2: “Is that the white line?”: The Racialization of Waiting in a Public Bureaucracy

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on public bureaucratic spaces routinely describe individuals, disproportionately poor

women of color, waiting for hours to receive services, resources, and support. Alternately, school

choice literatures overwhelmingly focus on those who opt in to the process, attributable to their

more advantaged statuses than their non-choosing peers. Each subfield makes sense of how

public systems work in general based on their study of a specific subpopulation. But what does

waiting and school choice look like in a diverse public bureaucracy that ostensibly serves

everyone equally? In Boston Public Schools, all families must physically visit a district

registration site to enroll, and thousands do so during the priority registration month of January. I

draw on participant observation in these spaces, interviews with 50 staff, administrative data for

4,549 student cases, and a survey of 1,887 registering families. I find that the district’s optional

tool of pre-registration facilitates the same racialized, gendered, linguistic, and class-based

sorting that scholars expect to find dividing participants and non-participants in school choice or

concentrated in public waiting rooms. This research therefore focuses on how district resource

simultaneously operates as a tool, spatial logic, and moralized value system that allows for the

efficient and racialized sorting of time and space in a diverse public school registration process.

This finding has implications for scholars and policymakers interested in equalizing access to

public resources.

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INTRODUCTION

Sociological literatures regularly document the ways that poor women of color most

commonly bear the burden of long waits for public resources, whether in welfare offices in the

United States (Hays, 2004; Watkins-Hayes, 2009) or administrative offices in the Global South

(Auyero, 2012; Gupta, 2012). However, absent from these studies is an understanding of how

their whiter, wealthier peers fare in the same process, largely because they rarely participate in

the same processes (André-Bechely, 2005; Blum, 2015). School choice generally, and

compulsory choice models more specifically, offer a unique window so that we can better

understand: When everyone participates in a bureaucratic process for a public resource, who

waits and why?

Using the case of Boston Public Schools, I focus on “pre-registration,” an English-only,

online-only optional resource for families before they participate in the district’s compulsory

choice system. In order to register for school in Boston, all families must bring documentation

related to their child (i.e. immunizations, birth certificate) and two proofs of residency to one of

the district’s four registration sites. While there, they wait to meet with a registration specialist

who will check their documents, type their information into the district’s server, and submit their

school choices. Families who pre-registered provided their information into the district’s

platform in advance, thus accelerating the process for themselves and the staff assisting them.

Drawing on mixed-methods data including administrative data from 4,549 registration

cases, a survey of 1,887 registering families, interviews with fifty district staff, and ethnographic

observations at the four registration centers in Boston Public Schools I find that the design, in-

center implementation of, and staff discourse about pre-registration all protect, value, and

facilitate the efficient and racialized sorting of time and space. While pre-registration

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participation does not shape school choices or ultimate school assignments, it does shape all

families’ experiences with the process of registration. Pre-registration is therefore a bureaucratic

tool that facilitates the same racialized, gendered, linguistic, and class-based sorting that scholars

expect to find in choosing versus non-choosing populations or concentrated in public waiting

rooms.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Sociological literatures have long demonstrated the individual and structural level factors

that shape how institutions construct and reproduce race, class, and gender inequalities, such as

those in housing (Massey & Denton, 2003), education (Bettie, 2014; Lewis, 2003; Orfield &

Frankenberg, 2013), health (Bridges 2011) and organizations (Acker, 1990, 2006). This literature

review brings into conversation two different literatures: one on how public bureaucracies shape

citizenship particularly through waiting, and the other on studies of school choice participation as

viewed through the chooser vs. non-chooser divide. While both literatures address who accesses

and is subjected to waits for public resources, be they welfare or public schools, neither fully

explains what happens when all families participate in these public bureaucratic processes.

Logics Governing Unequal Waits for the State

Literatures on the role of the state, bureaucracy, and waiting explore both the contexts

and consequences of clients seeking public resources across the Global South as well as in the

United States. These authors argue that interactions between the state and its constituents operate

as an important political lesson, and shape both clients’ self-perceptions and perceptions of the

state alike (Lipsky, 1980; Soss, 1999). Those seeking resources are taught to fulfill the “client

role” (Alcabes & Jones, 1985; Lipsky, 1980; Soss, 1999), and therefore are part of the state’s

efforts to define and create subjects. At the same time, these client roles and subject boundaries

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are themselves specific to broader socio-political assumptions, stereotypes, and structures

(Lipsky, 1980, p. 4). In this way, we can also understand the state, and the bureaucracies that

operate under it, as sites of both cultural and symbolic production (Yang, 2005).

Despite this critical intermediary role between the state and its subjects, for a long time

the processes in bureaucracies were understudied (Gupta, 2012) or relied heavily on the seminal

work of Street-Level Bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980). Lipsky (1980) argues that queuing (p. 95) and

creaming (p. 107) are different means of selecting clients based on their social value, often a pre-

sort and pre-screen of those who will most likely succeed in the context of bureaucratic rules

(Lipsky, 1980). They are part of organizational logics which the institution uses to “routinize,

simplify, and differentiate in the context of inequality” (Lipsky, 1980, p. 115). Watkins-Hayes

(2009) moves his work further by looking at these street-level bureaucrats as “socially situated

bureaucrats,” in order to understand how inequalities interact with and are produced by the social

location of both the staff and clients alike. However, because welfare policy is itself linked to

material resources (or lack thereof), situated in raced and gendered contexts, Watkins-Hayes’

descriptions of waiting still depict a homogeneous group of “clients” versus a homogenous group

of “staff” (p. 44).1

Recent work investigating processes, particularly around poor people’s waiting have

revealed the “everyday sociospatial constitution of power—not despite but because of their

banality” (Secor, 2007, p. 42). Therefore, observations and analyses of spaces in which

marginalized individuals wait help to unveil the ways that citizenship is routinized and inscribed

in bureaucratic practices including when those waiting are diverse. These practices, such as

waiting in line to be served, are therefore meaningful spaces in which to observe “performances

1 More recently, Bridges’ (2011) ethnography of a public hospital describes how language stratifies the waits of patients, with Spanish only families stuck in longer holding patterns as they wait for the “language line” (p. 51).

45

of citizenship” (Holston, 2008, p. 15). Across these contexts, these scholars acknowledge the

tradeoffs between bureaucratic efficiency and equity, since “the goals of efficiency do not

necessarily coincide with the goals of justice” (Gupta 2012, p. 25).

Scholarship on the Global South looked specifically at the effects of state domination of

the poor in relation to the extent and ways in which they are forced to wait for the state (Auyero,

2012; Gupta, 2012). In the context of the United States’ welfare systems, scholars have looked at

the regulation and subjugation of individuals (Piven & Cloward, 1993; Quadagno, 1996;

Wacquant, 2009), as well as the role of paternalism and maternalism in shaping institutional

experiences of our most marginalized citizens, disproportionately poor mothers of color (Edin &

Lein, 1997; Hays, 2004; Levine, 2013; Reich, 2005). In Bridges’ (2011) ethnography of a public

hospital in New York, she explains how the intersection of public resources, poor pregnant

women, and time intersect:

I stress the length of the [intake procedure] because it might be understood as training women to accept a common characteristic of ‘public’ institutions: hideously long waiting periods. Accordingly, [the day] teaches women that public institutions [like the public hospital] are frequently too understaffed to effectively and efficiently meet the needs of those who depend on them… it communicates to women that their time is not highly valued (p. 51).

The devaluation of these women’s time is rendered directly through long waits, which is itself a

product of underfunding the institution these women have access to.

Critical scholars have pushed for examination of how institutional cultures, practices, and

discourses all sustain inequalities. For example, resource limitations are a given in all of the

studies described above, yet there is still discretion in each institution as to how those limited

resources will be deployed. Critical race scholars call attention to the material interests of

whiteness, and how it impacts institutional differentiation in simultaneously colorblind and

measurable ways (Bonilla-Silva, 2010). So given limited resources, literatures on waiting in

46

public bureaucracies might assume that waiting process for all is ubiquitous: long, slow, and

demeaning. However, recent work by Ray points out that “one way racialized organizations

shape agency is by controlling time” (2019, p. 11). He calls attention to both social and

institutional locations as dynamics which shape one’s ability to control and manage one’s time

within organizations. Ray also looks at how organizations allocate time to clients differently

across racial lines, which is of particular importance for this paper where I examine what

queuing, creaming, and waiting look like when a diverse set of families participate

simultaneously. The uniform assumptions of the research are in many ways attributable to the

case selection of these scholars and the hyper segregation of public and private institutional

spaces; they make it hard to see the implicit and explicit ways that advantage, rather than

disadvantage, organizes and is organized by bureaucracy. Uniquely, public education is

ostensibly available to and used by a full range of families. However, there has been scant

consideration of how family participation (also disproportionately mothers) is shaped by the state

and/or relegated into waiting rooms. Given the diverse racial, classed, and linguistic

demographics of families, this study asks what waiting looks like as families seek the public

resource of public education at required registration sites, and how that aligns with institutional

logics designed to protect white material interests (Moore, 2008; Ray, 2019).

Unequal Participation in School Choice

While education literatures are generally more attuned to variation in family

demographics due to the diversity of public school participation nationwide, school choice

literatures tend to overwhelmingly looks at those who participate in choice. However, this group

is much more heterogeneous than that of participants in other public systems. Part of what may

be shaping scholarly assumptions about equal or at least diverse access to post-civil rights school

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choice systems is that “families exercising choice are not always ‘privileged’ in the absolute

sense,” they are just more privileged with regards to education, social networks, and social

capital than their peers who do not participate in choice (Delale-O’Connor, 2018a, p. 4).

Nevertheless, studies find that school choice participants are disproportionately white and

higher-income (Bifulco, Ladd, & Ross, 2009; Goyette, 2008; Phillips, Hausman, & Larsen,

2012; Rich & Jennings, 2015; Saporito & Sohoni, 2007).

All educational institutions, both K-12 schools and higher education, reveal “the

mechanisms by which white power and privilege are enforced and reproduced in the post-civil

rights era” (Moore, 2008, p. 173). By looking at the historical contexts that inform institutional

logics, and the unequal distribution of resources that they facilitate, critical race scholars provide

a helpful lens to map “contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics”

(Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 2). School choice itself has a history that provides an important lens for

understanding contemporary inequalities, as it was designed as an explicit desegregation

resistance tactic in response to 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education (Guinier, 2004).

Today, the demographic segregation of contemporary choosing versus non-choosing

families hints at the multiple barriers and broader structural inequalities that continue to impact

families. These include information gaps (Bell, 2009; DeLuca & Rosenblatt, 2010; Neild, 2005;

Pattillo, Delale-O’Connor, & Butts, 2014), logistical barriers (DeLuca, Wood, & Rosenblatt,

2011), and cultural and linguistic barriers to largely English-only bureaucratic processes (Haynes

et al., 2010; Valdés, 1996). While low-income, immigrant, non- or limited-English speaking,

families of color are multiply marginalized by school choice systems, scholars have documented

that with the rapid expansion of school choice, even elite families find school choice processes to

be complicated, incoherent, and overwhelming (Lareau et al., 2016).

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While these literatures on barriers to educational access help us understand how

segregation persists in school choice, little is known about how racial exclusion plays out within

districts with compulsory choice. While the difference may seem to only be an issue of scale,

scholarship on choosing points out that much of what we know about choice is based on those

who can, and do, choose at all (Delale-O’Connor, 2018a). Recent research on New York’s

citywide high school choice model, for example, shows that segregated outcomes are at least in

part shaped by inequalities and inconsistencies in the quality and quantity of information that

families receive when navigating the system, both on their own and through the bureaucratic

intermediaries of school guidance counselors (Sattin-Bajaj, 2014a; Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018).

Taken together, these literatures invite us to more closely examine the mechanisms and processes

happening between parents and systems that sustain these inequalities.

RESEARCH CONTEXT

The Unique Diversity of Round One Kindergarten Registration

Despite our collective social imagination of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) as

public bureaucracy at its worst, one staff member at Boston Public Schools told me that “I would

argue that [the] DMV beats us in a lot of things, which is kind of disgusting.” In Boston, all

families must go in person to physically register and make school selections at one of several

district registration offices, called Welcome Centers. Welcome Center waiting rooms typically

mirror the banality and lethargy of a stereotypical DMV. While there is slight variation across

the four district locations, at each there is no mistaking the queues, paperwork, unknown wait

times, and metal folding chairs of a public bureaucratic process. The transactions at Welcome

Centers include photocopying IDs, immunization records, and documentation to prove residency.

Despite how routinized this bureaucratic experience is, it is also the site where families make

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high-stakes decisions about how to rank their school preferences. But before any of this can

happen, families regularly have to wait, sometimes for more than five hours during peak

registration season when there are many more families than there are staff.

A compulsory education model, such as that in Boston Public Schools where all families

have to participate in registering and choosing schools, offers a unique window into a

demographically heterogeneous population all seeking access to the same public good: public

schools. Specifically, district registration families are much more diverse than ultimate district

enrollees due to Boston’s complex school choice landscape. This is because many families of all

backgrounds participate in multiple school options in multiple sectors, weigh their acceptances,

and then select a school. In fact, only around 56,000 students, or 72% of school-age-children in

Boston attended Boston Public Schools in the 2016-2017 school year (Boston Public Schools,

2016c)2.

In order to handle the logistics of registering families in a compulsory choice model, the

district has instituted formal registration “rounds” for families to enter the system for the first

time or apply for transfers to a new school within the district. The first registration round is

typically held during the month of January for families registering for typical school entrance

grades, including kindergarten and pre-kindergarten, sixth grade, and ninth grade. This priority

round also offers a unique opportunity for observing inequalities in registration systems for

several reasons. First, it is the time when the system is most closely working as it was designed.

With seats open across the district in kindergarten and pre-kindergarten classrooms, families who

show up at this time have the highest chance of getting the schools they prefer because they are

2 Of the remaining school-age-children, 12% of these children attended charter schools, 6% attended parochial schools, 5% attended private schools, and another 4% participate in the voluntary desegregation program METCO and therefore attend suburban schools outside of the city of Boston altogether.

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entered together into the first lottery of that choice season. In subsequent rounds, irrespective of

a family’s school choice list or preferences, there are simply fewer seats available.

Second, given that white families are far more likely to enroll in public elementary

schools than in older grades (Kimelberg, 2014), we can expect that the registration and

subsequent enrollment in kindergarten and pre-kindergarten to be more racially diverse than the

district overall. State data from the 2016-2017 school year, see Table 1 below, indeed show a

marked difference between Kindergarten demographics and the overall district demographics for

that year.

Table 1: Boston Public School Enrollment by Race for the 2016-2017 School Year

Race

Kindergarten

All Grades (K-12)

Percentage Point Difference

African American 30.2% 31.8% +1.6% Asian 7.5% 8.8% +1.3% Hispanic 40.9% 41.8% +0.9% Native American, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander 0.4% 0.5% +0.1%

White 17.6% 14.2% -3.4% Multi-Race Non-Hispanic 3.5% 2.9% -0.6%

The fullest demographic diversity is therefore best observed during the moment of registration,

before white families have exited the district in upper years and indeed even before any family

has had to commit to enrolling in an urban public school at all. Indeed, other research into the

timing of registration reveals that a majority of all racial groups register during the first round.

Administrative data from 2014-2016 show that 60% of Hispanic families, 53% of Black families,

83% of white families, and 75% of Asian families register during Round 1 (Fong & Faude,

2018). Participation during this priority registration round is the most diverse in the process, and

therefore affords us an insight into how systems work to manage both the quantity of families

registering and the range of families participating.

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DATA AND METHODS

For this article I draw on multiple data sources and methods including data from a

multilingual survey of registering families (n=1,887), administrative data (n=4,549),

ethnographic observations of registration sites, and 50 in-depth interviews with district staff. The

family surveys and admin data provide demographics, and participation rates in the pre-

registration process. Field notes from participant observation at the four registration sites

document what pre-registration looks like in practice. Finally, qualitative semi-structured

interviews reveal how staff perceive the pre-registration tool and the families who use it.

Registration Data

I draw on administrative data of 4,549 kindergarten and pre-kindergarten student

registrations during the priority round in January 2017. This data was de-identified by the district

and offers case level data including pre-registration participation status, race, zip code, and

Limited English Proficiency (LEP) status3 as a proxy for language fluency. I also draw on a

survey of 1,887 families who registered during the priority round in January 2017 (Appendix A).

The two-sided, one-page paper survey was designed in collaboration with the district, translated

into ten languages4 by the district, and distributed at the four registration sites across the city for

families to complete while waiting during the registration process. The front of the survey asked

questions about families’ demographic information, how families learned about choosing

schools, and what was important when choosing a school. The back of the survey asked about

their satisfaction with staff and the process (i.e. were staff welcoming? Or was the center easy to

3 Given the district policy to not test students until their Kindergarten year, and the fact that the data pulled reflects a student’s status at the time of the data draw and not the moment of registration, this is at best a very rough proxy for parent language fluency. Nevertheless, it is the best measure that the district was able to share. 4 Arabic, Cape Verdean Creole, Chinese, English, French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Spanish, Somali, and Vietnamese.

52

get to and find?). There was also a specific question that asked families, “Did you pre-register

online before coming in today?” followed by a yes/no option and follow-up questions on both (if

yes) their experience with pre-registration and (if no) the barriers that kept them from pre-

registering.

Ethnographic Observation

I spent January 2017 divided amongst the four different registration sites in the district,

from before the centers opened until the last family was served--sometimes an hour or more after

they officially closed. Because each registration site had a waiting room stationed near where

families were first greeted by staff, I spent several hours each day sitting in the worn metal chairs

of the waiting area, teal field notebook in hand, documenting what I saw and heard. As a young

white woman, but old enough to have a school-aged child, some families likely mistook me for a

mother waiting to register. While waiting I sometimes made small talk with parents or other

guardians, asking if they had been waiting long (especially when I was first entering a space). I

explained my role as a graduate student and then learned about their families, their worries about

the process, or whatever else they were willing to share with me while they waited. Given the

physical layout of the Welcome Centers, and the amount of paperwork exchanged during the

process, I was able to easily and visibly have my notebook out to take verbatim notes of the

conversations between families and staff members.

In my field notebook I documented what families stated they were there to do, whether or

not they had pre-registered online, and then made guesses about their ethno-racial identities

based on language and accent of the adult, last name, and their phenotype. This is a crude

representation of the identities, and likely contains misrepresentation for a variety of reasons

including but not limited to my own white racial identity and subjective assumptions of race and

53

ethnic classifications. However, these observations are meaningful to map this inequality in

space and time, particularly given my interest in documenting the ways that families are greeted,

sorted, and subsequently treated by staff (see Armenta, 2016 for a similar approach).

Staff Interviews

I conducted in-person, semi-structured interviews with 50 staff members, 37 of whom

were individuals who work as registration specialists in the registration sites. I did not interview

all staff due to space and time limitations, as all interviews were contingent on not increasing

wait times for families (see Watkins-Hayes, 2009 for a methodological model). An overview of

interviewed staff is included in Appendix B. Through the interviews, I sought to understand the

specific “work knowledges” of my respondents, such as how they did their daily work, how

different registration processes worked, as well as their perceptions and experiences of working

with families (Smith, 2005). After completing the interviews, all audio files were transcribed

verbatim. Respondents also chose their own pseudonyms (Lahman et al., 2015) to protect the

internal confidentiality risks of a workplace study such as this and to allow staff members to

reflect or conceal their identity via their names. While this was an effort to minimize the research

trope of white researchers choosing appropriately “ethnic” names for their respondents of color,

many respondents chose “white sounding” names and/or names of different genders as the

ultimate disguise.

Analysis

I analyzed qualitative data, both field notes and interviews, using NVivo in two stages:

first, thematic coding based on the interview questions or part of the process I had observed, and

second, analytic coding on the responses and observations related to pre-registration as a process.

The latter stage included inductive coding about why families did or did not participate in the

54

process, how pre-registration impacted staff work flows and the space overall, and descriptive

characterizations and observations of families on either side of the pre-registration / registration

divide.

Complementary quantitative analysis in this paper are based on administrative data of

January families who registered for pre-kindergarten or kindergarten (n=4,549) and a comparable

subsample of from the family survey (n=1,143)5. I provide descriptive statistics to show who

participates in pre-registration and conducted a logistic regression to test the hypothesis that pre-

registration participation varies across income, language, and ethno-racial identity. The findings

presented here draw on the triangulated analysis of these data sources.

PRE-REGISTRATION: TOOL, LOGIC, AND VALUE SYSTEM

Staff regularly justified pre-registration to me by explaining how it decreased time

burdens on both families and staff. Given that school registration requires an in-person visit from

all families involved, its process was visible within the confines of the district’s four brick-and-

mortar registration sites. This visibility in real-time also resulted in its constant scrutiny by all

stakeholders. Guardians and staff alike would see long lines or waiting rooms packed with

families and groan in disbelief. Conversely, on less busy days, I often heard administrators

walking through commenting “good, they’re keeping things moving” or families saying, “it

looks like this will be quick.” Given that the district handles nearly five thousand unique

registrations during the month of January each year, any efforts to improve the efficiency of the

registration process seemed a win-win for all involved. Nevertheless, I argue that waiting within

the district bureaucracy is designed, organized, and legitimated in ways that produce and

5 The total number of January registering families who filled out the survey was n=1,887. Pre-kindergarten and kindergarten families are the focus of this analysis as these are the first entry grades into the district, and likely have the most families participating in the pre-registration system which is designed for new families.

55

perpetuate the efficient and racialized sorting of time and space within the process of school

choice. Specifically, I find that pre-registration allows white, English-speaking, wealthier

families to have a more streamlined process of registration, wait for less time, and be perceived

as more caring and dedicated guardians by staff.

In this section, I show how pre-registration both produces and masks inequality in the

district’s registration process. I first document who uses pre-registration, both today and since its

initial development several decades ago. Second, I show how pre-registration despite being an

optional stage of the process, efficiently segregates families in district spaces, in terms of how

long they wait, and even in terms of how they are perceived. I show how these processes

together legitimate and waiting for families of color, as well as how it is policed and resisted by

families and staff. Finally, I detail the families’ self-reported barriers to pre-registration as well

as the institutional constraints that perpetuate unequal access to this resource.

Part 1: Who Are Pre-Registering Families?

BPS Express: An Origin Story

Pre-registration was developed nearly twenty-five years earlier in order to help mitigate

the crush of January registration cases. While optional, this pre-stage of the process was designed

to improve the process for both the district and for families alike. For the former, it meant that

guardians could pre-enter their demographic information and select their school choices, a

tedious process that often doubled the total time to process a registration case. For the latter, it

meant less paperwork to fill out on site, less time waiting, and less time with a staff member once

called. One staff member of color, Justin, explained to me that it was designed with the goal of

expanding access for families, although he conceded that “there weren't a lot of people on the

internet at the time.” Justin explained that while he experienced resistance at the beginning, he

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was confident that “as time goes on, more and more people are gonna be able to do this and we

have this real initial step. Of course, it was my thinking that everybody would pre-register.” With

a young internet, and a staff member of color advocating for its use as a process that would help

all families, the inception of pre-registration sounded like it was at best, a small way to ease the

process for families, and at worst a small additional layer of bureaucracy.

When I asked about the history of the tool during a small staff working group about

innovation in the department, Kelly, one veteran6 staff member explained to me: “You know,

like, we had lots of problems, over at that side.” She gestured out the window towards the

predominantly and historically black neighborhoods in Boston. “[...] you know, everyone in BPS

Express was Caucasian.” Another staff member chimed in, “It was true!” She continued, “It was

moments that you had twenty people in the room, ten BPS Express all Caucasian, the other ten

all minorities.” “All minorities” echoed a staff member. She continued, explaining that those

minority parents “would go ‘is that the white line?!’” The whole room erupted in laughter. “So

things like that. So with pre-registration we start explaining to them [regular registration

families], they [pre-registration families] did stuff at home, not just like getting an express.”

Although Kelly notes the problems in the connection and connotation of whiteness and “express”

given the tool’s original name, she did not mention that access to the tool changed much over

time. Instead, she points out that with the name change, staff were given bureaucratic cover for

this imbalance. Her framing of the problem was no longer that the district was fast tracking white

families in an express lane, but instead that white families had chosen to do extra work before

arriving at the centers. This shift from the institution’s responsibility to that of individual

6 The status of “veteran” in this paper refers to staff who have worked in registration sites for more than five years, representing half of the sample of all staff interviewed.

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families, despite historic disproportionality of white participation in the tool, reflects the

institution’s willingness to sustain racially unequal waits and experiences.

Who Uses Pre-Registration Today?

Table 2 compares survey data of families to administrative data of the full population of

pre-kindergarten and kindergarten registrants during this priority round. Administrative data

reveals that less than one third (31%) of registering pre-kindergarten and kindergarten families

successfully accessed and used the pre-registration tool, compared to just over half (51%) of

those who completed the survey. Across categories measuring ethno-racial identity, income, and

language, the survey sample of families was a non-probability sample that is overrepresented in

its share of pre-registration families across all categories, although nearly identical in its

proportion of white families.

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Table 2. January K0-K2 Pre-Registration Rates by Race, Language, and Class

Administrative Data n=4,549

Survey Data n=1,887

Total Pre-Registration 30.8 51.2 Race/Ethnicity Asian 24.9 45.6 Black 16.2 45.2 Hispanic 18.7 39.0 White 65.2 65.5 Native 0.0 20.0 Other 56.3 41.7 Language Status Limited English 17.6 n/a Never Limited English 41.8 n/a Language Not English n/a 28.2 English n/a 53.7 Annual Income Less than $20,000 n/a 38.3 $20,000-$49,000 n/a 39.6 $50,000-$74,999 n/a 43.7 $75,000-$99,999 n/a 58.0 Over $100,000 n/a 67.6 Neighborhood median household income $20,000-$49,000 20.7 40.6 $50,000-$74,999 26.2 41.7 Over $75,000 56.0 59.5

Descriptively, both the administrative data and family survey reveal a distinct pattern of

unequal access to pre-registration across race, income, and language. In a district that was 14%

white overall, and 18% white in Kindergarten (Table 1), I find that nearly half (48%) of all pre-

registration families (using admin data) are white. Table 2 shows disproportionality within

groups, with white and other as the only racial groups in which a majority of those families

participating in pre-registration. The survey, despite its oversampling, finds similar results. Even

with a “check all” option to be inclusive of complex ethno-racial identities, families who

checked white were the only group to have a majority of respondents participate in pre-

registration at 65.5%; when looking at families who only checked white, this percentage rises to

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69.4%. In comparison, despite being a majority-minority district with over 70% of students in

both kindergarten and overall identifying as black or Hispanic, less than one fifth of black and

Hispanic families participate in pre-registration.

Unequal access continues across measures of language and class as well. Nearly double

the proportion of families with a child designated “Never Limited English” accessed pre-

registration as compared to those labeled “Limited English” and more than 90% of survey

respondents completed the survey in English, despite its translation into nine other languages.

Additionally, both the survey and administrative data reveal inequalities by class and

neighborhood, either through the measure of individual self-reporting on income on the family

survey or linked neighborhood median household income data by zip code across data sources.

In all cases, a majority of families living in zip codes with a neighborhood median household

income of over $75,000 used pre-registration, as opposed to less than half of that for families

living in less affluent areas or identifying lower household income on the survey. This is a

particularly compelling illumination of the broader divide of haves and have nots in Boston, as a

2016 report showed that the city’s median income was $75,300 (Horowitz, 2017). The pre-

registration divide therefore also maps onto Boston’s income divide.

Part 2: Efficiently Segregated Spaces and the Legitimation of Legitimate Waiting

The unequal participation rates in pre-registration by race, class, and language, mapped

out onto the registration sites themselves. Using both ethnographic observations and interviews

with staff, I find that pre-registration was framed and perceived as just another bureaucratic tool

to manage the work of registration and choice. However, it not only efficiently allowed for the

sorting of families by their reason for visiting, but also became an efficient proxy insofar as “pre-

registration” came to be code for good, engaged, families. Pre-registration expedited the

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experiences of families and decreased the workload of staff. Consequentially, pre-registration

was a bureaucratic resource and a proxy for an ideal parent; something simultaneously and

disproportionately good, white, savvy, and prepared. In contrast, regular registration was a

burden, slow, inefficient, and challenging, both as a queue and as a parent within that queue. As

a result of institutional decisions about how to use the information of pre-registration status, this

seemingly neutral and optional tool instead became an efficient mechanism that shaped the

segregated sorting, waiting, and staff perceptions of families. Therefore, the resource of pre-

registration does not just make the process of registration more efficient for some, but efficiently

racializes the waits and experiences of district families in district spaces.

From the moment that anyone steps into a registration site, the first two questions a staff

member asks them are: What are you here to do today? Did you register ahead of time online? At

this intake stage I watched family after family arrive, briefly interact with the “greeter” (often a

seasonal or temporary worker), and then be sorted to their appropriate waiting area depending on

their answers to those first two questions. Even as an observer in registration site waiting rooms,

sitting among families in metal folding chairs, demographic variation between pre-registration

and regular registration groups was immediately visible. In the month of January, I observed 144

different families across the four different Welcome Centers. 24% of the cases I observed pre-

registered7, and 69% of those pre-registration families were white compared to only 17% (only

19 families) of regular registration families. Women, as is true in most studies of educational

participation (André-Bechely, 2005; Blum, 2007, 2011), were the most common participants

(74%), but of the men I observed, nine out of the ten of those who pre-registered were white.

These sorting patterns became incredibly predictable for both me and also it seemed for the staff

7 This number is likely higher than the overall proportion of pre-registration as one center had a higher concentration of white families than the others, and thus afforded the best opportunity to observe this sorting in action.

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I was observing. White English-speaking mothers would arrive and had pre-registered. Mothers

of color, English-speaking or not, had most often not pre-registered. At all centers, greeters

always asked white English-speaking mothers if they had pre-registered, but some did not always

ask their peers of color. When families deviated from the pattern, as when I observed an English-

speaking Latina mom explain that she “did it online,” Yermaliz, a temporary worker of color

exclaimed with surprise “Oh look at you!”

Irrespective of their pre-registration status, all of these families were just trying to register

their children for school. Nevertheless, the centers managed both their space and queuing

systems based on pre-registration participation (or lack thereof). Therefore, pre-registration was

more than just an optional tool for families; it was also an invisible step that facilitated expedited

service by the district to certain families over others. While the spatial constraints and

configuration of each registration site were slightly different, in three of the four sites pre-

registration families only had to go to one room to wait before being served. The result of this

queuing process was an expedited and often one-step queue for pre-registration families

compared to a process that is a two-step waiting room shuffle for regular registration families.

Those in the pre-registration queue often remarked how happy they were that it was so much

faster than they had anticipated. In contrast, the experience of families who had to go through

multiple stages was summarized by the experience of one mother I observed during the second

week of registration. A temporary staff member at document check was highlighting the key

information on the mother’s photocopied documentation. She did not engage with the mother

except to ask clarifying questions. When she finished, she put the immunization form into an

envelope, and let the parent know she had to bring it to school on the first day. The mother asked

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if she was all set, the staff member responded, “Now you have to go to the next step.” The parent

sighed.

At all locations, pre-registration families were served ahead of regular registration

families irrespective of when they arrived. As a result, wait time of regular registration was not

only longer than that of pre-registration families due to their multi-step process but also

contingent on the number of pre-registration families waiting to be served. As a result of the

centers’ practice to segregate families by pre-registration status, and the consistent practice to

expedite the service of pre-registration families above their non-pre-registered peers, the resource

of pre-registration becomes a means to legitimate the racialization of time in registration spaces.

Specifically, it legitimated the importance of expediting white time (albeit coded as pre-

registration) above all others. I observed this process of legitimation reflected in the comments

and behavior of both the staff and the guardians alike. For example, staff expectations of who

pre-registration families were and their right to be expedited shaped their work-flow, such as on

several occasions when I observed staff switching from calling registrations to calling pre-

registrations as soon as a white adult entered the room. Illegitimate waiting therefore was

reserved for anyone who had pre-registered, and by proxy, typically anyone who was white (and

vice versa). Their waiting was illegitimate because they had done everything the district asked

and were in turn deserving of a reward or benefit for their efforts. In a system of scarcity, as is

typical of public bureaucracies (Lipsky, 1980), that reward was time.

In interviews, staff were all very aware of the demographics of pre-registration families

and were able to quickly explain to me that they were disproportionately or majority one of

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several overlapping categories: white or Caucasian8; from historically white, wealthy, segregated

neighborhoods in Boston; they had money; and they were English speaking. However, in

addition to demographic observations, other attributes common to both pre-registration and its

participants also emerged in interviews, often in reference to parents’ preparation and

willingness to invest time in the process before arriving. “They think ahead” one temporary

worker told me, they do their research, make choices about schools, all before arriving. These

parents were explicitly described as “savvy” by more than a dozen interviewees. Despite this

common categorization, some staff signaled in their interviews that they were uncomfortable

with their own characterization of why the process and families play out alike. These

contradictions were not just in staff members’ own heads, but evident in the centers themselves.

In the earlier example when a staff member explained the shift from BPS Express to pre-

registration, he also commented to suggest that those who participate come to represent more

than just having done things ahead of time online. He told me, “Parents would be yelling, ‘you’re

giving them a privilege!’ But it just goes to the parents we serve, and who is more resourceful.”

He didn’t unpack this duality even though in an interview he later admitted that pre-registration

was one of many processes that was unfair given the actual diversity of Boston families.

Staff consistently framed pre-registration families as deserving of this privileged quick

service using the bureaucratic language of the tool itself, specifically in terms of being prepared,

saving time, and making choices. March, a veteran staff of color, explained to me, “what they do

is come in very well prepared.” Another staff member, Alice who was a temporary worker,

explained, “Because they're more prepared, not to be rude or anything. Because they took the

8 Given that most staff were individuals of color, the use of the word Caucasian is particularly interesting, although not surprising given it is still common usage. See Mukhopadhyay (2008) for critiques on the usage and persistence of the term.

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time to look for it, as well as research on schools they want. Because they chose schools already

in the system, they'll go faster. [...] So they did their own research knowing they'll be in and out.”

Again, while the pre-registration is entirely optional, it was constantly referenced by staff, as

John explained, “what you’re supposed to do” as a parent.

The illegitimacy of white waiting was frequently reinforced by white parents in several

ways: by asking to be moved up in the queue due to their professional status and obligations,

such as when one white, European, surgeon asked to cut the line to make it back to the hospital

and was granted it; by refusing to wait such as when a white dad left and said, “sorry, I just can’t

wait” after waiting for five minutes; or even in just naming that they were vigilantly watching the

clock while being served. This last case was the most common tactic used by white parents to

police the illegitimacy of their waiting. In one case, I observed a white mom who was knitting a

hat while working with the registration specialist. At the end, I heard her let the temporary staff

member she was working with know that while she had been concerned about the wait being too

long, “I timed it. About 15 minutes. Not too bad.” In another case, I wrote in my fieldnotes:

A white parent, with a long puff coat has a 9:30 appointment and pre-registered. She does not have the printout [the required proof of her pre-registered status] but [a center employee] tells her “We normally ask for it, but we’ll figure it out. It’s ok.” When she sits down next to me she tells me that she saw a woman outside and “she said it’s only 20 minutes so that’s not bad.” She comments that she intentionally “dressed comfortably in case I have to wait a long time.” She ends up getting called in even before she’s done with her paperwork. “Not bad.” As she’s leaving, after finishing her case, she catches my eyes and says “10 minutes! Done!” and gives me thumbs up. I smile back at her and she heads out. No families from the big waiting room, who all arrived before this woman, have been served yet.

Here we see not only the ways in which white parents are affirming their success in not waiting,

but also the consequences of their expedited queue: the delay of service for the families of color

in the back waiting room.

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The registration site described was known for serving the highest proportion of white

elite families given its geographic proximity to similarly elite neighborhoods. While they

certainly serve the full diversity of the district, as do all centers, the whiteness of their clients and

how this plays out in space are a useful example of pre-registration’s segregating role. This

center has two rooms, one right behind the “greeter’s” desk, and one out of sight down a short

hallway and through a door to the right. As family after family arrived, pre-registration families

were offered a seat in the front waiting room, and regular registration families were sent to a

back room. This discrepancy between waiting and service was visibly unequal. Not only are

these families expedited due to their pre-registration status, but the invisibility of the families of

color, relegated to waiting in a back room, normalizes this distinction. Sometimes, however, the

intersection of these two different groups of clients point out the disparity that pre-registration

produces. In one case, I had just finished observing a white mom registering her second child.

She had pre-registered and was working with Professor X, a veteran staff member of color,

handing him her documents and mentioning her time constraints. It’s 2:16 and she tells him, “At

3:15 I have to be in West Roxbury9” looking Professor X directly in the eye. “Oh you’ll be fine,

this will be quick” he responds. It was. After she left, I noticed that a pregnant woman of color

left the back room. I observed her pacing the halls and rubbing her belly for several minutes

before going up to Emily, a veteran staff member of color. “I’ve been here for four hours.”

Emily, without asking the mother for her name so she could check her position in line: “you will

be next.”

The consequence of a system of expedited white time is the legitimation of waiting,

sometimes for hours, of families of color. Legitimated waiting in this context was most

9 A neighborhood in Boston that is historically one of the whitest and wealthiest.

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commonly understood as something deserved by those who did not pre-register in advance.

While a heterogenous group, they were typically defined in ways that were opposite of the pre-

registration group: non-white; from historically black, poor, segregated neighborhoods in

Boston, less likely to be comfortable with or have access to computers; and disproportionately

non-English speaking. Those whose waiting was legitimated were also those who deviated from

what would make it easiest for staff: having few kids to register, having the right paperwork, not

asking too many questions, already having schools picked out, etc. Although staff were expected

to take the next parent in the queue, on more than one occasion I heard temporary staff members

resist taking families who were registering multiple children. For example, on one occasion,

Tamar, a temporary worker of color say “she’s registering like five kids at once! I’m not

touching that!” As a result of her unwillingness to serve the English-speaking mother of color,

wearing her winter coat, a headscarf, and with two small children next to her, this mother had to

wait longer for another staff member to take her. This reference to “five kids” came up in more

than ten different interviews, evoking racially essentialized notions of welfare queens preying on

public services with their many children (despite the reality that they tended to have fewer

children than non-welfare families) (Hays, 2004; Quadagno, 1996; Watkins-Hayes, 2009) or

wily patients trying to give staff a hard time (Bridges, 2011). When I asked staff to explain what

made regular registration families different from their resourceful pre-registration peers, staff

sometimes evoked another racialized framework: that of laziness. In her interview, Tamar

explained it to me in this way: “Honestly, they’re lazy. Lazy. This is your child’s education. You

don’t be lazy for your kid’s education.” The categories of pre-registration versus registration here

become categories that staff draw on to make moralized, simplistic, and racialized distinctions

between groups. Rather than looking at how participation in the pre-registration process

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specifically, or school choice generally, are organized by district assumptions of parent

engagement (see Sattin-Bajaj 2014 for this argument), pre-registration becomes a way that

Tamar and others misrecognize families’ participation as an indicator of engagement and

investment. Pre-registration therefore allows staff to efficiently sort families according to their

participation levels, draw on both structural and individual explanations (Hunt, 1996), and

ultimately justify their deservingness of having to wait. By assuming white individuals

participate because they care, and that families of color do not, we see this colorblind resource

now interpreted through deficit framings and cultural racism sustain myths of the failings of

communities of color in properly raising their children, even in the eyes of staff of color

(Bonilla-Silva 2010).

Resistance

Just as families of color had the unspoken visibility of Express BPS as the “white line,”

so too did the parents I observed resist the system’s attempted legitimation of their long waits.

Much of my research documents them waiting patiently in ways similar to the silent resistance

described by Auyero (2012). One example of this was that during the busiest days, with clearly

the longest waits, I consistently observed waiting rooms full of mothers of color all of whom

kept their coats on while waiting. My field notes captured this observation. I wrote, “The waiting

room for document check is all mothers of color. I can hear them speaking multiple languages to

each other and to the staff members they are working with. Most families still have their coats

on, although it is not that cold.” These mothers seemed to push back at the notion that their

waiting was legitimate, unwilling to “make themselves comfortable” in settings that had no

respect for the time they were spending investing in the educational outcomes of their children.

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When mothers did take their coats off it was typically only once they were finally seen by a

registration specialist, or on days in which very few parents were waiting.

But beyond silent persistence I also saw parents, such as the pregnant woman described

earlier, seeking out staff members, making sure their waiting is visible, and advocating to have

their time valued as well. Sometimes resistance came in the form of declarations that while they

were going to wait, they were not happy with it. In one case, an English-speaking mom of color

said out loud, to me, “I’m tired of all this waiting!” This happened often, and when it did, I broke

from my role as an unobtrusive observer to let the parent know that I did not work for the district

and therefore could not help by calling the next person. What I could do, I explained, was

document it and make sure the staff knew they were waiting. Most mothers accepted this

explanation, but some also pushed back, as one did saying to me: “Where are all the people at? I

hope you write about all of this b.s. in your report.” While the system had constructed her wait as

a legitimate part of the process, she called attention to the reality that her wait was a construct

not of her own deservingness or mistakes but of the institution’s unwillingness or inability to

properly staff the process. Watkins-Hayes (2009) documented similar resistance in welfare

waiting rooms, where she saw women “push to have their time and needs respected by the

organization” (p. 44).

Despite the clear delineation between those who were legitimately waiting and those

whose waits were illegitimate, staff did sometimes resist these distinctions. This was most

frequently the case for veteran staff members, women, and staff of color (often all three). One

staff member even disclosed to me that she sometimes resisted the order of whom to call first.

We were talking about the challenges and advantages of pre-registration and she was explaining

to me that the way the centers do it is helpful for both families and the system, but “It’s not fair. I

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would hate to see that somebody came right now […] If I knew, some parents could use

everything, could use technology and everything, but they don’t know about it.” I asked her how

she felt about the discrepancy in waiting, given that not all families knew about it, and she

explained to me that sometimes she took matters into her own hands:

There are people waiting two, three hours. But we were told to take pre-reg. I skipped a few. I’ll be like [to herself] ‘Okay, I won’t take them now. I’ll take two regulars.’ And then [a more senior staff member] is like, ‘We have some online here.’ I’m like, ‘Oh yeah? I’ll take you here.’ I’m like [to herself], ‘Fuck.’ I’m like, ‘Good for you, but other people are trying to wait too.’

Here, the staff member describes feigning ignorance about who is waiting, specifically that pre-

registration families were waiting, in order to try and mitigate the long wait for other families.

While she knows the practice of her site, she resists it, in part because of her acute awareness that

not all families have equal access.

Other times, staff did not disrupt the process of sorting or waits, but worked to make sure

that there were not further delays. I regularly observed Peter, a veteran staff member, especially

on days with long waits, greeting parents who finally reached him saying “I’m trying to get

through this as quick as possible so you can go home and get comfy…” He seemed to be trying

to validate the discomfort and length of the process of waiting that they had already been

subjected to. Staff often confided in me that seeing the discrepancies in waiting was hard for

them because of their competing identities. First, as professionals, staff were required and

committed to support the parents with their stress and confusion. Second, as individuals, they

recognized and often explained explicitly to me that the families who were waiting were either

like them, or in fact were them in previous years. One staff member explained her concerns to

me in this way: “These poor people be waiting here forever, and some don’t even know if they

have the right document. Anxiety comes in of doing this job. [I] Don’t want people coming in

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here for nothing.” While the multiple step process for the regular registration process adds to the

frustrations and exhaustion of some parents, it was actually implemented by staff who were

concerned that families would wait even longer only to find out that they did not have adequate

paperwork to complete the process. Unfortunately, with limited staff (both in terms of training

and raw numbers), waiting was an expected consequence for some if not all families during the

month of January.

Given this seeming inevitability, veteran staff in particular kept a vigilant eye out to make

sure that wait times were not exacerbated for any group. I often saw these staff, particularly those

in Director level positions, working the floor, double checking parent numbers given where they

were waiting, and clarifying any questions. In one case, I saw a veteran staff member emphasize

this responsibility to a temporary worker: “Make sure that people are in the right place because

that woman was just waiting… just waiting.” Later in an interview, that staff member explained

to me that part of the walking around was both professional defense, “to avoid complaints,” and

a personal commitment to families. She continued, “They need to feel that you care. And in the

other centers, they sit over there, and they can die there.” However, staff were not only resisting

on behalf of those waiting the most, but also sometimes those waiting the least. When discussing

my preliminary findings with this same Director, she told me that their center was trying to

figure out how to “make white people seem less special.” Therefore, while pre-registration

facilitates a divide between legitimate and illegitimate waiting in the centers, some staff still

resisted this, at least at the margins.

Part 3: Barriers to equalizing pre-registration: persistent inequality

The efficient segregation of pre-registration, while now a taken-for-granted component of

the registration process in Boston, operates in this way due to how it was designed and continues

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to be used in centers. Although pre-registration decreases wait times for families, speeds up

processing time for staff, and seems to be a benefit for all participating, it is also important to

question why so many families still do not participate either before arriving or once they are

sitting and waiting to be seen. This section outlines the many barriers that perpetuate the unequal

distribution of pre-registration participation among prospective district parents, ranging from

barriers parents face before arriving at centers, staff-parent interactions at centers, and to the

institutional decisions and resources that shape each.

“What Kept You From Pre-Registering?”

The family survey asked for those that indicated that they did not pre-register, to explain:

“what kept you from pre-registering?” Parents were then given five options to choose from,

including an “Other” option with space for write-in answers. Responses are displayed in Table 4,

grouped by ethno-racial identity, language, and income status.

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Table 4: Barriers to Pre-Registration by Demographic

I did not know this was an option

I did not have time

I did not understand the process

I tried to, but ran into difficulties

Other10

Total Responses 318 117 39 154 213 Race/Ethnicity (n=677) Percentage of each response group displayed below Asian (n=51) 43.1 19.6 9.8 25.5 37.3 Black (n=318) 50.9 16.4 4.1 29.6 29.6 Hispanic (n=221) 59.3 18.1 4.5 14.5 19.9 White (n=127) 22.0 18.1 8.7 44.1 52.8 Native (n=5) 66.7 0.0 6.7 13.3 26.7 Other (n=51) 45.1 21.6 0.0 21.6 39.2 Language (n=701) English (n=586) 43.5 18.3 5.5 24.6 33.8 Not English (n=115) 63.5 14.8 9.6 12,2 18.3 Annual Income (n=646) Less than $20,000 (n=192) 63.5 14.6 6.8 13.0 17.2 $20,000-$49,000 (n=216) 49.1 20.8 4.6 16.7 28.2 $50,000-$74,999 (n=98) 44.9 18.4 7.1 22.4 31.6 $75,000-$99,999 (n=47) 25.5 25.5 6.4 38.3 44.7 Over $100,000 (n=93) 21.5 15.1 5.4 44.1 57.0 Note: This table reflects pair-wise deletion given missing data. Ethno-racial categories mirror those tallied in earlier tables, and may double-count families who selected more than one option. Totals within demographic categories as well as response categories are therefore provided. Respondents were given the option to “check all that apply,” therefore percentages do not add up to 100. Percentages instead reflect the percentage of a given demographic who checked the option in order to account for sample size variation (i.e. 318 Black respondents compared to only 51 Asian respondents). Respondents were also given the option to select “Other” and space to complete a write-in, although most who selected this option did not. Those whom wrote-in comments related to existing categories were recoded as such.

The survey shows a clear pattern that higher income, English speaking, and white ethno-

racial identified families all had the lowest rates of response for the category “I did not know this

was an option” when explaining why they did not pre-register. At only 22 percent, white families

were twice to three times as likely as their peers of color to be aware of this resource. For

income, three times as many families making over $100,000 knew about the resource than those

making less than $20,000 a year. White identifying families also had the highest rate of response,

10 Patterns of selecting “Other” mirror the findings of race, class, and linguistically privileged families described in this section in that more privileged families were more likely to select “Other.” Given that most families did not write in a response, the reasons for this cannot be fully determined.

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at more than double any other ethno-racial group, for attempting to access the resource but

running into difficulties. Wealthier and English-speaking families also were more likely to run

into difficulties with the resource than their peers. Write-in responses from families indicated

challenges with the website being “down” (which staff confirmed, and I documented several

times in my field notes), error messages, and confusion in “saving” responses versus

“submitting” them. If the technology of the resource were to be improved, these survey results

indicate that the gap between privileged pre-registrants and other groups would be even greater

than it is currently.

Unequal by Design

More than twenty-five years after its launch as “BPS Express,” pre-registration is still

referred to as an efficiency tool despite very few changes to the system that would allow it to

actually be efficient for all families and therefore the system overall. First, the option to pre-

register has remained an online-only process, hosted through an web platform that is neither

tablet nor phone compatible and the site has only ever been available in English. As the digital

divide persists between computer users compared to smart phone users due to interface

challenges, this sustains inequalities that technological decisions (like creating an app or mobile-

friendly version of the website) could help mitigate. Second and similarly, because of how it was

designed, technological resources like “Google translate” (albeit imperfect) were not available as

an option to increase accessibility for families. Third, to participate in the pre-registration site,

families have to first enter an email, then receive a code, and then use that code and their email

to log in. Multi-step processes and email addresses are both additional points in the process

through which families can lose access. Pre-registration is both coded and encoded in ways that

limit access to non-English speakers without broadband internet.

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When I asked staff members about these barriers, I learned that the blame for stagnation

of pre-registration was diffuse. Staff explanations included that changes to pre-registration were

beyond the day-to-day work of IT staff, beyond the capabilities of registration staff, and beyond

the scope of the district’s investment in time or resources. When I asked about translating the

website, given the district’s capacity to do so and Department of Justice requirement to do so

(U.S. Department of Justice, 2012), the challenges were explained to me by staff as mostly

related to time. I found that the text was already available internally in all ten district languages,

but staff told me it would take too much time and work for the IT department to update this tool

to be more accessible for non-English speaking families. Specifically, when I interviewed

members of IT, they explained to me that they were, “spending 90% of my time doing

operational things that are behind schedule,” thus making it seem impossible given the district

priorities they were tasked with implementing, to protect or invest the time for a time-consuming

initiative like putting the code into the pre-registration system.

In a district where 30% of students are English learners and 45% have a first language

other than English (Boston Public Schools, 2016c), it is safe to assume that an even larger

percentage of families (and unquestionably a majority of district families) are excluded from

access to pre-registration without these translations. Cameron, a non-IT staff member explained

the challenge of getting the site translated to me in this way: “One of the questions I've been

trying to work with IT to develop it and they're like, ‘The amount of time it would take us to do

that is extraordinary.’ […] Programming the system to be in multiple languages apparently takes

ages. The time investment they say is not worth it.” Depending on the institutional location of the

staff member I spoke to, staff therefore held different levels of the system to blame: the IT staff

member views the district’s lack of priority as the barrier, while Cameron viewed the challenge

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located in another individual’s unwillingness to consider it “worth” their time. Irrespective of

where blame actually falls, assuming it is located in one location only, these perspectives both

still highlight the ways that the district as a system protects its time and the interests of its native

English-speaking parents who have exclusive access to this tool. As a result, pre-registration is a

case of the district resisting the investment and value of time that would equalize access for a

majority of its families: non-native English speakers, many of whom are families of color. Here

we see the institutional logics of efficiency, the deployment of time and resources producing a

material inequality that explicitly privileges material access to a tool for a minority of families, a

disproportionate number of whom are white.

While street-level workers did not necessarily know the institutional challenges that kept

pre-registration from being more accessible, they were aware of its inaccessibility to families.

However, staff with immigrant backgrounds and/or who are bi- or multilingual pointed out in

subtle ways that this was not an accident; more privileged families register more often because,

as Joe explained to me, “they know how to do it online, easy for them” compared to their less

advantaged peers. In an earlier example, Alice explained that pre-registration families were more

prepared, but less than a minute later, she also explained specific structural inequalities that kept

other families from accessing this same resource, including access to the internet and English

fluency.

Institutions’ Role in Sustaining Barriers on the Street-Level

In an informal conversation in her office, I brought up the unequal experiences for pre-

registration and registration families that I had been noticing in my observations. Julia agreed

with me and stated frankly, “Sitting in line for six hours is not part of the process […] we need to

educate more people on that.” Unfortunately, my observations in the registration sites revealed

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that not all staff were equally assertive that all families could or should pre-register ahead of

time. When I asked district staff at all levels why registration sites were not utilized to bridge the

pre-registration participation gap, most quickly pointed out that there simply were not enough

staff available to make that happen. Angela, a seasonal employee told me that “it’s hard to do

seven jobs when we’re only told to do one. It’s a lot of things. I am doing what the Director

asked me to do.” The narrow scope of staff roles combined with the high volume of temporary

and seasonal workers, addressed more thoroughly in the second empirical chapter, play a central

role in the lack of information bridging that occurs in the centers themselves. I recorded very few

instances of any staff encouraging families to pre-register, make appointments, or do anything

that would decrease their wait time.

My only observations of information brokerage around the resource of pre-registration,

were of interactions between parents and full-time staff who had worked in the district for more

than ten years. In very few cases these were one on one consultations, such as when I observed

Paola counseling a white parent, who explained she could not wait, to pre-register online and

book an appointment. The parent thanked her and was able to leave, presumably with the

information she needed to streamline the process on the second visit. Out of a handful of

observations, I only once observed a staff member providing one-on-one counseling to parents of

color to take advantage of pre-registration or appointments. In one case, an African American

dad was asking about the wait time and the hours of the center. The Director of that center asked

him if he had access to a computer, and when he nodded yes, they explained “You could do it

online, get a different ticket, and hopefully go faster.” More commonly, families of color were

counseled en masse in ways that were more symbolically supportive than actually useful. On

several occasions I observed staff members announcing to rooms full of regular registration

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families (in English) that they could pre-register online or make appointments for another time.

Announcing a process whose name is not meaningful, in a language they do not all speak, is

unlikely to bridge the gap between a regular registration family’s current understanding and

accessing the resource.

Even in one-on-one interactions, parents of color, particularly with temporary staff, were

more likely to not be given the same information. An English-speaking dad of color was asking

the temporary staff member a barrage of questions: “How much longer? How many are ahead of

me? When are you open tomorrow?” He was not greeted with the same urgency by the

temporary staff worker. The dad continues, “I tried to do it online, but it didn’t work. I think I’ll

go home and finish it and then come back because that will be faster, no?” Unfortunately, the

temporary staff member was not really listening, did not answer, and the dad continued to sit in

the waiting room with the other regular registration parents of color. I also observed temporary

staff listening to parents of color, explaining that they had challenges with the pre-registration.

Rather than giving them the opportunity to do something about it, however, the most I heard

back from one of the temporary workers was an “Oh, I’m sorry” before handing the parent a full

application and number for the regular registration queue.

The experiences of non-pre-registered white parents, however, were noticeably different

from their peers of color. Similar to Lareau’s (2015; Lareau et al., 2016) findings that middle-

class families were more likely to understand the rules of the game and to feel entitled to seeking

institutional support, white families at the registration sites (likely also more affluent than their

peers of color) were more likely to successfully navigate the institutional process even if they

had not pre-registered before arriving. One case was that of a white mom, late in the evening,

already thirty minutes past closing time during this first (and notoriously busy) week of January

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registration. Her number in the queue was in the 100s and they were currently only calling 94 for

document check, the first of two steps at this center. This white mother notified a staff member

that she had called her husband to go online and pre-register for her and he had just clicked

submit. I observed this white mother receive a new number and be ushered to the second step of

the process, skipping at least ten mothers of color in the document check waiting room. Just then,

a pregnant Latina woman and her friend are finally called to document check after waiting well

over an hour.

While staff rarely intervened on waiting in the centers, the waiting of white parents was

sometimes an exception to this. Staff would describe this as important to manage the crowd and

“keep it moving,” and implied that whiter, wealthier families were the most common squeaky

wheels that would complain about them to higher-ups (see more on this in chapter three). A

salient example of this happened at one of the registration sites that was piloting an appointment

system. Appointments were scheduled ahead of time online and allowed for parents to pick a

specific time to be seen by a staff member. A white woman with a toddler in tow arrived to the

greeter’s desk. When the greeter, a temporary worker, discovers that the mother did not pre-

register she lets her know in no uncertain terms: “you’re going to be here a couple of hours.” A

more senior staff member who was walking by immediately corrects her “not so loud!”

Laughing, she suggests to the greeter, “whisper it maybe.” Hearing the greeter’s comment, a

moment later another white woman walks up to the front desk from her folding desk and asks,

concerned, about the wait. The senior staff member intervenes, perhaps sensing resistance from

the growing number of white families in view and responded “it’s not as long as yesterday… but

I’ll see what I can do.” The staff member then polls the room to see who is there with an

appointment. A white dad and a white mom both raised their hands. One is there thirty minutes

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early, and the other is there waiting five minutes past when the appointment was supposed to

start. The Director encourages the white woman without the appointment to make one so that she

doesn’t have to wait. She thanks the Director and leaves. The next two staff members who

become available take the remaining two white parents from the waiting room while the rest of

the room, parents of color, continued to wait.

Across all families, however, staff were explicit to families that pre-registration was

preferred. However, they explained their values to families in different ways: either as a means

of encouragement, or in some cases to dismiss any parent frustrations with how long they had

been waiting. In the first case, an English-speaking white dad arrived at a center and explained

that he was there for registration. He asked about the wait and the staff member he spoke to

hedges, “there is some type of wait… we just don’t know how long.” As the interaction between

staff and parent continues, the dad explains that he did “some type of pre-registration.” The staff

member immediately perked up, “Oh you did it online? Then it will be a little bit easier and

faster.” In contrast, an English-speaking mom of color is chatting with the temporary staff

member she’s working with, explaining that she is confused as to why the wait was so long. The

staff member explains that with each case, staff have to type everything into the computer from

the documents and the application. She then added, “That’s why it’s better to do pre-registration.

It’s faster.” The mom agrees and explained that she tried to do it on her phone, but it didn’t work

well. The staff member continued typing and did not respond to, let alone validate this

information in any way that was visible to the mom (or myself).

CONCLUSION

Through the case of Boston Public Schools’ pre-registration, I show how the promise of

compulsory choice does not undo the raced, classed, gendered, and linguistic inequalities that

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scholars have long documented in public resource waiting rooms. Instead, institutions reproduce

these disparities through the development and institutionalization of bureaucratic tools, like pre-

registration, intended as an efficiency resource for all that instead expedites access for only

some. In the BPS registration processes, pre-registration allows us to see that white waiting is

always illegitimate, and that systems and individuals operate to serve that normative assumption,

even in a diverse bureaucratic space where families seek access to a public good. The barriers

that sustain the unequal participation rates are many and complex, informed and shaped by

broader structural inequalities linked to the differently positioned social locations of families as

well as in the decisions and decisionmakers of the institution itself. This paper demonstrates that

despite the fact that staff and families alike tend to recognize the unevenness of pre-registration

participation, it persists as the central organizer of registration site queues, determiner of parent

waits, and code for parent participation.

While the tool of pre-registration is specific to Boston Public Schools, it also calls

attention to two broader paradoxes. First, segregation persists in both public and private

institutions in our post-civil rights society. Building on existing scholarship on segregated

waiting rooms, it re-introduces the otherwise invisible comparative group of privileged families

to help make sense of what structures these segregated spaces to begin with. Rather than

assuming that marginalized groups are the target of the state, this research introduces the

possibility that they are instead a byproduct of the state’s willingness to cater to white elites. In

addition, while this paper points out intersecting inequalities, there is no mistaking the salience

of race in framing the spaces and discourse around families. Concurrent with this paper’s

fieldwork, a Boston Globe investigation on racism in the city had to release an article update

with the title, “That was no typo: The median net worth of black Bostonians really is $8,” after

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dozens of readers wrote in contesting the detail, especially in comparison to their white

counterparts, who had a net worth of $247,500 (Johnson, 2017). Therefore, whether as visible as

a white line or seemingly invisible as net worth, racial inequalities persist and organize our

assumptions of who is deserving and undeserving, legitimate and illegitimate in all spaces.

The second paradox that this paper calls attention to is that of compulsory choice itself.

Unequal patterns of school enrollment, many have argued, are a result of gaps in parent choices,

gaps in differently situated parents’ ability to choose, or even gaps in the information that parents

use to make choices. While all are true, we can see that institutions shape, categorize, and

determine access of families. Here, we see that pre-registration is a layer of bureaucracy framed

as a resource for “all families.” However, when we look closer, and speak to those who

participate in it, or implement it day in and day out, it is quickly apparent that it was never

actually designed in a way that could realize that goal. Compulsory choice, without infinite

choices, cannot be equitable choice. We see here that full participation in choice, in this case

because participation is a pre-requisite for enrollment, is not enough to eradicate inequalities.

Troublingly and important to the study of structural racial inequality, the ways that pre-

registration is entrenched and reinforced in space point out that democratizing the resource

would not be enough. Even if pre-registration were to be translated, or available for all families

through an army of volunteers waiting at registration sites to help make the waits less onerous,

this does not ensure that the implications of pre-registration would go away. Given limited

resources and needs for institutional efficiency that kept the most politically active parents from

complaining, another resource would likely soon take its place. Through this framework, we see

that inequality may not be structured by institutional disregard for blackness, but instead through

the intentional and persistent spatial, temporal, and moral organization of whiteness. Even when

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white families had not pre-registered, they were more likely to be encouraged to do so. Even

when families of color signaled to staff that they knew about the resource, they were not

supported in using it, even though it would make the appointment faster and the staff’s job

easier. By looking beyond the work on waiting rooms by scholars like Auyero (2012) and Hays

(2004), we see that the story is not simply of state neglect of individuals of color seeking services

democratically owed to them. Pre-registration is a racialized bureaucratic practice, despite its

colorblind framing as equitable and available to all families, because it overwhelmingly serves

certain families at the expense of others. Specifically, the practice of pre-registration shows the

institution’s investment in protecting and expediting white time.

Ultimately, this paper shows the ways that language and discourse are as central to

understanding bureaucratic processes as racial phenomenon as their implementation in time and

space. The visibly unequal distribution of families participating in pre-registration was

rationalized as an issue of what individual families had chosen to do and not of racialized

inequality of access. In a false world of equal opportunity, which in actuality is an explicit

exclusion of some families based on an online access and English-only interface, pre-registration

is itself reframed as logical, reasonable, and even good resource for the system, as well as it is

proof of what good mothers take the time to do.

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APPENDIX A: Round 1 Family Survey, in English (2017)

Demographic Information:

1. Grade(s) of child(ren) you are registering in Fall 2017: ____________________

2. Zip Code: ___________

3. What best represents your child’s racial or ethnic heritage? (please check all that apply):

� Black, Afro Caribbean, or African American � East Asian or Asian American � Latino/a or Hispanic American � Middle Eastern or Arab American

� Native American or Native Alaskan � Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander � Non-Hispanic White or Euro American � South Asian or Indian American � Other: ________________________

4. What language(s) are spoken at home? ________________________________________

5. Does your child need help learning English at school? ___ Yes ___ No

6. Does your child need any Special Education (SPED) services? ___ Yes ___ No

7. What is your combined household annual income?

� Less than $20,000 � $20,000- $49,999 � $50,000- $74,999 � $75,000- $99,999 � $100,000 or more School Choice Experience:

1. How did you learn about choosing schools? (please check all that apply)

� Already have student(s) enrolled � I went to BPS � Friends, family, neighbors, or colleagues � Childcare/daycare/preschool � Other professional (caseworker, doctor, school staff, etc.) � BPS Website � DiscoverBPS

� BPS billboard � BPS poster � BPS flyer, newsletter � BPS lawn sign � BPS event (ie. Countdown to Kindergarten; Information Session) � Welcome Center Staff or Hotline Other: ________________________

2. What are some things that you look for in choosing a school? (please check all that apply)

� School start/end times � Before and after school programming � Distance from home (close) � Distance from home (far) � Transportation is provided � Reputation � Academic performance (ie. DESE levels /BPS Tiers)

� SPED offerings � ELL offerings � The school has uniforms � The school does not have uniforms � School size (small) � School size (large) Other: ______________________

3. What is the most important thing to you when choosing a school: ______________________

_____________________________________________________________________________

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4. Please rate the Welcome Center Staff below from a scale of “not at all” to “very”

Welcoming Not at all A little Neutral Mostly Very

Willing to listen Not at all A little Neutral Mostly Very

Positive attitude Not at all A little Neutral Mostly Very

Informed Not at all A little Neutral Mostly Very

Helpful Not at all A little Neutral Mostly Very

5. Please rate the Welcome Center experience below.

It was easy to get to/find. Strongly Disagree

Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

It was easy to understand. Strongly Disagree

Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

It helped me learn about and select schools. Strongly Disagree

Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

It answered my questions. Strongly Disagree

Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

6. Did you pre-register online before coming in today? ___ Yes ___ No If yes, please rate your experience. The online pre-registration:

It was easy to get to/find. Strongly Disagree

Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

It was easy to complete. Strongly Disagree

Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

It improved my experience at the Welcome Center.

Strongly Disagree

Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

It helped me learn about and select schools. Strongly Disagree

Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

If no, what kept you from pre-registering? (please check all that apply) I did not know this was an option I did not have time I did not understand the process I tried to, but ran into difficulties: Please explain: ______________________________________ Other: ________________________________________________________________________ Overall comments/suggestions about the registration experience: _________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________

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APPENDIX B: Demographic Characteristics of Current/Former Front-Facing Staff

Total* (n=50)

Race Black 21 Latinx 8 White 10 Asian 4 Bi-/Multi-Racial, Other 7

Linguistic Capacity Monolingual 18 Bi-/Multilingual 32

Sex Male 17 Female 33

Years of Experience 0-5 years 22 6-10 years 6 11-15 years 4 16-20 years 6 21+ years 6

Job Assistant Director or Director 9 Registration Specialist 22 Temporary Staff11 17 Seasonal Staff12 5 Other District Role13 27

Notes: Table displays percentages and number of respondents in parentheses. *Given that several staff members have changed roles within the district, and in order to protect internal confidentiality of respondents, staff totals within categories may add up to more than fifty interviewees.

11 Temporary workers are hourly workers, hired by the district to help manage the peak seasons in January and the summer months. They are typically younger and less-educated than full-time staff. 12 Seasonal staff are district staff who spend a few days a week, or the entire month of January supporting the Welcome Centers. However, their full-time work is in other departments. 13 Other district roles include positions that staff may have had before or after working in Welcome Centers. This could include positions in other departments (such as Finance, English language learners, or Special Education) or even elsewhere in the department of Engagement under which the Welcome Centers are also housed.

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CHAPTER 3: White Lies and Other Strategies: How Front-Facing Staff Cope With the Illusion of Choice ABSTRACT

Having more information has been shown to improve the quality of school choices made by

families, although there are multiple barriers to equitable access to that information. While

school districts, as institutions, may strive to mitigate these inequalities, front-line workers

typically routinize their behaviors in ways that privilege the institution over their clients’

individual needs. This paper examines a compulsory choice public school district where staff are

hired to help families make informed enrollment decisions for students at all grades. Given this

institutional investment in family’s choices, what enables or constrains staff dissemination of

information to families? And while we know that providing information improves parent

choices, what happens when staff do not provide that information? Using data from semi-

structured interviews with 37 staff, participant observation in registration sites, and a

supplemental survey of 1,887 registering families, this paper finds that the routinization of staff

behaviors to withhold school choice information is not just a symptom of street-level

bureaucratic work conditions, but also a mechanism of colorblind racism. Staff constraints

protect unequal access to high quality schools through the equal treatment of clients, even when

staff are aware and unhappy with the inequitable outcomes it perpetuates. Despite their charge to

help families make well-informed choices, workers are both limited in their access to and

complicit in limiting access to information that would help inform parent school choices.

Ultimately, the absence of institutional interventions to address known information gaps protects

the racial segregation of schools and harms both the highest need families and the staff of color

who serve them.

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I sometimes visualize the ongoing cycle of racism as a moving walkway at the airport. Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt. The person engaged in active racist behavior has identified with the ideology of White supremacy and is moving with it. Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking. Some of the bystanders may feel the motion of the conveyor belt, see the active racists ahead of them, and choose to turn around, unwilling to go to the same destination as the White supremacists. But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt-unless they are actively antiracist-they will find themselves carried along with the others....

(Tatum, 2017, p. 91) INTRODUCTION

Whether in the form of racial steering in housing (Charles, 2003), benefits dissemination

in welfare offices (Hays, 2004; Piven & Cloward, 1993; Watkins-Hayes, 2009), or hospital

emergency rooms (Corman, 2017), institutional actors across sectors have the power to shape

access to resources and outcomes for clients. In the context of school choice, although governed

by neoliberal logics of free market reform (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Harvey, 2011), scholars have

documented that with better information (Delale-O’Connor, 2018b; Villavicencio, 2013; Yettick,

2016) and the support of institutional actors (Rosenbaum et al., 1996; Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018),

families make better school choices and as a result increase their likelihood of accessing better

schools. However, not all parents receive access to better information nor the support of district

staff. Given the importance of both factors for equitable school assignment, this paper asks: what

are the consequences of staff withdrawal from information provision, when they neither steer

parents away nor towards quality resources? This paper shows how the absence of information

provision is not neutral but is instead ostensibly colorblind; it protects the known stratified access

to information and institutions by elite families.

This research explores a case study of compulsory choice in Boston Public Schools,

focused on the staff and context of “Welcome Centers”—the district sites that all families must

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visit in order to complete the school registration process. Using ethnographic fieldwork from one

year in the district, interviews with 37 front-facing staff, and supplementary survey data from

1,887 families, I find that staff are hired to assist families with two distinct, though related tasks:

access the system through registration and make well-informed choices about schools. While

staff work tirelessly to help families register within the system, I find that they almost never help

families make well-informed school choices. This paper examines the various conditions that

constrain, and the few conditions that enable, staff’s ability to mitigate informational inequality

on the front line.

Building on scholarship that shows how service provision can help families, I argue that

when staff do not provide essential information about school choice to families, this not only

disadvantages the families they serve but advantages the families who, because of their social

and cultural capital, already have access to that key information. This research supports previous

work on the ways that colorblind ideology operates in a post-civil rights society (Bonilla-Silva,

2010) as well as scholarship on institutional mechanisms that perpetuate racially unequal

material outcomes (Armenta, 2017; Moore, 2008; Ray, 2019). While it is promising to know that

providing quality information improves the quality of parent choices, this does not mean that the

absence of that service provision is neutral. Instead, treating all families equally by not providing

key information to all families, reproduces inequality.

COLORBLIND RACISM, CHOICE, AND ORGANIZATIONAL PRACTICES

While school choice policy is driven by the promise of individual decisions, these choices

are neither made in a vacuum, nor preordained. Rhetorically, the framing of “school choice”

complicates our ability to see it as a system, governed by broader inequalities and structured by

institutions. Sabina Vaught (2011) points out that “the discursive framing of ‘choice’ neutralizes

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the inequitable sorting system it describes [...] it both mask[s] the structural barriers to equitable

schooling and explain[s] the impact of these barriers instead as individualized decisions” (p. 9).

This is additionally challenging for equity advocates and reformers because unequal outcomes

can be produced by those organizations which are designed for the public good as is the case

with public education. Colorblind ideology is embedded within and drives systems of school

choice and school segregation in post-civil rights American society. This paper adds to a

growing body of scholarship that examines the role of institutions in maintaining white

supremacy through mechanisms including colorblind rhetoric and institutional practices

(Armenta, 2017; Bridges, 2011; Evans & Moore, 2015; Moore, 2008; Vaught, 2011).

Bonilla-Silva’s theory of colorblindness identifies four discursive strategies: abstract

liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism. Using survey and

interview data, Bonilla-Silva uncovered these four components of colorblind racism in an effort

to “uncover the collective practices […] that help reinforce the contemporary racial order”

(Bonilla-Silva, 2010). This paper extends that theory to examine abstract liberalism in practice.

As a rhetorical framework, abstract liberalism involves the rejection of the role of institutions in

perpetuating unequal racial conditions and outcomes; it is the sound of individuals and

institutions advocating for equality rather than for equity. Bonilla-Silva explains that when

individuals invoke abstract liberalism, the fallacy of racial pluralism is laid bare. Given the

unequal distribution of power, “their unfettered, so-called individual choices help reproduce a

form of white supremacy in neighborhoods, schools, and society in general” (Bonilla-Silva,

2010, p. 36). While Bonilla-Silva identifies colorblind ideology in the language and attitudes of

individuals, it is also important to examine it as embedded in institutional practices so that we

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can recognize how racially unequal outcomes persist even when policies and discourse do

advocate for equity.

Bonilla-Silva’s theory of colorblindness is particularly useful when studying school

choice, as he argues that the language of “choice” is simultaneously a policy and a discursive

framework that provides “ideological armor for a covert and institutionalized system in the post-

civil rights era… [which] aids in the maintenance of white privilege without fanfare, without

naming those who it subjects and those who it rewards” (Bonilla-Silva, 2014, pp. 3–4). While

not speaking about school choice explicitly, here Bonilla-Silva points out that the premise of

“choice” in any context is a means of downplaying and even erasing the importance of

institutions in sustaining racially unequal material outcomes.

Colorblindness is also useful in representative bureaucracies (Watkins-Hayes, 2011), or

in any context when examining practices implemented by or attitudes of staff of color. While the

primary focus of his seminal work Racism without Racists is on white discursive representations

of colorblind ideology, Bonilla-Silva also compares the deployment of colorblind frames of

white and black respondents. In particular, he finds that a majority of white respondents use three

of the four frames (abstract liberalism 96%; cultural racism 88%; and minimization of racism

84%), but this is not true for black respondents in any category. However, this does not mean

that black respondents do not rely on these frameworks: more than one in three black

respondents did draw on abstract liberalism, and one in four drew on cultural racism and

naturalization (p. 154). Therefore while colorblindness is less prominently embedded in the

attitudes of people of color, as the dominant ideology of the post-civil rights era it still permeates

individual logics and justifications despite diverse social locations.

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Challenges Embedded in the Promise of Choice

Orfield and Frankenberg (2013) point out that “one of the central assumptions about

choice is that everyone will know about all the available options and how to assess the

appropriateness [or fit] for their children. But it is clear that this assumption does not reflect

reality” (p. 262). Scholars have studied parent networks and information sources to better

understand the disparities and barriers that shape unequal access to school choice. They found

that although all families rely on their social networks to inform their school choices,

socioeconomically advantaged parents have access to stronger and larger networks for

information about educational options (Horvat et al., 2003; Schneider et al., 1997). In contrast,

low-income and immigrant families are typically less connected to networks that include

professionals or experts (Neild, 2005; Valdés, 1996; Weininger, 2014) and are less comfortable

(or welcome) navigating educational institutions (Cucchiara, 2013; Lareau et al., 2016; Yosso,

2005). While difficult to level the informational playing field, studies have nevertheless found

that with more information, families of all socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to choose

higher-performing schools (André-Bechely, 2005; Bancroft, 2009; Dougherty et al., 2013;

Hastings & Weinstein, 2008; Villavicencio, 2013; Yettick, 2016) and that informational

interventions at the institutional level show promising results in increasing access to high quality

choices for those who might benefit most (Corcoran et al., 2018; Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018).

Individual choices, however, are both constrained and augmented by districts.

Unfortunately, the promise of individual agency often falls apart as a result of the “arithmetic

problem;” since in many districts there are more students than high quality seats (McDermott et

al., 2015, p. 522). This is often compounded, or at least stratified by unequal choice baskets

(which schools parents can choose from) (Levinson, 2015), a decision typically designed and

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enforced by district-level policies. There are also barriers such as logistical issues concerning

transportation or distance from home (DeArmond et al., 2014; Rich & Jennings, 2015), as well

as a litany of bureaucratic problems including paperwork, eligibility requirements, multiple

applications, timelines, or even the translation of documents (Fong & Faude, 2018; Haynes et al.,

2010; Jessen, 2012; Lareau et al., 2016; Sattin-Bajaj, 2014a; Valdés, 1996). As a result of these

unequal conditions, created and enforced by institutional actors and policies, low-income parents

of color are more likely than their more advantaged peers to have constrained and

disempowering school choice experiences; they are less likely to be satisfied with the process

overall and less likely to get what they want (DeLuca & Rosenblatt, 2010; Fong & Faude, 2018;

Neild, 2005; Pattillo et al., 2014; Rhodes & DeLuca, 2014).

School Choice Bureaucrats

Empirical work on school choice bureaucrats has largely focused on school-level actors,

such as guidance counselors and other key adults who help students navigate high school choices

(Sattin-Bajaj, 2014b; Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018) and college admissions processes (Belasco, 2013;

Holland, 2015; Robinson & Roksa, 2016). In a recent study of New York City middle school

guidance counselors, Sattin-Bajaj et al. (2018) find that counselors rely on one of three types of

advice frameworks when helping students: action-guiding, procedural, and generic. When

counselors provided action-guiding advice, such as making curated suggestions for students on

what schools might be a good fit given their interests and talents, it had a strong positive

association on student choice outcomes (Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018, p. 64). While this kind of

informational intervention at the institutional level helped mitigate school choice inequalities, it

was rare. Most of the time, counselors instead used procedural and general frameworks which

only made recommendations when explicitly pressed by families and most commonly just

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guided students through the process or handed off information so that families could make

decisions on their own. The authors argue that these approaches are indistinguishable from the

expected behavior of Lipsky’s (1980) street-level bureaucrats (Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018).

Work as a street-level bureaucrat is notoriously constrained, and therefore it is unlikely

and unsurprising that counselors are unable to properly action-guide school choice. Lipsky’s

(1980) classic study of public service provision found that workers on the front line “lacked the

time, information, or other resources necessary to respond properly to the individual case” (p.

xi). To manage these constraints, workers in both public and private sectors are encouraged to or

explicitly given shortcuts. Work routines help staff to ration resources, manage clients, and

satisfy their employers as they seek to balance their position within the employer-worker-client

triangle (Korczynski, 2009; Leidner, 1993). While interactional routines are just one of many

strategies employed by organizational actors, Ray (2019) points out that these routines are

racialized and matter because they connect perceptions about racial groups to material resources

(p. 11). In the context of my paper, however, the interactional routines largely occur between

women of color who are staff with other women of color who are parents and guardians. Staff’s

reliance on routinized behaviors despite their commitment to serving the individual needs of

families call attention to the extraordinary pressures faced by front-line workers; although they

may work with clients, ultimately, they work for organizations. As a result, workers must

manage the frustration, expectations, and needs of clients while also ensuring that the clients’

preferences are secondary to the institution’s goals to be both efficient and cost effective

(Leidner, 1993).

Ultimately, Ray (2019) argues that “the organizational reproduction of racial inequality

may work best if organizational procedures appear impartial. Organizations help launder racial

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domination by obscuring or legitimating unequal processes” (2019, p. 14). Routines persist in

ways that most benefit the organizations themselves. Studies of public service work related to

marginalized populations have documented this in the context of how institutions govern, police,

and surveil poor women of color through the management of withholding or distributing aid

(Bridges, 2011; Hays, 2004; Piven & Cloward, 1993; Watkins-Hayes, 2009). But what about

when staff are supporting a diverse set of families, equally eligible for a public good (in this

case, a public-school seat) which is limited and ranges in quality? This paper draws on

ethnographic and interview data with front-line workers in a compulsory choice district to see

how staff resources are constrained, how these constraints are shaped by the institution in which

they work, and how staff’s resulting work ultimately perpetuates unequal access to well-

informed school choices.

BACKGROUND

School Choice, Quality, and Segregation in Boston

The case of Boston mirrors the central tensions in school choice itself: an attempt to

provide more choices for families in a landscape where not all school options are of equal

quality. Boston Public Schools, like many of its urban peers, has a complex history of student

assignment and choice dating back to court ordered desegregation in the 1970s. Boston’s

implementation of desegregation involved mandated bussing and a shift in assignment to undo

its de jure and de facto segregation. As a result, there are no traditional neighborhood schools14

in Boston and for decades the city has utilized various models of geographic driven choice for K-

8 schools, and citywide choice for high schools. While school choice nationwide is still largely

14 The term “neighborhood schools” typically refers to public schools that draw their student enrollment from the surrounding neighborhood(s).

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an opt-in process, particularly for younger grades, Boston Public Schools has a compulsory

choice model for all grades.

Boston’s current “Home-Based Assignment Plan” promises to offer “quality schools

close to home” for the nearly 56,000 students across the district (BPS at a Glance 2016-2017).

Despite its rhetorical ambition, this policy received front-page attention in the Boston Globe with

the headline: “Boston’s schools are becoming resegregated” (Vaznis, 2018). A July 2018

evaluation of the plan found “significant racial disparities in the realization of the implicit goal of

Boston school children attending neighborhood schools that are of high quality” (Boston Area

Research Initiative, 2018, p. 35). In a city struggling with increased racial and economic housing

segregation, this finding is perhaps not surprising. However, the report found that more than

policy and geography are at play. They also pointed out that beyond having fewer high quality

schools in their choice baskets and greater competition for those high quality seats, students

living in neighborhoods “predominantly inhabited by Black and disadvantaged students… were

less likely to attend [high quality schools]” (Boston Area Research Initiative, 2018, p. 2). The

concentration of race and class (dis)advantage remains a challenge for Boston’s schools, despite

a compulsory choice policy that requires all families to actively participate in school choice at all

grades.

Welcome Centers, Registration Specialists, and the Process of School Choice

The office in Boston Public Schools in charge of school registration and assignment is

called Welcome Services, in which is housed the Welcome Centers. Boston Public Schools’

Welcome Centers are advertised to “serve the registration needs of all Boston families,” (“BPS

Welcome Centers,” 2016) and are the district’s hub of all processes related to choice,

registration, and assignment. While the form and size of a registration site may vary in other

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districts, they all (whether as districts or individual schools, depending on the

public/private/parochial model) typically have staff tasked with managing the registration

information and applications, as well as fielding questions that families and students generate in

today’s increasingly complex education landscape.

At the time of my research, the district had four Welcome Centers, three full-time and

one part-time, located across the city. These brick and mortar locations are the front-facing

processing center for Boston Public Schools. As a result of its compulsory choice model, all

families must physically visit one of these registration sites in order to enter the system and/or

transition between schools. Families could participate in the registration process at any Welcome

Center, and typically chose one that was most convenient given a combination of work and home

locations, and considerations like parking (only one had a parking lot) or public transportation

access. Appointments were only first piloted in the centers in 2016, so most families arrived at a

time of their choosing, rolling the logistical dice and hoping for a short wait as one might at a

Department of Motor Vehicles or other public service location.

Within these spaces work different specialists, both for registration when parents submit

paperwork and make choices, and assignment which links those choices to school placements.

The front-line workers who guide families through the registration process are aptly named

Registration Specialists. These staff are almost exclusively people of color, and mostly women

of color. They were hired to meet the cultural and linguistic needs of a majority-minority district

in which more than two thirds of students identify as Black (35%) or Hispanic (42%), a majority

of students identify as “economically disadvantaged” (70%), and nearly half (45%) grew up

speaking a language other than English as their first language (Boston Public Schools, 2016c).

As this paper will demonstrate, the Registration Specialists are a critical intermediary between

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district information and parent decision making. Although Welcome Centers are where families

codify their high stakes decisions about their children’s educational choices, not all families are

armed with the same arsenal of information to inform those school choices, or even know what

set of schools they are choosing from. The Welcome Center staff generally, and Registration

Specialists specifically, therefore hold an important place in an institutional examination of

school choice, as they are uniquely positioned to inform, shape, and/or steer parents’ school

choices.

METHODS

The data used in this paper are part of a broader mixed-methods exploration of how

institutional racism occurs on the ground in a post-civil rights context. This research was

conducted during one “choice season,” from when families first learned of their school options in

December 2016 until they began school the following September 2017. This paper draws

primarily from interviews and ethnographic observations from the district’s Welcome Centers.

This data is then complemented with survey results from 1,887 families participating in priority

registration in January, a time when families are most likely to have the information they need to

participate and have the highest chance of getting their preferred choices (Fong and Faude 2018).

Ethnography

For two months I sat next to families while they waited for or registered with staff. For

each registration case I observed, I first asked their permission15 to take notes on the process, and

regularly made small talk with them or the children they had in tow while staff were entering

data or making copies. My observations also extended beyond the interactions between families

15 I often observed cases when I did not speak the language in which the family was being registered. In these cases, I asked the staff to explain to parents in their preferred language that I was a researcher and ask permission for me to observe and take notes on the process before I did so. All parents said yes, although some were confused or surprised that anyone would be interested in such a mundane process.

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and staff. Altogether I spent five months at the Welcome Centers, which also included time in

cubicles/offices, and at copy machines where families were not present, “off the clock” with staff

in break rooms, at staff meetings both formal and informal, on weekly calls with Directors,

giving and receiving rides to/from staff, and at various internal and public district meetings.

Interviews

In addition to more informal conversations with staff, I conducted semi-structured

interviews with fifty district staff members involved in various parts of the registration and

assignment system. This article draws on a subgroup of 37 current or former front-facing

employees (see Table 1). The staff largely mirrored the linguistic, ethno-racial, and cultural

backgrounds of the families they served, and certainly more than their “upstairs” colleagues. In

this case, protecting the internal confidentiality of respondents is more challenging than external

confidentiality, as any two demographic details could easily reveal which staff member I am

referencing (Tolich, 2004).

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Table 1: Staff Interview Characteristics of Current and Former Positions

Front-Facing Staff (n=37)

“Upstairs” Staff (n=17)

Total* (n=50)

Demographics Race and Ethnicity

Black 18 5 21 Latinx 7 1 8 White 3 9 10 Asian 4 0 4 Bi-/Multi-Racial/Other 5 2 7

Number of Languages Monolingual 11 9 18 Bi-/Multilingual 26 8 32

Sex Male 12 6 17 Female 25 11 33

Years of Experience 0-5 years 18 5 22 6-10 years 3 4 6 11-15 years 8 3 10 16-20 years 5 2 6 21+ years 3 3 6

Current/Former Job Leadership Position 9 2 9 Registration Specialist 15 4 22 Temporary Staff16 20 0 17 Seasonal Staff17 5 0 5 Other District Position18 18 17 27

*Notes: Table displays number of respondents. Front-facing staff are defined as staff who at the time of being interviewed work or had worked directly with families. Given that several staff members have changed roles within the district, and in order to protect internal confidentiality of respondents, staff totals within categories may in some cases add up to more than fifty interviewees.

16 Temporary staff are defined as staff hired for hourly-wage work, specifically to help with the families who come during “peak” registration seasons of January and July/August. 17 Seasonal workers are full-time district employees who work outside of Welcome Centers but assist with “peak” registration in January. They are essentially internal volunteers within the organization. 18 These positions range from work in other departments or offices in central office (e.g. IT, Finance, English Language Learners, Engagement) to work within specific schools in the district (e.g. support staff).

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Extensive steps were taken to protect both the internal and external confidentiality of

respondents. I offered all respondents the opportunity to choose their own pseudonym to

accompany their narratives (Lahman et al. 2015). Especially as a White female ethnographer

interviewing staff of color from many different cultural groups, it was important that I did not

attempt to approximate names that might read as authentic signifiers of their experiences. To

avoid filtering their identities through my own (white, upper-middle class, female) perspective,

the names in this paper are all pseudonyms, either chosen by the staff or generated using student

case files from my time observing. When I asked my respondents how they came to the name

they chose, some picked names with personal significance, while others picked names that would

best camouflage and anonymize their identity. Pseudonyms typically crossed gender and/or

cultural lines for men and staff of color, resulting in many pseudonyms such as Jenny and Emily:

the ultimate disguise.

Survey

To complement my qualitative findings, this paper also includes results from a survey of

1,887 families participating in January registration. This survey was a two-sided, paper survey

administered to families at the registration site in the ten languages most frequently used by

families the district19. Translations were provided by the district, and the survey was

administered by district staff. In addition to demographic information (such as race, language,

grade, zip code, and income) the survey included questions about parent preferences with school

choice, as well as parent satisfaction with both staff and the experience at Welcome Centers

overall. These satisfaction questions are those used to complement my qualitative findings here.

19 In alphabetical order: Arabic, Cape Verdean Creole, Chinese, English, French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Somali, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

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Data Analysis

All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Both interview transcripts and

handwritten fieldnotes were uploaded and coded with analytic and thematic codes using the

qualitative software NVivo (QSR International). The paper survey responses were inputted and

cleaned in Microsoft Excel before analyzed using SPSS.

THE JOBS OF WELCOME CENTERS AND THEIR STAFF

A posting for an open Registration Specialist position explained that the job entailed

“work[ing] with families to ensure that well-informed school choices are made.” When I asked

staff to describe their jobs their answers echoed this feminized framing of registration work as

care work. Over and over again, staff explained to me that their job was centrally about “helping

families,” and they often had backgrounds in religious leadership, social work, teaching, and

other human service fields. Staff regularly asserted that their investment in their jobs was

because of both its care and front-facing components, as with Paola when she explained to me

that “maybe that’s why I do this job, so I can talk to real people.”

The broader goals of Welcome Centers, as defined in the job advertisement, were “hubs

of information, communication and system access” for families. Staff were therefore tasked with

disseminating two distinct types of information to families: information about the process or the

system itself (registration), and information about schools so that families could make choices

that aligned with their preferences (school choice). Yorlenis, who had worked for the district in

several roles explained that she wanted to make sure that they, the staff, were “getting the

information out to them [the families] as best we can so they know how to navigate the system

and get what they want.” The district’s job posting suggests an investment and interest in hiring

staff who could be both well-informed and provide access to the process, however this rarely

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happened in practice. Instead, I found that while staff regularly provided individualized

information around the system and process of registration (how to officially submit school

preferences), staff rarely provided information that would result in the “well-informed school

choices.” As a result, while families were likely to complete the process due to the assistance and

persistence of staff, only those families who already had the information they needed were likely

to match their preferences to specific school options.

Measuring the extent to which parents were aware or satisfied with receiving both types

of information is difficult, in large part because one is unlikely to report being frustrated by

something y do not even know they are not getting (or even supposed to get). I observed over

and over again as parents arrived at Welcome Centers planning only to register for schools, not

knowing that they were also there to make high stakes decisions about schools. In most other

districts in the United States, parents find out their assigned school once they finished submitting

paperwork, and it is most commonly the one nearest to their home. In Boston, this had not been

the case for decades, but because of a recently rolled-out policy that changed school choice lists

for families (see samples in Appendix A), even current district parents were confused about their

list of schools.

The school choice and registration survey given to families, included several satisfaction

questions asking about their experiences with Welcome Center Staff and the Welcome Centers

overall. The staff domain included five different sub-questions, including whether or not staff

were “welcoming,” “willing to listen,” had a “positive attitude,” were “informed,” and were

“helpful.” All answers were on a Likert scale, and response options ranged from “not at all” (1)

to “very” (5) with a middle “neutral” option (3). The experience domain had four sub-questions,

also on a Likert scale, this time ranging from “strongly disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (5) with

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a middle “neutral” option (3). For this domain, families were asked whether or not the Welcome

Center overall “was easy to get to/find,” “was easy to understand,” “helped me learn about and

select schools,” and “answered my questions.” The samples, means, and standard deviations for

each are presented in Table 2 below.

Table 2: Means of Satisfaction Questions from Parent Survey

Domain Sub-Question N Mean SD

Staff

Welcoming 1617 4.81 .523 Willing to Listen 1569 4.83 .483 Positive Attitude 1583 4.84 .451 Informed 1569 4.83 .489 Helpful 1571 4.86 .442

Experience

Get to or Find 1638 4.63 .618 Understand 1604 4.65 .584 Learn and Select Schools 1548 4.39 .821 Answered my Questions 1555 4.61 .632

While all survey respondents rated both Welcome Center staff and the overall experience

positively, with average responses of 4 or higher, these means do vary in important ways. In

particular, the lowest response of any question is for “Learn and Select Schools,” at 4.39. Even

when disaggregating parents who made their choices ahead of visiting Welcome Centers through

the pre-registration process (see paper 1), non-pre-registration families, those who were least

likely to have made their school choices before arriving, still rated this question lowest of all

satisfaction sub-questions with a mean of 4.47. This also holds for non-English speaking families

(mean=4.49), and families making under $100,000 a year (mean=4.47). In all cases, the

differences between these marginalized groups and their comparison categories are statistically

significant. Despite the official job of Welcome Center staff to support well-informed school

choices, not all families reported receiving this support.

Staff were the first to admit how complex their jobs were, especially given the range of

need in a diverse district like Boston. As such, staff like Nina explained their work as

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multifaceted, including connecting families with resources, providing tools for families to

navigate the registration and choice process, and helping “them select the school that’s right for

their child and for their situation.” However, the sheer volume and complexity of information

that parents must navigate in today’s era of school choice is daunting for any family (Lareau et

al., 2016). In New York City, school officials notoriously hand out a phonebook size tome on

just high school selections (Sattin-Bajaj et al. 2018). While Boston has fewer choices to navigate,

parents are likely still comparing across one dozen different school options along numerous

indicators to make these well-informed school choices. Some staff were explicit in naming how

this complexity stratified access to information across families, even before they arrived to

Welcome Centers. Nancy, a seasonal worker of color, explained that the current system allowed

those parents with “a higher level of navigating, like social capacity” to be “taking advantage” of

these inequalities. March explained that some parents have access to technology that gives them

an advantage over other families. These advantages, as this paper will demonstrate, regularly

thwarted staff’s attempts to fulfill their charge to help all families make informed school choices.

The next two sections take up the two distinct types of information that staff were

expected to provide: system access and school choice information. In each section, I map out

what interactions between staff and families looked like within Welcome Centers, the

institutional constraints that negatively impacted service delivery, and staff perceptions on why

they can or cannot persist to provide that resource. Ultimately, I find that the first part, “system

access” crowds out and exacerbates the challenges already inherent to providing high-quality

school information to families. When staff do not mitigate information inequalities and provide

this school information to families who rely on them (knowingly or not) to provide that

information, those families who entered Welcome Centers armed with well-informed choices

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remain at an advantage. Despite a compulsory choice system in which all families interact with

staff, the information gap persists because everyone is treated equally (not given information),

and both marginalized families and staff are harmed in the process.

SYSTEM ACCESS

Bureaucratic Burnout

Before families could even get to the point where they made choices, they had several

other steps to work through first: lines and uncomfortable folding chairs to wait in, paperwork to

fill out, staff to check in with, and documentation to provide. In the district’s own four-minute

informational video, “How to Register Your Child in the Boston Public Schools,” nearly three

minutes are dedicated to the bureaucratic process of registration (Boston Public Schools, 2017).

There was no video that explained how to make school choices. The time parents spend on non-

school choice activities far outweighed their time making and submitting choices, no matter how

many questions they asked staff or how much guidance they received. Every family visiting a

Welcome Center had to check in, fill out their application while they waited to be served,

provide documents that proved their Boston residency (and often supply additional documents if

the ones they brought were insufficient), wait while staff entered their information and

photocopied their documents. At this point, which during peak registration could be hours into

their visit (largely due to extreme waits to be served), parents would make and submit their

choices.

For the most part, staff worked relentlessly to help individual families come up with

documentation that would satisfy the strict bureaucratic constraints for the registration process to

help get their kids into Boston Public Schools. However, the extensiveness of the registration

process often burned all of the patience and energy between staff and parents alike before they

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could even begin to navigate what a well-informed school choice might look like for that

particular family or child. As in any bureaucratic process, its complexity and seeming

endlessness were exhausting for staff and families alike. When parents inevitably got frustrated

at one stage or another, staff were upset because they saw their job as being there to help with the

process (see Bridges 2011 for similar instances in a public hospital). Eric, a temporary staff

member, described feeling badly because families “think that we don’t want to help them” in

large part because when families “get mad, and we can’t do nothing.” Staff were trapped

between the processes they were tasked with carrying out and the clients who were frustrated by

them (Korczynski, 2009; Leidner, 1993). As a result, burnout most impacted those families that

staff most hoped to serve: the most marginalized who needed their assistance navigating the

bureaucracy and action-guiding advice on school choices.

When I asked staff what was the hardest part about their job, almost all mentioned the

bureaucratic documents which parents had to provide as the source of frustration. I observed this

tension numerous times in my time in the registration sites. One time, a black father was working

with a full-time staff member. However, the documentation he had brought for the registration

could not be accepted because his name was not on the birth certificate. He explained that he had

called ahead but had not been told by the staff member he spoke to that there would be any issue.

A director was called over to help manage the situation. They informed him that without the

marriage certificate, he could not register the child. “I’m distraught” he explained to the staff

members, “I can’t take another day off work.” The director spoke calmly and without hesitation,

“You’re not open to hearing me right now. When you have a moment, I can tell you your

options.” This strategic management of clients was common when families got frustrated, and

was typically (as it was here) complemented with additional logistical information such as the

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center’s hours, Saturday availability, etc. Still frustrated, the dad stated, “No I can’t” and left the

center, after waiting for several hours, having not completed the registration.

While the challenge of this specific case is less common than a parent with a utility bill

older than the allowed sixty days, or one who thought a cell phone or water bill were acceptable

forms of documentation (they are not), it illustrates several key components of bureaucratic

burnout that undermine the role of staff in helping families make informed school choice

decisions. When clients are inadequately prepared to successfully complete the process, it is in

both the staff and client’s best interest to resolve this issue. However, resolution rarely arrived

without some frustration on both sides. I watched over and over again as staff tirelessly and

creatively proposed different ideas for different paperwork that would allow families to

overcome bureaucratic hurdles. However, if and when families did not have what they needed,

they would have to leave and come back and try again.

My observations in the centers revealed that one key reason that staff did not discuss

school quality or provide action-guiding advice regarding school choices was due to bureaucratic

burnout. While scholars have documented the professional burnout of workers (Finn, 1990), the

burnout I observed impacted both the staff and the families, and therefore decreased the

likelihood of them working together to achieve the complex outcome of a well-informed school

choice. As other literatures on front-facing staff have detailed, particularly in public sector

service work, there is often a scarcity of time that constrains interactions between worker and

client. While staff were often concerned with the egregious waits of families, this sometimes

translated, particularly for temporary workers, into a sharp transactional approach to their work.

One temporary worker had just finished working with a client, and escorted the parent back

toward the exit. When he returned, he smiled and boasted, “I try to move quickly. I try to

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minimize the convo, not being cold, just trying to do the work. We have a time limit of thirty

minutes. It’s supposed to be thirty minutes per case. They told us at training.” Although I had

heard in my interviews from lots of staff that a “typical” registration case could take twenty to

thirty minutes, this is the only time I heard a staff member assert that they were supposed to

work to accomplish that. However, institutional signals certainly reinforced this more often than

it did not. Several components policed this, from the implementation of time-tracking software to

manage the flow of clients, to manager’s naming which staff (both men and women) were

“chatty” in a disparaging way, to even staff from “upstairs” occasionally walking by and saying

“good, they aren’t waiting too long.” The emphasis on time and its scarcity permeated the

registration sites, worked against staff’s inclinations to take the time to do the messy working of

counseling families, and exhausted staff.

Segregated District

A second factor that exacerbated burnout and constrained staff willingness and ability to

provide information to registering families was the spatial, occupational, and social segregation

of front-line staff from those who had the power to make decisions and change policy. As in

many hierarchical organizations, front-line workers commented on how they were regularly

misunderstood, underestimated, and even excluded from decisions affecting their work by their

own organization. In interviews, particularly those with workers who had ever held leadership

positions, staff spoke to the changes to their work that seemed to be delivered from someone

upstairs. Examples of these new “initiatives” or “practices” included a new workflow involving

scanned documents, a new plan for family outreach, and even a district-wide support strategy for

families going through a school closure. In most cases, front-facing staff (and even their

directors) were not consulted. Jessica explained to me that changes would continuously happen

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without “telling people who have to talk to parents.” Rossie explained that while frustrating to

have it happen, it’s more frustrating because it is unnecessary. She told me, “If we do that

together, it’s gonna be awesome” but instead, “We are gonna be feeling like, like trash. Like old

people. Like ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’ stupid people, you know?” When staff were

excluded from conversations and planning related to their own work, they described feeling

disempowered and disengaged from what they came into these roles to do: help families.

Peter described that these changes over time resulted in “new people […], different mission

visions, and all that stuff.” However, beyond these changes generally, staff noticed that the last

minute nature of many bigger decisions left the Welcome Centers (and likely other front-facing

staff throughout the district) without adequate time to adjust and prepare. Nina explained it to me

in this way, “When they change the process without going to the appropriate timeline that you

need to get to families, that’s disrespect because, now, you have to redo everything in a second.”

Staff regularly pointed out that institutional changes were in part most frustrating because they

were avoidable (as described by Rossie earlier); to avoid these challenges, the district could

intentionally align system decisions with the registration calendar, for example.

During my time in following the Boston case I observed many of these changes both to

the system generally and registration specifically. The changes were both substantial and

frequent. There were three different superintendents from 2015 to 2018 and as many district

reorganizations during that time. Also because of shifting financial investment in expanding the

length of the school day in some schools, there were several last-minute changes to many school

start times. This delayed the printing of the district’s school choice information guide. It then

required a paper insert to be hand-added to the guide by staff, only to be taken out haphazardly

later, midway through a registration round because the times were incorrect.

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Jessica explained to me how these constant changes impacted staff ,

Registration specialists just constantly look like idiots. Because things change without them [the district] telling registration specialists. Things change that don’t make any sense and you have to actually repeat it. Or school times change, and no one tells you and then they come back to you and say you told me it was this time, well I didn’t know it changed. It’s like, so they’re constantly like thrown into a rock fight with no rocks. And you just have to like get hit in the face all the time.

Here, Jessica illuminates that even when staff try to keep up with changes in order to serve

families, it is not without personal and professional injury. No matter which approach staff took,

staff explained that they were regularly blamed by both the organization they worked for and the

clients they served. Staff’s alienation was in part exhaustion and in part frustration that the work

they cared most about, helping families, seemed both invisible and undervalued by families and

the district alike.

Rossie spoke to this as well and told me “They think we do data entry, but we are not. It’s

more. So much more.” Zariah echoed Rossie’s concern of being misunderstood by staff outside

of Welcome Services, but points out that it was not just separate, but also contentious. She

described the culture as “an aura of they against us,” and projected that those upstairs likely

mused about front-line workers such as she: “I’m not sure what they do, but I don’t think they do

much.” Staff regularly referred to themselves and those on the front-line as “workers” versus

“everybody upstairs,” making it clear that upstairs folks “rarely come downstairs.” Jenny, a

bilingual front-line staff member of color went as far as to call out other departments as

“sheltered.” She explained to me that the strategic planning that happened upstairs was

disconnected from “here [the Welcome Centers], where all the nitty-gritty work is done. It

doesn’t line up.” Nina, who had worked on both the front-line and in other district positions,

explained to me that “central office doesn’t understand the work… they have no respect for the

amount of work and caring that goes on for the people that are here.” Staff often alluded to how

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those “upstairs” misunderstood the reality that both parents and staff faced on a daily basis that

made the mundane work of registration quite elaborate and emotive.

One part of the divide between “upstairs” and downstairs was explicitly how the staff in

each location viewed families as a result of their work’s distance from direct interaction with

families. Specifically, front-facing staff pointed out that in that position they were able to see

complex needs, emotions, and situations of families every day, whereas their upstairs colleagues

simply thought of the families as data. Stacy explained it to me in this way:

At the end of the day, we’re talking to families all day long. On the phones. In the centers. So, it’s like, we hear what their concerns are. And then you bring it back to meetings, and directives… I don’t think they really get it because they are not sitting there getting the emotion.” As a result of this distancing, she continued, she surmised that all these higher-ups ended up hearing was a “kind of like second, third hand information and data. You know, data is important. Don’t get me wrong. But when you just have this data like you’re just disconnected emotionally to what parents are feeling and how important things are to them.”

This division between the emotional reality of parent experiences versus viewing parents as

numbers is not only a product of the organizational silos and hierarchies that distance

decisionmakers from the front-line. This distance is simultaneously a story about intersectional

identities of whom does the work in each space. Front-line workers and the care work embedded

in their job is simultaneously feminized and racialized, just as those who make decisions and

view the problem as a numbers problem mirrored the disproportionately whiteness and maleness

of those institutional actors (see Table 1). This was most clear to me in my ethnographic

fieldwork, as I navigated from the front-line of Welcome Centers to internal, cross-department

meetings on issues related to enrollment and assignment. Across all four Welcome Centers,

except for two other individuals, I was the only white person who was not there as a parent.

However, the cross-functional meetings were run by and mostly attended by white staff,

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particularly white men, although there were regularly white women and women of color in

attendance as well.

The segregation of both decision making and demographics was most striking in the only

all-white meeting I ever attended, late in my fieldwork, in which a room of predominately white

men finalized and debriefed the new assignments of students who had to be moved due to an

elementary school closure. As the staff wrestled with the complexity of trying to fit students into

the seats they were promised as part of the closure agreement, one white male staff member

explained, “Six [families] never submitted choices… because they didn’t care enough to choose

where they went.” More likely, as an education advocate and former civil rights attorney, Peggy

Weisenberg pointed out to a local news article on the school closure, “given some parents’ lack

of access to computers and the high number of homeless students at the school, she was

concerned that in some cases, families or students had not completed their school selections

because they had not received information that the school was closing” (Pattison-Gordon, 2017).

This social distance from the complex and multiple marginality of families was evident to

the staff I interviewed in these racial terms as well. Jenny, who was invited to some but not all

cross-functional meetings, described the district’s overall culture as both unequal and

exclusionary, “I think staff are really undervalued when it comes to the higher ups. I think that

diversity kind of starts thinning out a little the higher you get.” Betty, a veteran bilingual staff

member of color, was also explicit about how the social position of the workers, specifically with

regards to race and power, were underlying the burnout of front-line staff. She explained,

“Talking about a segregated city, it’s a segregated building […] It’s this us and them. And they

don’t come downstairs, and we don’t come upstairs type thing.” Ultimately, this spatial,

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occupational, and social segregation magnified and exacerbated the ways in which front-line

staff felt disrespected and isolated in their work.

Lilly was disheartened and even shocked by how often staff felt separated from key

decisions and how it impacted her work. She explained to me, “It’s like oh my God, how can we

not know that first? Like a school closure or a turnaround school. I feel we, being the Welcome

Centers, we do the student registrations, we help them pick out schools. […] I think important

things like that, Welcome Centers need to know. It’s crazy how a lot of things happen like that

and we don’t know.” Again, staff’s frustration was not just for being excluded, but that it made

everyone’s job harder and ultimately, disadvantaged families. If the district really wanted staff to

provide families with the information they needed, then those front-line staff should be kept in

the loop on changes that impacted families. However, as this paper shows, these institutional

routines result in the institutional production of segregated school assignments, masked as school

choices.

Staff explained to me that the information churn and their limited access to decisions

combined to make the Welcome Center staff at the center of everyone’s frustration. Jessica, who

used to work directly with families but had since moved to a different district department,

explained that “Welcome Centers get the blame for a lot of things” but the “rules are not clear to

anybody […] so it’s not necessarily Welcome Centers’ faults […] there’s no black and white,

there is rules, but there is 10,000 exceptions.” Indeed, the district’s assignment “rule book” was

over 100 pages long, detailing every exception to date, but it was often updated as new issues

arose. Kelly elaborated on this point and spoke to the broader implications of these exceptions on

how front-line staff were treated. She explained to me that front-line staff were:

Like punching bags for the system […] when people come, they get like a management position, those policies start changing and they change so quickly

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because they’re not written anywhere. So, it’s, that gives us a bad name […] You know, anything that happened in the system, because we are the ones that face the parents and stuff like that. So, it’s blamed on us.

As a result of these shifting agendas, front-facing staff struggled to keep up both with the

families they served and the families who relied on them for information. In both interviews and

observations, I observed major consequences of this for staff in terms of demoralization and

burnout, and for families in terms of being provided limited, dated, or no information at all.

While Jessica earlier described the inevitability of front-facing staff looking “like idiots”

no matter what they did or did not do, Peter described the risk as specifically related to the

information he provided to families at different moments in the reform churn cycle of the district.

He described it to me like a bureaucratic game of telephone:

Sometimes the information changes at the top of the pyramid and doesn’t trickle down in an effective matter. The first person I told one version of the story, the second person I told another version of the story, the third person I told another version of the story. When the information actually comes out […] The first person calls me a liar. The second person says, ‘I don’t trust you because you told me one thing and now it’s another.’ The third person says, ‘You’re awesome, you’re the best person in the world.’ So now you’ve created a divide. Now you have more people that don’t trust you. You’ve got two out of three that don’t trust you, and don’t believe anything that comes out of your mouth. Now I look like a liar. I look like the bad guy.

Ultimately, the impact of this game of telephone was twofold. First, when parents relied on the

information from staff, it was often incorrect, thus replicating the divide between knowledge

haves and have-nots we expect from literatures on school choice and information access more

broadly. Second, in several cases the staff began to withdraw from providing information about

school choice to parents because they did not want to fail additional families. Abby explained her

experience with this challenge:

We give the information to the parent but then, it’s not true. […] On top of that, the pressure, whatever information we give out, it change and then parents will come to you […] So there’s always that, scary that, because of this instant change,

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something that you already told parents and then they change. I’d say, “Oh gosh.” I’m not so sure when the parents are going to come to me and say, “This is not what you say.” So I’m working in fear. I would say I’m working in fear.

For Abby, the fear of being called out as wrong and letting down the clients she served was

enough to shift the nature of her work with families. She worked under a cloud of uncertainty as

to when she would be told next that she was failing to do her job, by in fact, trying to do her job.

This contributed to her own burnout as well as increased the likelihood that she would not

always provide sensitive information to parents.

The costs of staff not providing quality information about school choices to parents who

were registering reinforces the information inequality that parents all brought with them to the

Welcome Centers. By not intervening the staff of color actually, albeit often inadvertently,

protected the opportunity hoarding20 of white elites who were much more likely to have the best

information in comparison to both other families and the front-line workers themselves.

However, staff did not perpetuate this inequality naively, and as a result, expressed great

frustration and distress about their role as complicit actors in an unjust system.

WELL-INFORMED SCHOOL CHOICES

Despite spending most of its time on bureaucratic processes, the narrator of the district’s

informational video opens by saying “we want to make sure that you have all of the tools to help

you pick the best school for your child” (Boston Public Schools, 2017). However, despite listing

five different components that families may consider when making a school choice, school

quality is not mentioned. The same was largely true in one-to-one interactions between

20 While white families are not explicitly gathering information in order to exclude access for families of color, the limited supply of high-quality schools in the districts does make access to quality schools a race for information as well. I draw on Tilly’s (2009) concept of “opportunity hoarding” as it has been more recently applied and expanded in education literatures, where historical patterns of explicitly exclusionary efforts now operate through different mechanisms with the same results. While once defined to be organized efforts of resource exclusivity, opportunity hoarding in this case is also facilitated through the subtle maintenance of a neutral bureaucratic tool: pre-registration.

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registration staff and families. I went into Welcome Centers, prepared to observe staff doing

what I thought would be central to their jobs as “hubs of information”: explain school choices,

including quality, to families. In two months of observation, I never observed a staff member

making a suggestion explicitly for a family at a registration site for their next year’s school, as I

might expect given the findings of recent research (Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018). Instead, I found that

staff rarely helped families navigate the complex information available to them, and almost never

provided school quality information. While this routinized withholding of information was

endemic to the centers, it was neither required by their employers nor something that staff

enjoyed doing.

The sections that follow detail the different approaches that staff took to managing

information dissemination with families, as well as their reflections on the broader constraints

and values that motivated their decisions. While staff often mirror the generic and procedural

approaches identified by Sattin-Bajaj et al. (2018), I find that staff explanations of why they do

not share key information reveal institutional routines that locate these staff of color in an

isolated, demoralized, and deprofessionalized institutional location. They are both limited

themselves and complicit in limiting access to information that would allow families to make

well-informed school choices. As a result, staff testify to how both they and the most

marginalized families are constrained by the very institution they both rely on. Ultimately, within

this black box of school segregation, the equal (poor) treatment of families at this crucial

moment of school choice protects the information already available to the most elite families.

“Every School is a Quality School”

The most critical information about school choice, that of quality, was constantly

changing, outdated, inaccurate, misleading, or withheld from the front-facing staff who needed it

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most. Therefore, even in cases when staff persisted through bureaucratic burnout, or had a case

that was not as complex or they did not feel isolated, they were still often not supplied with the

necessary conditions to provide quality information. In this section I detail what misinformation

looked like to staff and families, as well as the conditions that exacerbated staff withdrawal from

their job of providing information. Ultimately, this section demonstrates that no matter the

intentions of staff, to protect the families they served from confusion or themselves from injury,

bad information in the system corrupted the ability of staff to provide essential information about

schools to families.

The constant onslaught of institutional changes, however necessary in a large urban

district, necessarily hindered the ability of front-line workers to provide accurate information to

families generally. When I asked staff to describe their jobs to me, Paola, a veteran staff member

in a leadership role explained, “I’m more of a director of BPS information than anything, but I

don’t know things are changing until after they just happened.” While aware of this, some staff

were hopeful that they could persist and be able to help the families navigate both the institution

and their school choices. Shihara was one such staff member, and she told me that her hope was

“that we can deliver quality services to folks, regardless of what the new spin or twist is […] that

we can even keep up.” However, in order to successfully support the families who were most

reliant on staff— particularly immigrant, English Language Learners, and illiterate families—

staff emphasized that high quality information was key. March, a veteran multi-lingual staff

member, explained that “if we, we’re working with families we have to be informed. And I go

further than that— well informed.”

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While staff were consistently clear that they were there to help all families who came to

Welcome Centers (and all families were required to do so), this was not easy. Stacy mentioned

the complexity of navigating information for both families and staff members:

It was too hard for parents to maneuver through and just too much information. You have to realize that every resource parents don’t know how to access. It wasn’t equitable as far as you know parents knowing what all the information means. Like we know and even for us it was a lot, so I can only imagine how a person who has no idea what all that stuff means, they would just be lost and frustrated and say, ‘This is just too much.’

Given this, some articulated a particular commitment to helping those families who were most

disadvantaged; they saw it as their responsibility to try and help parents who do not have access,

or do not know how to access, make well-informed choices.

While I often watched staff willingly provide information about the process and even

about schools, quality was consistently absent from the conversation, just as it was absent from

the video. I saw staff either avoid or omit information about quality when explaining school

choice information to parents. The information volunteered by staff, either on their own or in

response to a prompt from a parent, was most often on structural or logistical information such as

the school’s facility (e.g. whether it had a gym, cafeteria, or pool) or its surround care options

(i.e. before and after school programming). While likely not distributed equally across the district

either, these school characteristics were far less controversial or contested than an indicator like

quality.

One example of this came while I was observing a Black, English-speaking mother

working with a staff member, trying to make sense of her school choice list. She pointed out to

the staff member, “some of the schools that I thought would be on my list aren’t anymore […]

it’s such a little list.” The staff member shared a few vague references to policy changes, as well

as which neighborhoods were vocal in advocating for those changes, and concluded saying that

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now the district was “trying to keep families closer to home, because that’s what parents wanted”

essentially, although perhaps inadvertently, silencing the parent’s concern. The staff member

pointed back to the list in front of the parent. “Rank them in order of preference.” They then

gestured to the different columns on the choice sheet, pausing after each one: “Times, distance,

bus vs. walk zone” before going back to typing in the parent’s information into the computer.

They did not mention the column, next to bus vs. walk zone, that said “Tiers” which referred to

the district’s quality ranking. The mom ranked her choices without asking any further questions.

Here we see the parent’s concerns dismissed, information about quality not provided, and the

parent ultimately making choices without any clear indication that she was (or even felt) well-

informed.

This is not to say that when staff provided information it was always this discouraging.

Sometimes staff, including veteran staff, were incredibly individualized, thoughtful, and detailed

in counseling families. While this approaches the “directional” guidance detailed by Sattin-Bajaj

and her colleagues (2018), they still often did not provide the information on school quality or

make specific recommendations. Shihara, a veteran staff member, stood out for her willingness

to help families navigate the process, but even she did not raise the issue of quality. I observed

her as she printed out the family’s list as well as the district’s annually produced newspaper style

information guide. She highlighted all of the schools on the list that the parent would be a walker

to. She then explained to the parent in a soft, unhurried tone, “You can choose as many of these

as you want to. Pay attention to the hours. If you want before/after schools you can look in here

[gesturing to the information guide] on page 12.” She even went so far as to explain the

contradictory information that was often a product of the policy churn. In this case, an insert with

school times. The parent spent more than ten minutes working through the information, before

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ranking her school choices. More commonly, however, staff did not make tailored

recommendations to the parents they worked with; they barely provided enough guidance to help

parents figure out on their own what choices they might prefer.

However, part of what stood in the way of staff being able to provide this access, was the

district’s complicated relationship with school quality. While schools in the district ranged from

award winners to those in state receivership due to chronic failure, Nancy, a staff member of

color who worked outside of the Welcome Centers told me that the district’s message was

essentially that “every school is a quality school.” This misrepresentation was constantly

justified by district representatives and school committee members who regularly asserted in

public meetings that “every family has a different definition of quality.” While every family

likely has different school-level factors that are important to them when making school choices,

that does not mean that “quality” is without meaning. For instance, the district, despite its

posturing and multiple measurements of quality, only operationalized it into their “quality

schools close to home” policy in one specific way. At the time of my research, the metric of

choice was “district tiers” and were based on standardized test performance.21

Many staff suspected, given their isolation from decision makers and the policy churn of

the district, that the information they had regarding quality was shaky. However, there was one

moment in which staff learned, explicitly and at once, that information they thought they knew

21 At the time of this research, the different measures of quality were as follows: The district measured quality using “Tiers,” which were approximately quartiles of schools serving grades K-8 but based on data from 2013. District tiers categorized schools from 1 to 4, with 1 as the highest performing. These were only applied to schools serving grades K-8. State levels were a more complex annual rating based on student progress, subgroup achievement gap closures, and state determined risk of all schools K-12. These ranked schools from 1 to 5, with 1 as the highest performing. However, there were not equal numbers of schools in each category, and there were therefore far more schools ranked 3-5 using the state ranking than 1-2. In fact, some district Tier 1 schools were a State Tier 3. Finally, the School Quality Framework (SQF) was a recently launched holistic measure of quality developed in collaboration with community partners. This created a composite score which included test scores as well as categories such as school culture and family engagement. This rated all schools on a scale from 1 to 4, with 1 representing best.

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regarding school quality was wrong. Midway through my fieldwork, after priority registration

season had ended and more than 80% of all kindergarten families had already submitted their

school choices to the district, I attended a Welcome Services department meeting. The

conference room was full of front-facing staff, predominantly women of color, and we were

organized into small groups in order to do a school choice simulation activity. Using one parent’s

list of schools, they were asked to rank their preferences and then justify their choices to their

group members. Staff relied on both their professional and personal expertise, as many of them

were not only front-facing experts who helped parents with registration but also attended or had

children who attended Boston Public Schools as well.

The staff at my table considered a range of variables that shaped their rankings, both

logistical like school start times and programmatic like whether or not they had extracurriculars,

but all agreed on the importance of quality and seemed to exclusively select schools labeled as

Tier 1s or 2s (the top 50% in the district). When a white woman from “upstairs” brought the

group back together to debrief, she revealed information that challenged the only thing that staff

felt certain about: “‘One’ does not mean high performing.” The women around me looked at

each other with frustration and dismay. One woman shouted “It’s a lie!” as another whispered to

a colleague, making eye contact with me to be sure I heard, “We are really misleading parents.”

When I spoke to staff after this meeting, this hypocrisy was not lost on them: district tiers shaped

the entire school choice process, and yet the staff from “upstairs” was telling them that the top

tier schools that families were fighting for weren’t even necessarily good in the eyes of the state.

A bilingual seasonal worker of color, Nina, was explicit at it being the district’s decision to

continue to push this inaccuracy on families. She told me that while she thought “at some point

there was the best intention […] but if we are not updating the data, then families you know are

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going to probably a level four school thinking that they’re going to a tier one school […] we

know that it’s wrong, but we continue to do it.”

Given the inaccessibility of the district’s information and the complexity of the school

quality framework, especially in comparison to the streamlined district website, staff had very

few good choices of what to do with the meeting’s revelation. Lolita, a bilingual woman of color,

explained why she found this “new” information to be both incredibly frustrating for staff and

representative of the challenges faced by the families they serve:

I don’t know. It’s very crazy, and that website is so hard to navigate. It’s like the information is in the crevasses of the back of the website. But like once you get there, it’s really useful information. It totally changed the way I [ranked my school choices]. Because I didn’t even think to look on the DESE [the state’s education website] I’m going to be honest. I went on like, ‘Okay, my dad can like drop off this kid at this time, and he can pick them up with my brother and sister.’ Like convenient stuff which most people do. But if I was, when I looked at the DESE okay I know that this is convenient but I gotta go where the info is and stuff. So it totally changed my lists and that sucks. ‘Cause I’m going to say that 90% of the families we work with [at my center] are not looking on DESE. And not doing any of that research because they don’t even know it exists and that website is only in English. I think. Right? Good. So yeah that’s my little rant. I want you to publish that word for word.

Lolita’s “little rant” calls attention to several key assumptions built into school choice. First, she

highlights how the tools and information necessary to make an “informed” decision in this

complex system are online, in English only, and is “hard to navigate,” located “in the crevasses

of the back of the website.” The DESE website is the state’s website, but was not available via

the district’s own school choice webpages, where families would likely need that information. In

addition, this “resource” only showcases some information: that of school quality as measured by

standardized test scores. Second, Lolita points out and dismisses her own process of making an

informed decision not as “useful information” but instead as “convenient stuff which most

people do.” However, she was not picking a school at random or without any information, she

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was mirroring the process of many families who have to navigate school choice based on

concerns like work hours, family logistics, and the like first before they can, if possible, further

sort their options by quality. As a result, Lolita highlights that having constraints that shape

school choices is seemed as the “wrong” way to participate in school choice. Given this, the only

families who can make the “right” school choices are those without constraints of time, money,

childcare, etc.

I interviewed Stacy after the staff meeting, as she was the woman of color who had

shouted “It’s a lie!” upon learning the tier systems were not equivalent with quality. When I

asked her why she exclaimed that, she just laughed, shook her head, and stated, “we’ve just been

lying to parents all this time.” Other staff took this realization, or perhaps reminder, as a direct

assault on their professional ethics and even personal morality. March, a multilingual staff

member of color who had worked for the district for more than ten years, said that the staff

meeting had reminded him how his job was one that was “hard to do with integrity.” He told me

that “In order for the credibility of the system you have to take your time to give them [parents]

something real.” However, “real” is complicated in the realm of school choice and school

districts in general. As a result, many staff felt trapped between the district’s bad information and

their intention to help families make choices.

Many other staff were upset both in the moment and upon reflection, although their

responses to families differed. Some staff chose not to change their behavior but were upset by

what they saw as a forced choice. March was one clear example of this, and explained how the

meeting’s revelation impacted his personal and professional identity, “Can you believe, now,

[…] I know exactly what I’m going to tell people is not true? Can you imagine? My morals? Can

you imagine that?” At this point in the interview he sighed, at the brink of tears. He clicked his

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tongue, shaming himself “tsk tsk tsk tsk.” Because the information was so complicated to fully

explain, March decided to just continue sharing the simplified, inaccurate information with

families.

Other staff members took a different tack. Instead of feeling badly about sharing

incomplete information, Papa Bear described how he opted to not provide specific level or tier

information at all unless asked directly. He explained: “Information is not up to date. Two years

behind. So that’s why half the time I don’t even bother explaining to parents. I mean, if a parent

asks, then it’s important but… sometimes I won’t even volunteer that information because it’s

outdated.” In cases like this families were not given essential school choice information because

staff were certain, or at least tired of a pattern of finding out, that it was misleading (such as

when schools were “held harmless” and their ranking was not updated despite declines in

performance), outdated, or just too confusing to be useful. While in some cases this was

motivated by the self-interests of staff to not be accused of lying or being wrong, in other cases it

was to protect families from inaccurate or confusing information in a process that was already

overwhelming and confusing.

Kelly did something similar, and explained to me that because both measures of school

quality (the district’s and the state’s) are wrong, as we know […] I won’t go into details. I just

present [the choice lists], those are the numbers that we have. And just do your own research and

go beyond those numbers if you can.” These staff rationalized and compartmentalized their work

with families, both refusing to participate in the district’s game of information uncertainty and

resigning themselves to the unfairness of the system they represented. Unfortunately, the

consequence of staff waiting for parents to explicitly ask for high-stakes information like school

quality data, is that only those parents who know how to ask for key information get it. This

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reifies existing information gaps and supports earlier work on information inequality in school

choice as well as scholarship on the role of cultural capital in stratifying access to formal

institutions (Horvat et al. 2003).

Risky Business

On rare occasions, staff actions mirrored that of “generic guidance,” when staff did not

make recommendations but instead helped families “cultivate their own opinions […] based on

their independently determined goals and preferences” (Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018, p. 58). Nina, a

bilingual staff member, was one example of this generic guidance approach. On one occasion, I

observed her talking a mother through the process: how the lottery works using random numbers

to determine how seats are allocated; how different priorities worked to increase the chance that

siblings can attend the same school. Nina then took the time to explain the district’s definition of

quality, tiers, which shaped school choice lists. “Tiers,” she explained unprompted, “are here”—

pointing to the choice list in the mother’s hand (see Appendix A for an example). “1 and 2 are

performing better.” After a long conversation back and forth, the mom thanked her. “Now that

I’m talking to you, it helps.”

The staff I saw going most in depth with families were most commonly bilingual women

of color, especially those who had worked for the district for more than ten years. However,

sometimes temporary workers fell into this category as well, albeit with mixed results. Some just

went through the motions of the choice lists, and since “tier” was on it, they explained what it

meant just as they explained what “corner bus” might mean (parents with this designation were

eligible for transportation to a particular school via bus from a nearby “corner”). I saw Lauren do

this in her first week as a temporary worker, checking in with the parents in front of her as she

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pointed to “Tier” on the choice list: “do you know what this means?” When they nodded no, she

explained plainly, “it’s how good the school is doing. Tier 1 is doing really well.”

In interviews, staff sometimes alluded to the kind of information provision that might

mitigate known informational gaps of many families. However, in cases when staff I spoke to

were confident that they knew what parents might need to make well-informed school choices

(such as school quality, academic performance, and reputation of teaching and learning), they

were equally certain they were not allowed to (or at least supposed to) share that information

with families. This perspective was most common with veteran staff of color who had worked in

more than role for the district. Angela, who worked full-time with families for the district but

only seasonally in Welcome Centers explained to me that there was a lot she had to consider

when helping families make school choices:

We’re always having to be careful about what we say to families, or what we do with families, and how much information we give them, and how much… If you’re on the inside, you can’t really say. There’s sort of a secret society of information when we know we’re creating more problems for people, but we can’t tell them that. [Interviewer: Why not?] Because we’re told that we can’t tell them. […] I’m in the pay grade where I’m being told I can’t say anything, so the pay grade above me knows something that I don’t even know about why I can’t tell families the truth. If they know the truth, what will happen like anything else? You might have a civil war on your hands because people will realize that there was a true injustice here.

Many staff I spoke with seemed well aware of their precarious location within the institution. At

the same time, Angela’s comment about awareness of the system’s “true injustice” potentially

leading to a “civil war” speaks to the institution’s motivations to sustain these information gaps.

If families were aware that not all schools were of high or equal quality, given that they were

comparing Boston to neighboring districts rather than schools within Boston with one another,

the promise of the district’s choice policy would ring hollow as the shortage of high-quality

schools would be more widely understood by all families. Such awareness would frustrate more

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families, make visible more inequality, and put more pressure on both the front-facing staff and

the district overall.

Papa Bear, who had worked for the district in various roles for over ten years, explained

that not being able to share what he knew was one of his biggest challenges at work. He told me,

“Sometimes we’re limited, our wings are cut off, with the information that we have that we

cannot provide.” Nina agreed with Papa Bear’s frustration, adding some context of why she felt

it was so hard. She explaining to me, “you can’t tell them: ‘You know that school really sucks. I

wouldn’t put my child in that school,’ because, now, you’re hurting that school too.” For Nina,

the frustration was not just that she had to withhold information, but that coaching families away

from certain low-performing schools was bad for the whole system, even if she would not let her

own child go there. She explained to me that she had to remind herself that her work was to keep

in mind that if “those kids are all our kids and we want all of them to do well,” then it was more

important to find schools that were a good fit for families rather than a high-quality school for

each child (since that was impossible).

Angela, Papa Bear, and Nina’s comments all highlight the ways that the district was

invested in masking several problems. First, school choice did not change that there were a fixed

number of quality schools available within the district. Second, the distribution of students to

these schools by race and class, remained unequal despite major policy interventions. Calling

attention to these persistent inequalities would likely lead to more families unhappy with their

choices, their assignments, the district, and the staff who worked there. In the current system,

obscuring these inequalities means that more families are likely to be satisfied with their school

assignments. To put it another way, if someone’s child has to end up in a low-quality, segregated

school, it’s better for both the system and the family if the family “chose” it. Similarly, if all

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schools need students to stay open, then it is better for them to have families who feel like they

chose it rather than were assigned to sustain enrollment. This perpetuation of ignorance therefore

is in the service of the institution, and the staff’s withdrawal from counseling and providing

critical information reinforce an unsubstantiated claim by the district that “every school is a

quality school.”

While I did not observe it, some staff did report that, despite their concerns, they would

provide some information about school quality. When I asked the staff why, given the high

likelihood of pushback from their employer and parents alike, most staff explained their decision

as driven by a sense of personal integrity. However, there was tension in being both a good

person and a good worker, and staff described the risks of navigating these choppy waters. John

Smith told me he was worried about being honest with families. He explained, “because I don’t

want it to backfire on us.” The tension between risk and responsibility weighed heavily on him

as he decided what to do in his interactions: “I don’t know. I tried to be as more informative to

them, transparent with them, but sometimes I’m like, ‘Am I doing the wrong thing? Am I telling

them more than they should be knowing?’” He worried about both getting in trouble and the

inequalities that would persist for those families who didn’t know when, for example, it was too

late in the choice season to request a transfer and have a chance of getting what they wanted

(Fong and Faude 2018).

John also told me that beyond worrying about his employer, parents were not always

amenable to the information he wanted to provide, even if it was “the truth.” He told me that

parents “are misinformed and they constantly… they fight you about it.” Given the complexity

of both the bureaucratic and choice processes that families were navigating, this was not

surprising, but his efforts to clarify and provide better information were sometimes met with

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resistance. “They barge out, Sarah. […] I explain to them how it is, and they get upset. I’m sorry

you didn’t want to hear the truth. I have to just tell them the truth. I’m not going to tell them a

lie, never. […] I don’t want to get your hopes up.” Several staff also described to me that they

had once been parents registering for this district. As a result, they wanted to be transparent

about which schools were in high demand and which ones were struggling because as Nancy

explained to me, “because I would want them to be that honest with me.” Others, like Rossie,

spoke to her own moral code as driving her actions at work: “I don’t lie. I don’t like to lie. I’m

not gonna sell you something that I know is not good.” While Rossie is adamant that she does

not lie, she immediately says that she does not like to, implying that there was tension in being

able to fulfill both her personal and professional sense of duty.

Even when they were not confident in the information they had, full time front-line staff

were still worried about the tension between truth telling and repercussions for the families and

institutions they served. In my interviews, staff also described restricting information as a

strategy to avoid “trouble” with families. Tony described walking a fine line of sharing but not

too much, saying he didn’t want to tell lies, but was willing to tell “white lies.” Tony told me that

staff have to be careful to know “when you have to shut your mouth,” in particular when it could

lead to “a problem and they know your name or something.” In the case of Nancy, she even

identified this tension as a reason why she had not advanced internally. “Until I hit the lotto, I’m

going to split the two [helping parents and keeping her job]. No, actually, it usually spills over

and I sometimes tell the truth and it’s not really popular. Maybe that’s why I can’t get ahead.”

These interviews reveal who the staff are themselves socially and structurally situated within the

institutions they represent. While they are powerful in that they have access to middle-class jobs

and formally work as a part of the institution, these positions are privileged only in comparison

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to the other parents they serve from similar race, class, and linguistic communities. The other

workers at the district and even many of the parents they served were more white and elite and

therefore had more access to resources and power. Caught between these two identities, one as a

parent of color and the other as a representative of the district, staff bore the emotional brunt of

trying to do best by the parents they served and the district they were serving.

Ultimately, their location as front-line staff constrained their work, and their own social

locations made them painfully aware of the ways that they were unable to help parents in the

ways they hoped. One time when observing Rossie, she and I were chatting as she finished the

paperwork in between clients. As she briefly checked her work email, her body language

immediately shifted. Her shoulders slumped forward, and she turned to me with tears in her eyes.

A bilingual parent that she had supported had complained that she had not helped her. Rossie

explained the case to me: the mom had wanted a particular school but could not choose it

because it was not on her list. While she tried to explain the policy to her, the mom was upset,

sure that Rossie had been hiding something from her. Rossie began to cry, tears streaming down

her face for a moment before she wiped them away. She looked at me and explained her sadness:

she had started this work to help families navigate a system full of people who were not looking

out for them, only accused to be that problem herself.

CONCLUSION

The unique potential of a compulsory choice system is that all families have the

opportunity to interact with a district staff member before making their high-stakes school

choices. While much is known about informational inequalities that influence school choice

decisions and outcomes, research consistently demonstrates that institutional interventions make

a difference in helping all families make sense of, navigate, and participate in school choice as

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advocates hoped. Unfortunately, access to a staff member, as this research and other recent work

have shown (Sattin-Bajaj et al., 2018), does not guarantee equitable access to the system

especially if the system itself is unequal. This paper looks at the conditions under which staff

withdraw from providing the action-guiding advice that has been demonstrated to improve high-

quality school choices, and asks, what are its consequences? Bridging scholarship on

colorblindness, service provision, and school choice, I argue that the absence of informational

intervention is not neutral but instead a mechanism of colorblind racism which reifies an unequal

system of informed choosers and uninformed choosers.

In the case of Boston Public Schools, the institution both limits and complicates staff

access to information on schools and school quality that is central to their position as “hubs of

information.” Additionally, through under-staffing and a lengthy bureaucratic process that

precedes the selection of schools, staff and families are burned out by the process, the waits, and

the fundamental disconnect between front-line workers and the processes they implement. While

staff are uniquely positioned to help serve the most marginalized families make well-informed

school choices, they nevertheless largely withdraw or avoid this step altogether, finding it more

reasonable instead to protect themselves, the system, and the families they serve from the

gauntlet of unreliable and complicated information that governs a system in which there are not

enough high-quality choices to begin with.

Especially in the context of post-civil rights institutions, when overt racist actions are

rarely visible smoking guns, it is important to look within institutions for the ways that

seemingly benign and mundane routines also perpetuate materially different outcomes.

Critical race literatures of institutional racism tell us to not only look for, but indeed to expect to

find white supremacy lurking in the shadows and encoded in the very DNA of institutions.

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Although scholarship on workplaces and service provision provide helpful roadmaps as to what

routines and institutional constraints we can expect to find, more is needed examine the ways

that unequal outcomes can also be sustained at the interactional level between staff of color and

the very families they were hired to, and want to, help.

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APPENDIX A: Sample Choice Lists from 2017 Registration Season

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CHAPTER 4: White Noise: The Raciolinguistic Marginalization of the Administratively Disadvantaged

ABSTRACT

School choice, as with many forms of public policy, involves complex administrative burdens

required for families’ participation. While scholars document that poor families of color are

disproportionately impacted by administrative burdens, less is known about how the language of

institutions, as majority or exclusively English-speaking spaces, also shapes access to public

resources. Using a case study of Boston Public Schools’ compulsory choice policy, I find that

district efforts to reduce administrative burdens for families does not do so equitably. As a result,

these new initiatives actually compound disadvantage for the non-English speaking, non-white,

non-elite families participating in the process. Using interviews with fifty district staff,

ethnographic observation across district registration sites, and an analysis of both recent and

historical school choice communications documents, I argue that the intense administrative

burdens embedded in a complicated compulsory choice process produces “white noise” which

drowns out the particular needs of the most administratively disadvantaged: poor, non-English

speaking, immigrant families of color. Despite district efforts to decrease the learning,

compliance, and psychological costs for all families, interventions also reproduce known

technological, literacy, and language barriers which compound the stratification of access to the

registration process.

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Like the video that we have over there. They are forcing [us] to put something in an office where 98% of the population [speak languages other than English]. You are forcing [us] to have a video in English. Because you want to say that you did the video in all the centers? That's nothing over here. That's noise. This is not being culturally sensitive.

Rossie, veteran bilingual staff member

white noise noun a constant background noise especially : one that drowns out other sounds

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

INTRODUCTION

In Boston, as in many other urban districts, there is a history of serving linguistically

diverse communities that dates back generations. However, while scholarship on public

bureaucracies has provided frameworks to understand the different administrative burdens and

costs on both clients and staff, less is known about the effect of language on successful access to

resources. Education scholarship has been particularly adept at calling attention to the

inequalities of race, class, immigration, and language status. However, it is largely focused on

educational spaces such as classrooms and schools rather than the bureaucracies that structure

them and impact student assignment. I look at the intersection of these two literatures to better

understand the challenges of service provision to a linguistically diverse clientele.

This paper examines the various efforts that the district has taken to decrease

administrative burdens on families in the face of a compulsory choice school assignment policy.

The analysis draws on several data sources: first, ethnographic fieldwork from one year in

registration offices, district and public meetings in Boston Public Schools; second, interviews

with fifty district staff members who work daily in relation to school choice, registration,

assignment, and enrollment; and third, document analysis of over one hundred historical and

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contemporary documents related to these processes. The research questions explored in this

paper are:

1. What initiatives have been implemented to decrease administrative burdens?

2. Who benefits from these initiatives and/or who is excluded?

3. How do staff understand the challenges families face, and which families face

them?

Through my analysis, I find that there have been decades of efforts by the district to improve

access to and decrease the time burdens of the processes of school choice, registration,

assignment, and enrollment. Nevertheless, these efforts have only consistently helped English-

speaking, white, elite families. This paper shows that structural inequalities persist because of

organizational efforts to make the process fairer for all families, rather than more equitable for

those families who are already the most structurally disadvantaged. The broader complexity of

the system, confusing even the most advantaged families, has resulted in institutional efforts to

make it easier for everyone, rather than recognizing how seemingly neutral policies perpetuate

exclusion rather than ameliorate it. Given the diversity of district staff, including the intentional

hires of multilingual, multiethnic front-facing staff members, these inequalities are not entirely

invisible/inaudible. Paradoxically, staff interviews reveal that there is still tension between

blaming the system and blaming families when trying to explain why unequal participation

persists. Ultimately, this paper makes several important theoretical and practical contributions. It

helps to broaden theories of administrative burden and public bureaucracy to include English-

language practices as a hidden signifier of structural inequality. It also helps to extend

raciolinguistic scholarship on race, language, and power by looking at how processes in

bureaucratic spaces enforce inequality despite institutional efforts to the contrary.

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LITERATURE REVIEW

Administrative Burdens and Disadvantage in Public Policy

Scholarship on post-civil rights institutions often grapple with the ways that organizations

continue to be sites of the reproduction of inequalities. Fundamental to the front-facing work of

both public and private sectors is the strategic rationing of services in order to protect efficiency

and an economic bottom line (Leidner, 1993; Lipsky, 1980), as one might expect as a feature in

any bureaucratic organization (Weber, 2012). Nevertheless, as many scholars point out, “we can

question whose rationality, whose efficiency and what kind of fairness” are produced by these

bureaucracies (Sarangi & Slembrouck, 2014, p. 3). In the public sector, organizational efforts to

manage clients are especially important given that “theoretically there is no limit to the demand

for free public goods” (Lipsky, 1980, p. 87).

Recent work by Herd and Moynihan (2018) offers a framework for understanding the

different “administrative burdens” that define the features of public organizations, and ultimately

result in “policymaking by other means.” Herd and Moynihan (2018) conceptualize

administrative burdens as consisting of three distinct types of costs that clients face: compliance

costs, psychological costs, and learning costs. These three costs are embedded in the scholarship

of many who study citizen engagement with public sector resources, ranging from welfare to

public schools, in contexts in both the United States and the Global South. Compliance costs

include what is often considered to be “red tape”, including the information, documentation, and

other costs to access services (Gupta, 2012; Watkins-Hayes, 2011). Psychological costs include

stigma of application/participation (Stuber & Schlesinger, 2006), as well as the stress and

frustration of the process (Cucchiara, 2013; Roda & Wells, 2013). Finally, learning costs include

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the time, effort, and knowledge necessary to successfully gain access (Kimelberg, 2014; Lareau

& Goyette, 2014).

Rather than assume the necessity, inevitability, or neutrality of administrative burdens,

Herd and Moynihan (2018) demonstrate through case studies ranging from voting to abortion

care three central themes: burdens have consequences for citizens, burdens are unequally

distributed, and burdens are constructed by policy makers, political bodies, and organizations

themselves. The unequal distribution of burdens is of central importance here. Herd and

Moynihan argue that “those who are least advantaged tend to face more administrative burdens,

even though they have fewer resources to manage and overcome them” (p. 6). These clients, also

understood as the “administratively disadvantaged” (Brodkin & Majmundar, 2010), are more

likely to drop-out or opt-out of their effort to secure the public resource (Herd, DeLeire, Harvey,

& Moynihan, 2013). Scholars have found that across different resources, universal programs that

are available to all (such as Social Security) have fewer bureaucratic hurdles for individuals to

overcome than means-tested programs with eligibility requirements (such as welfare) (Moynihan

& Herd, 2010).

Overall, this literature operates under the assumption that the weight of these burdens can

be measured by participation rates; the higher the burden, the more people will opt-out or drop-

out of seeking that resource. In an increasingly complex school choice landscape, scholars

document the ways that race, class, geography, and other factors shape who successfully

participates in choice, who accepts default school options, and who never participates in choice

at all (Bifulco et al., 2009; Delale-O’Connor, 2018a; Lareau & Goyette, 2014; Pattillo, 2015).

However, in a compulsory choice context in which all families must choose, measuring opt-out

or drop-out is not an adequate measure of the administratively disadvantaged, as these families

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will likely have to persist in the face of onerous administrative burdens or face greater

consequences for truancy. This paper examines how district efforts to reduce administrative

burdens for all families instead, intentionally or not, produce a set of administratively

disadvantaged parents who have a harder and slower time in the process of school choice,

registration, and assignment. More specifically, this article finds that district efforts to lift the

administrative burdens for all families drown out the specific needs of poor and non-English

speaking families, both of whom in this context are disproportionately families of color.

Raciolinguistic Exclusion in Education

Scholars have long looked at how language operates alongside visual symbols to signify

power and privilege in institutions generally and educational institutions specifically (Bell &

Hartmann, 2007; Berrey, 2015; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Bridges, 2011; Codó, 2011; Moore,

2008; Picca & Feagin, 2007; Ray, 2019; Sarangi & Slembrouck, 2014). Some scholars have built

on this work to also examine exclusion of certain languages (i.e. disregarding Spanish in favor of

English) in institutions as a key dimension of stratification that is linked to broader, more visible

dimensions of race, class, and gender. Language, particularly facility with “proper” English (or

other dominant national languages) has been analyzed as a strategy that helps to legitimate the

whiteness of individuals and the creation of white communities in colonial and postcolonial

contexts (Anderson, 2006; Fanon, 2008; Feagin, 2010; Omi & Winant, 1994; Rosa, 2018;

Steinberg, 2001; Trechter & Bucholtz, 2001). Anderson (2006) explains that “languages-of-

power” were a product of the simultaneous emergence of capitalism and print communications

which allowed for the solidification and organization of nations, communities, and

administrative control through the printing (and therefore legitimation and privileging) of

specific languages over others (p. 45).

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In education and other institutional strategies, scholars find that the English language is

used as a strategy of assimilation (Anderson, 2006; Fanon, 2008; Steinberg, 2001), subordination

and control (Feagin, 2010; Hill, 1998), and even a measure of intellectual capacity, competency,

and potential (Delpit & Dowdy, 2008; hooks, 1994). Ultimately, these languages of power are a

“weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize” (hooks, 1994, p. 168). Bourdieu and Passeron

(1990) called attention to the specific role of “pedagogic communication” in educational

institutions as one mechanism that produces legitimacy for certain cultures, languages, and

knowledges through the decisions it makes by signifying what is “worthy of transmission, as

opposed to what it does not transmit” (p. 22). However, the language used by institutions does

not serve all families equally, nor even acknowledge non-dominant forms of capital (González,

Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Rosa, 2016; Yosso, 2005).

Yosso (2005) extends Bourdieu’s conceptions of cultural, symbolic, and economic

capitals to include additional valuable resources which exist in non-elite (non-white)

communities but are often devalued. In particular, she resists the culturally normative (white,

English-speaking, middle-class) context in which this capital is narrowly defined. She offers six

additional “capitals” that constitute “community cultural wealth,” including the concept of

“linguistic capital.” Yosso argues that multilingual families bring the “cultural wealth” of

“intellectual and social skills attained through communication experiences in more than one

language and/or style” (p. 78), irrespective of whether or not an institution accepts or values this

non-English-only linguistic capital.

Language is therefore both a tool mediated by institutions and something that is

performed by and interacted with individuals within institutional spaces, as when Fanon (2008)

writes of the experience of black men in European spaces: “He proves himself through his

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language” (p. 8). In the influential book The Skin That We Speak, (Delpit & Dowdy, 2008) Delpit

opens the edited volume discussing the importance of language in relationship to identity

(particularly race), power, and belonging in the context of education:

Our language embraces us long before we are defined by any other medium of identity […] Our home language is as viscerally tied to our beings as existence itself […] Just as our skin provides us with a means to negotiate our interactions with the world—both in how we perceive our surroundings and in how those around us perceive us—our language plays an equally pivotal role in determining who we are: it is The Skin That We Speak. (p. xix)

Taken together, these disparate literatures point out that institutions have the power to construct

different administrative burdens for those they serve, and that the social location of the

administratively disadvantaged is shaped not only by race, class, and gender, but also by

language. In particular, I examine the dimension of language as a lens through which we can

examine how institutional access is stratified, obscured, and delayed for multiply marginalized

groups despite institutional efforts to diminish the administrative burden of registering and

choosing schools in Boston. The systemic disinvestment from administratively marginalized

families, who are disproportionately of color, enforces the material consequences of a white

supremacist society. Ultimately, despite a history of serving linguistically diverse public school

students and families, the district continues to inadequately address the delayed and obscured

access to the institutional process of registering for and choosing schools.

SERVING LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE STUDENTS IN BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS

In 1974, the same year as the launch of the now infamous court-ordered desegregation in

Boston, the Equal Education Opportunity Act was passed at the federal level. This law made

“English Learners” a protected class of students alongside students of different “genders, races,

colors, and nationalities” (“Types Of Educational Opportunities Discrimination,” 2015). This

legislation was particularly significant for cities, which have historically housed a

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disproportionate number of immigrant families. In Boston this has been true for generations. In

1975, a Commission on Civil Rights report identified Boston as a multilingual city of

immigrants: “1/3 of city is foreign-born or the offspring of at least one foreign-born parent” (p.

8). At the time, its three most commonly spoken languages after English were Italian, Spanish,

and Yiddish and the city even ranked third nationally for its percent foreign-born, only behind

New York City and San Francisco.

From 1974’s court-ordered desegregation to the 2016-2017 school year, Boston has

undergone a series of complex student assignment plans. A central feature of these plans for the

past few decades has been that the choice process is required of all families and there are no

traditional neighborhood schools with default assignment based on catchment area. One central

district initiative designed to help families navigate this required process of choosing, including

for students as young as three years old and interested in pre-kindergarten programming, is the

development of school choice guides detailing the process and school options. Table 1

documents a snapshot of enrollment at three different moments in Boston from 1974 to the 2016-

201722 school year. The data compiled includes the total enrollment, racial demographics, and

language status of students as well as the number and languages that the choice guides were

translated into.

22 The dates provided are based on the availability of archival data.

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Table 1: Boston Public Schools 1974-2017 School Year 1974-197523 1993-199424 2016-201725 Total Enrollment 84,913 63,738 55,843 Language Status

First Language not English 7,000 (8%) 22,372 (35%) 25,129 (45%) English Language Learner 4,000 (5%) 14,532 (23%) 16,753 (30%)

Ethnoracial Identity White 52% 19% 14% Black 36% 48% 35% Asian N/A 9% 9% Latinx N/A 23% 42% Other/Multiracial 12%26 <1% <1%

Total Languages Provided 7 1027 10 Language Names by Year

English ✓ ✓ ✓ Spanish ✓ ✓ ✓ Portuguese ✓ ✓ ✓ Chinese ✓ ✓ ✓ Haitian Creole28 ✓ ✓ ✓ Greek ✓ ✓ Italian ✓ Cape Verdean ✓ ✓ Vietnamese ✓ ✓ Laotian ✓ Cambodian ✓ French ✓ Somali ✓ Arabic ✓

23 Most enrollment data comes from the 1975 “Student Desegregation Plan” (Garrity Jr., 1975, p. 68). The statistics on Language Status, however, come from a 1975 report prepared by the U.S. Commission on Civil rights (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1975, p. 48). 24 (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 1994). 25 (Boston Public Schools, 2016c). 26 Desegregation filings on behalf of the district in the early 1970s listed Chinese alongside White in their racial tallies with an asterisk. Documentation within the 1975 Garrity ruling, however, list racial groups as White, Black, and “OM” for Other Minority. However, Other Minority was likely to capture both Chinese and Spanish speaking families given other indications in the reports. Nevertheless, Spanish-speaking Latinx families were counted as White in the United States census until 1980. These contradictions speak to the importance of historical context for identifying ethno-racial and raciolinguistic categories and their meanings. 27 (Boston Public Schools, 1991). 28 While the 1975 Civil Rights document lists one of the district languages as “Haitian French,” by 2017 both French and Haitian Creole were official language options within the district. While it is unclear whether the 1974 designation of “Haitian French” is actually Haitian Creole or French spoken primarily by Haitians, this language choice nonetheless signifies a specific raciolinguistic connotation that is distinguished from a White, European (or even Canadian), French speaking population.

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Table 1 demonstrates that there have been large enrollment declines in the past forty years

(particularly in the proportion of white students) but also a large increase in the number and

proportion of students whose first language is not English and who are classified as English

Language Learners. While substantial increases in Latinx students may explain much of the

increases in the proportion of students in the Language status categories, it is important to note

that there is evidence that the district has been providing services in many languages dating back

to the 1970s. In particular, there is evidence from archival data that the district has provided

documents and information related to school choice and assignment in at least seven languages

for the past 40 years. Therefore, while language services are likely a large burden on the

institution, it is not a new one. The district has provided translation services on this topic in five

languages for at least forty years (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Haitian Creole), and

two others for at least twenty years (Cape Verdean Creole and Vietnamese).

To situate these demographics in a broader context, in the fall of 2015 only 8.6% of

students nationally, and 9.5% of students in Massachusetts were classified as English Language

Learners (NCTE statistics). Therefore Boston has both a history of serving linguistically diverse

students, and Boston has served a disproportionate number of these families compared to other

districts statewide and nationally. Nevertheless, Boston has struggled to fully serve these

students. In 2010, a Boston Globe headline blared: “Boston schools violated rights: Students

lacking English fluency denied services” (Vaznis, 2010). A U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)

investigation in 2010 led to a successor agreement which outlined the steps that the district had

to take in order to remedy its inadequate protection of students who were classified as English

Language Learners (ELLs). The agreement stated:

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As required by Title VI and the EEOA, the School District shall not discriminate on the basis of national origin with respect to its educational programs and benefits and shall take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impeded equal and meaningful participation by ELLs in its instructional programs (U.S. Department of Justice, 2012, p. 9).

While changes to accountability and services have been orchestrated by the central

administration to change school-level services, this paper documents how these required changes

have not reached the district’s processes related to school choice and registration despite

historical attention to decreasing administrative burdens for families.

METHODS

This paper draws on data that was collected as part of a broader mixed-methods study on

inequalities in the Boston Public School choice, registration, assignment, and enrollment

processes. Specifically, this paper draws on three key data sources. First, I conducted 50 semi-

structured interviews with district staff whose day-to-day work was connected to these processes.

Second, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the district’s four permanent registration offices,

as well as department, cross-department, and public meetings during the 2017 school choice

“season,” spanning from December 2016 to September 2017. In addition, I collected and

analyzed over one hundred documents related to school choice, registration, assignment, and

enrollment. These included external communications with parents and prospective parents as

well as evaluations and reports on the process dating back to the 1974 desegregation court

decisions. Access to these district staff, spaces, and documents were facilitated through the

generosity and willingness of key district staff to support my project on registration, and then

approved by both the district’s Office of Data and Accountability and the Institutional Review

Board at Northeastern University. All data was then coded thematically using the qualitative

analysis software NVivo.

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Boston, to manage issues of segregation, has long had a compulsory choice model of

school choice and assignment. As a result, Boston has for decades required all families to

participate in school choice by visiting a brick-and-mortar registration site, once called Family

Resource Centers, but now called Welcome Centers. There are four such formal sites today.

These spaces are at the center of this research project because they are unique locations in which

to observe families making school choices, district staff working with families to do so, and to

gain a broader sense of what school choice looks like at work, on the street-level.

It is important to note that as a white, monolingual, English-speaking woman, conducting

research in a public bureaucratic space predominantly occupied by women of color, many of

whom were multilingual—my presence as an ethnographer was overtly visible. Depending on

the registration site, I sometimes blended in with other young, white mothers, or was mistaken

for a staff member (although there were no white full-time staff members during my time

observing). Nevertheless, my positionality and visibility likely impacted my findings, my

credibility as a researcher, and my ability to gain access. Given my whiteness and the highly

sensitive and political nature of studying issues of racial inequality, I was explicit in my

introductions to and interviews with staff that I was interested in learning about their personal

and professional experiences at work, the families they served, and the ways that segregation

persisted in this storied district. While my research is subject to social desirability bias, this

decision to disclose my interest in racial inequality, as a white woman, was a strategic one in

order to open the door to topics, issues, and examples that my respondents might otherwise

consider me uninterested, uncomfortable, or unwilling to discuss given the power inequalities in

our social locations.

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In total, I conducted and audio recorded 50 semi-structured interviews with district staff

involved in the various stages and apparatuses of the choice, registration, assignment, and

enrollment processes; including 37 with current or former front-facing staff who worked directly

with families in the Welcome Centers; all interviews were transcribed. My interviewees were

generous with the disclosures they made to me, and extensive steps were taken to protect their

confidentiality. All names in this paper are pseudonyms, either chosen by the respondent

themselves to accompany their narratives or from first names of students who registered during

the time of my fieldwork (Tolich, 2004).

The demographics of those interviewed, broken down by respondents’ race/ethnicity,

number of languages spoken, and district responsibility, are presented in Table 2. Those who

served in front-facing positions were much more commonly multilingual than those who worked

internally within the district, and much less likely to be white. Specific languages are not

provided to protect internal confidentiality, as several of my interviewees were the only ones I

spoke to who spoke a particular language. However, the front-facing staff’s demographics do

largely mirror those spoken by district families, with the highest proportion of families speaking

English, then Spanish, followed by other languages.

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Table 2: District Staff Demographics Front Facing Staff

(n=37) Other Staff

(n=16) Total* (n=50)

Race Asian 10.81% 0.00% 8.00% Black 48.65% 31.25% 42.00% Latinx 18.92% 6.25% 16.00% White 8.11% 50.00% 20.00% Bi-/Multi-Racial 13.51% 12.50% 14.00%

Number of Languages Monolingual 29.73% 50.00% 36.00% Bi-/Multilingual 70.27% 50.00% 64.00%

Language Type English 100.00% 100.00% 100.00% Spanish 54.00% 12.50% 40.00% Other 18.92% 12.50% 18.00%

*Notes: In order to protect confidentiality, staff are represented in both the front facing and other staff columns where applicable. As a result, while there are 50 total interviewees, there are more than fifty staff represented in the sum of the two sub-categories. To account for this, the table displays percentage of respondents within each column so that the Total column represents the actual percentages rather than the sum or average of the two sub-groups. Front-facing staff are defined as staff who at the time of being interviewed work or had worked directly with families in district registration sites.

To complement my participant observation and interview findings, I also reviewed all

external facing district documents (either for registered parents, or the general public) produced

for the 2017-2018 “school choice season” from October 2016 to August 2017. Most of these

were produced or republished annually by Welcome Centers and ranged from flyers announcing

school preview events, to registration forms and assignment letters, to a 28-page newspaper

guide for families navigating choices for grades K-8. These documents allowed me to examine

the specific language of district communications in terms of both discursive and translation

choices, and were often the subject of discussions during my fieldwork and interviews with staff.

In addition, over the course of my fieldwork I also gained access to several volumes of historic

documents on school choice in Boston through online archives and my time in district

headquarters, including previous choice and registration guides and rule books, outside

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evaluations of assignment practices, and news coverage of policy implementation. These provide

historical context of patterns of district outreach efforts in the context of assignment and

registration.

ALL FAMILIES ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

This paper looks across the district’s efforts to improve families’ experiences with the

processes embedded in their compulsory choice policy. Notably some of these strategies have

existed in some form dating back to desegregation (such as the newspaper information guide)

while many were new initiatives that were first launched in January 2017 while I was observing

full-time in the registration sites. In all of these cases, my analysis demonstrates that the

complexity of the system has encouraged the constant development of new initiatives to increase

access for all families. In addition, despite demographic changes, the need to serve non-English

speaking families has persisted. I find that efforts to help all families navigate the complexity of

the process, the system’s white noise, drown out the needs of families of color. In particular, by

relying on strategies rooted in technology and information in efforts to decrease parent waits and

increase parent access to the process, these interventions reproduce known technological,

literacy, and language barriers, thereby further stratifying the gap between the administratively

burdened and other families. As a result, the specific needs of the most marginalized have been

left further and further behind as district initiatives advantaged white, English-speaking, elite

families. Intentional or not, all of these strategies have had the effect of disproportionately

excluding those families who rely on the institutions most for access.

The next sections use interview, ethnographic, and archival documents to detail many of

these initiatives designed to decrease the administrative burden of families, with particular

attention to who benefits from these initiatives and/or who is excluded, and how the staff

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understand the administratively disadvantaged. First, I focus on how a few staff perceive the

goals, beneficiaries, and consequences of district initiatives overall. Then I move into analysis of

several specific initiatives, grouped by common features, including: informational texts

disseminated by the district to decrease learning costs of families; outreach efforts and the

involvement of multilingual staff intended to decrease learning, compliance, and psychological

costs; technology as a tool for decreasing the psychological costs of waiting and helping families

learn about the process. I finally explore a few examples of how the white noise of the system

shapes how staff understand the needs of different groups of families and the responsibility of

the district to serve them.

District Initiatives To Decrease Administrative Burdens For Families

During my time observing in Welcome Centers, there were constant changes underfoot.

The first major shift to assignment policy in decades was only three years old (Boston Public

Schools, 2016b). In addition, the district’s superintendent was only in his second school year,

trying to revitalize and reorganize the district around his three principles of “Equity, Coherence,

and Innovation” (Boston Public Schools, 2016a). As in many public institutions, however, the

district had a long history of trying to better serve its clients. In the context of school choice and

registration, I found that there were decades of different efforts designed to lower the

administrative burden on families. Figure 1 below maps out these initiatives in relation to the

three types of administrative burden costs that clients face, as identified by Herd and Moynihan

(2018), and discussed below.

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Figure 1: District Initiatives to Decrease Administrative Burdens by Cost Type29

Given the complexity of a compulsory choice system, about half of the initiatives were

unsurprisingly dedicated to helping families decrease the learning costs associated with

participation in the complex system. These included traditional advertisements like billboards

and newspaper ads compelling families to “Discover BPS” or “Choose BPS” or know when

registration began for kindergarten students. Others were designed to help families learn about

the different school choices available, such as the Newspaper Information Guide and the

district’s customized website DiscoverBPS, both of which were available in all ten district

languages. A third set of initiatives was aimed at decreasing the learning costs about the process

itself, specifically the registration site locations, times, and what documentation was necessary

29 I relied on definitions and relevant case examples offered by Herd and Moynihan (2018) to determine which district initiatives best fit with each type of administrative burden.

District Initiatives Learning Compliance PsychologicalBillboards, Lawn Signs*, Newspaper Ads, Transit Ads ✓Community Outreach ✓Information Sessions ✓Information Video* ✓Newspaper Information Guide ✓DiscoverBPS Website ✓Multilingual On-site Staff ✓ ✓ ✓Hotline ✓Pop-up welcome centers* ✓Pre-registration ✓ ✓Appointments* ✓ ✓Reduction in proofs of address ✓ ✓No proofs required for homeless families ✓ ✓Kiosk / digital queueing system* ✓ ✓Single Visit Assignment (SVA)* ✓Note: All initiatives marked with an asterisk * were new during the time of my fieldwork (2016-2017).

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for families to bring in order to register. These included information sessions across the city and

a new district informational video, first developed and distributed during the time of my

fieldwork.

The other half of initiatives were designed to decrease the compliance costs for families.

Compliance costs in the districts fit into two broader categories: documentation and time. The

district had in years past decreased the number of required proofs of residency documents down

to two from four, and had created alternative documentation or even policies that required no

documentation to make it easier for families with unstable housing or were homeless. However,

the majority of the initiatives were centered around decreasing the total amount of time that

district families had to spend engaging with the process. To address travel to registration sites,

the district piloted “Pop-Up Welcome Centers” (see flyer in Appendix A) based on survey data

of the zip codes where the highest concentration of late registration families were located (Fong

& Faude, 2018). Pre-registration allowed families to decrease their wait in centers by pre-

entering their demographic information and choices ahead of arrival, and the year of my

fieldwork the district even began accepting registration appointments for these pre-registered

families for the first time.

Several initiatives also overlapped with Herd and Moynihan’s (2018) definitions of

decreasing psychological costs. However, unlike in their framework where program stigma was

often the largest psychological costs, in this case psychological costs more commonly were in

response to the documentation required to register or the long and uncertain wait times to be

served by district staff. Only one initiative, that of single visit assignment, was designed to

decrease psychological costs alone. It allowed parents registering for immediate placement, due

to a recent move into the city or very late summer registration, to learn on the spot which schools

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had seats remaining. This cut down the delays and anxieties of receiving assignments

tremendously for those families, but did not otherwise alter the documentation or process of

registration. Most efforts to address psychological costs, however, were focused on decreasing

waits at the centers.

In conversations with staff in leadership positions, they also provided their perspectives

on what motivated the district’s efforts to reduce administrative burdens and what challenges

persisted. However, despite similar institutional locations, these staff did not always agree on the

benefits of reducing administrative burdens given challenges with doing so equitably. In one

interview I asked Cameron, a monolingual staff member in a leadership position, to describe the

different types of parents that the Welcome Centers served. Before answering my question

directly, he began by explaining to me that everyone involved with the Welcome Centers is

“constantly trying to figure out how to improve everyone's experience at a Welcome Center and

everyone's experience in registration and assignment.” Despite this stated goal to decrease

administrative burdens for all families, Cameron went on to be explicit that “everyone” does not

benefit equally as a result. He explained that “the haves,” those with “more political capital” and

the “ones that we hear more often and hear loudest,” are already advantaged compared to their

peers “the have nots.” When designing changes, he argued that the goal was not to make things

equal by making things worse for “the haves” but instead to try and make things better for all

families.

Cameron continued that improving the system for families was challenging given these

inequalities. He reconciled the tensions between equal and equitable by explaining,

I think it's fine to say we're improving this experience, as long as we're not ruining this experience and as long as we are also trying to improve this experience as well. In short, what I'm saying is, I don't think it's... the fact that we're improving

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the experience for a particular population, does not necessarily mean we shouldn't do it because we aren't helping others.

Cameron viewed the net good of system improvements as important enough to

implement a change in the process, even when it was known that it did not serve all

families.

However, not all staff were as willing as Cameron to say “it’s fine” when innovations did

not equally serve all families. Rossie, a veteran bilingual staff member, explained to me that she

was frustrated because many of the initiatives were unfair. I asked her, “Who would all of those

changes benefit most? Like what kinds of families benefit from those?” She responded, “The

people who went to school here, speak English, and don’t have any immigration problems. Yeah.

They are going to be benefit. And it’s good, but the same time we need to think about the other

one. If we would simplify things for the ones that, you know, speak other languages.” Here she

noted, echoing Cameron, that the benefits are “good.” However, she continued by pointing out

that the work of the district and its staff should not stop there, but also consider “the other one,”

the families who do not fit into the English-speaking, Boston-native category. This broad tension

was present in conversations with staff about all of the initiatives designed to decrease

administrative burdens of families. While many agreed that things could and should be made

easier for families, staff also regularly pointed out that at least in the short term, the solutions that

the district chose to invest in were not the ones that served the most administratively

disadvantaged: non-English speaking, immigrant, families of color.

Other staff members, given their unique institutional location as front-line workers and

social locations that mirrored that of the families they served, also regularly called my attention

to the inequities that families faced while I was in the field. “The ones affected are the ones who

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don’t have a voice. NOT gringos30” a multilingual staff member vented to me alongside her

registration site colleagues. Given the district’s longstanding compulsory choice process, where

all families had to show up and navigate the administrative processes of school registration and

assignment, squeaky wheels were both a common nuisance and a lightning rod. While staff were

never happy to hear that a parent complaint had been lodged against them, they often were

conciliatory that complaints for the system were reasonable given how complicated it was to

navigate. However, this openness to critique often fell apart when the ones complaining were (or

were perceived as) white, English-speaking, middle class parents. In these cases, staff were

unsettled by which parents were more likely to both lodge complaints and have their complaints

taken seriously by the district. The staff member’s comments above discloses an acute awareness

of how race and language overlap in terms of administrative burdens in the district; the gringos

could complain and be heard by the institution, but their non-English speaking non-white peers

were both the ones most affected by the process and least likely to be heard.

Delays, Omissions, and Errors: Decreasing Learning Costs for Multilingual Families

The most common and prolific form of district efforts to increase access to the process

came in the form of text-based communications. Jenny, a bilingual staff member described what

this looked like in this way:

I think BPS tends to err on the side of caution and just like word vomit everywhere. That’s basically what they do, which I don’t think is that helpful sometimes. And like obviously, the information should be available, because people want to know, but I think more thought needs to be put into language and the ways that things are expressed.

Staff concerns about the ways that things were expressed in writing was a constant theme

throughout interviews and included both the clarity of English language word choices as well as

30 A derogatory word for non-Latinx person, typically English-speaking and American.

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the quality of translation into other languages. For example, district billboards (see Image 1) said

“Registration Begins January 3” but did not mention that the first round was priority registration

for particular grades with implications for school assignment (Fong and Faude 2018).

Image 3: District Billboard Advertisement, December 2016-January 2017

Flyers and signs designed to reach parents of a school that was closing never even used the

words “Close” or “Closing,” but encouraged families to come make new choices for schools

nonetheless (see Image 2).

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Image 2: Excerpt from district family flier, December 2016

Several bilingual staff members regularly pulled me aside during my fieldwork to call my

attention to the persistent mis-translations of district texts. They were invested in the ways that

translation could increase access for all families to important district information. Staff pointed

out that translations risked being exclusionary to the families they aimed to serve. Peter, a

bilingual staff member advocated for translations that were in a “neutral, common language”

rather than just a literal translation. He pointed out that though there were professionals

registering in all languages, if things are translated literally rather than meaningfully, non-

English-language speakers would be at a disadvantage when trying to make “the right decisions”

regarding their school choices due to the intensely bureaucratic, technical language. For some

families, for example, the center specific short-hand of “documents” for “proof of residency

documents” was anxiety producing for those who were undocumented. In other cases,

translations were so inaccurate, staff were convinced that the English text had simply been

copied and pasted into Google Translate. There were more than a dozen examples of these

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mistranslations presented to me during my fieldwork. This included word for word translations

that skewed meaning, such as “Before/After School Programming” translated into “Before/After

School Drafting,” because drafting was a synonym for computer programming. In another case,

an abbreviated translation left off part of a word which changed the meaning of the translation

entirely: on a survey, the racial category of “Black/African” should be translated in Vietnamese

as “Phi chán” but was instead translated as just “Phi” which means Filipino (see Appendix B for

staff markups).

Beyond challenges of translation, there were other ways that the district’s texts unequally

served its families, despite efforts to increase access. One key information document that had

been part of the district’s outreach dating back to the 1970s was a lengthy information guide,

now more commonly referred to as the newspaper, due to its recent years of being produced on

newsprint. Analysis of archival documents found that these information guides date back to the

early years of desegregation in Boston. A 1975 Commission on Civil Rights report explained

that the guide was under court supervision, to be published in multiple languages (see Table 1),

and designed to help families “make an informed selection.” (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,

1975, p. 91). At the time of my fieldwork, the current version of this text, the newspaper, had

expanded to ten languages including English.

Unfortunately, even after considering challenges with translation and language choice,

this critical resource was not made equally available to all families. When I asked Rossie about

what she would change about the district’s information dissemination, she mentioned the

newspapers. “When we have the newspaper, we [have] the English one in December or let’s say

November, and then in February we have the other languages. If I’m not able to publish all the

languages at the same time, I’m not going to do it. You know?” My observations in Welcome

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Centers confirmed this. I noticed that only the English version of the newspaper was available in

time for the start of peak registration at the beginning of January. Then about mid-month, the

Spanish edition appeared, and by the end of the month, often trickling into February, the other

languages would also be printed and disseminated. Once translated, all language versions of the

paper were also available online through the district’s site. However, the delayed dissemination

of this critical resource designed to decrease the learning costs about the registration and school

choice processes kept this information out of the hands of non-English speaking families until

after many of them had already participated in the process.

Uneven Outreach: How to Reach a Multilingual, Multiethnic, Segregated City

Interviews with staff revealed that the districts’ textual outreach was often insufficient,

either because it was print-based or because of where it was disseminated was unequal. Print-

based efforts highlighted how inequalities often build upon one another: first the words needed to

be clear and meaningful (and translated), then they needed to be accessible and reach the

appropriate family. The barrier of technology was only one additional layer resitricting access,

but print-based communication did not guarantee acces. Several staff members mentioned

challenges with billboards. For at least the past several years, the district paid to have 25

billboards advertising the start of registration. Several bilingual respondents called attention to

the unequal distribution of these signs in terms of both language and geography. One example

was Peony, a bilingual temporary worker. She pointed out that she had seen way fewer

billboards in the East Boston neighborhood (separated from mainland Boston by water) than in

other neighborhoods. She explained,

In Boston [referring to the neighborhoods on the other side of the water] I’ve already seen four or five billboards with the BPS name. It’s just like, it’s kind of unfair. Because people in East Boston have the right to know that their kids have the right for an education. And that they have the opportunity to sign up during

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these times, at this place, with these documents, you know? I don’t know. It’s somewhat unfair.

Through my ethnographic fieldwork, I learned that billboards were located in eleven

neighborhoods, but only in three languages (18 English; 6 Spanish; 1 Haitian Creole) rather than

in the required ten, and only for a total of four weeks each. In the neighborhood of East Boston

that Peony was referring to there were only two billboards, one in English and one in Spanish,

despite having over 1,000 registrations that January. Other neighborhoods had lower registration

numbers but more billboards per person, as with South Boston which stood out for having three

billboards despite a third as many registrations as East Boston. The current and past politics of

the city matter here too. Both East Boston and South Boston were once predominately white

immigrant neighborhoods, the former Italian and the latter Irish. Both have seen demographic

change in the past decades, first diversifying and now gentrifying. Today, East Boston is now

home to many immigrant families, particularly from South and Central America but also

Morocco. While South Boston is more diverse than it was during the Boston bussing crisis, it

remains symbolically one of Boston’s whitest neighborhoods.

Not having billboards in all ten languages, intentional or not, is exclusionary and a

violation of (at least the spirit of) the Department of Justice agreement. The inequality of

geographic distribution of the billboards is harder to quantify, particularly given that no

respondent could explain to me the logic behind their locations. If they were designed to recruit

children who might otherwise choose from a large private/parochial school sector and a growing

charter school sector rather than Boston Public Schools, their location in certain neighborhoods

and languages might reflect those who opt out more than those who typically opt in. However,

given that participation in the priority round of registration is stratified by race, class, and

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neighborhood in Boston (Fong and Faude 2018), the location and language of billboards also

reflect district neglect in certain communities who would benefit from access to that information.

Either way, many staff found that this kind of written outreach was not enough to reach

many families who needed the information anyway. Jasmy, a multilingual staff member, told me

that in certain communities, a billboard is not enough. He explained,

The message they’re trying to convey, it doesn’t reach enough people. I think they have to do a better job using the channels that will fully touch these people […] you have to use that channel if you really want to make, to communicate something important for them in the Boston area. Because they have a lot of radio station, a lot of radio shows, they’re very into churches, they have their own social activities. If you don’t do that approach most likely you won’t, they won’t know what’s going on.

Multilingual staff regularly brought up the importance of going to meet different

communities, particularly different immigrant communities, in spaces where they are

located.

Unfortunately, as budgets tightened and priorities shifted over time, outreach efforts that

were either differentiated and/or required staff time seemed to be less of a priority in the

district’s portfolio of strategies. The fallout of this was particularly evident on a Saturday

afternoon in January, which offered extra hours to help families access priority registration. I

stood in the hallway near the front sign-in desk with a group of staff members who were all

waiting for families to arrive. When I asked them why it was so slow, Paola, a veteran staff

member told me “This is the worst Saturday we’ve ever had! It was not advertised anywhere!

Nobody asks us!” When I asked what was different in other years, the veteran staff members

described different grassroots approaches to outreach in previous years when they were better

staffed and better funded. Paola said that she used to “go places and talking to people wherever

and whenever we go out” including at places like the laundromat. Rossie explained that she

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would leave her center and go to a nearby train stop from 7:00-9:30 some mornings to hand out

flyers. Kelly added that they would “carry info with us on the weekends in case we bump into

people. I wanted something business card size I could always keep in my pocket to give to

people, but it was never approved.” Given the formal costs, unpredictability, and limited reach of

things like billboards and signs on public transportation, staff sometimes brainstormed

alternatives. Unfortunately, although staff wanted to be part of creating solutions, their proposed

solutions were rarely approved, financed, or supported by those who were in a position to

approve these initiatives. As a result, the one-size-fits-all approach of district outreach continued

to exclude some families, rather than include more differentiated approaches that could leverage

the multilingual strengths of staff and more effectively and directly reach hard to reach families.

District registration sites are another place where there have been efforts to decrease the

administrative costs on families, particularly through the intentional hiring of multilingual staff

members. By employing staff who speak the languages most common to the district, the district

hoped to decrease the learning, compliance, and psychological costs for families who speak

languages other than English. Unfortunately, there were gaps in this effort to decrease the

administrative burden, particularly around access to the multilingual staff. In our interview,

Jenny mentioned this explicitly:

Jenny: I mean, you have a lot of families that don’t speak English. There is not always someone that speaks the language available to assist them. I mean, if you have nine official languages [other than English] you should probably have those languages available in all the Welcome Centers. You shouldn’t have to go across town to another Welcome Center just because they have the person that speaks the language you need. I think that that’s a pretty big… oversight.

Interviewer: Do you think people know that? Jenny: I don’t think I’ve heard anyone speak of it, so I’m not sure that it’s really

on anyone’s radar.

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Here, Jenny points out that having many staff speaking district languages across the four

registration sites was not enough to actually provide access to all languages for all

families. I found that during my time in the center, no staff was fluent in Arabic, the

newest addition to the district’s languages. Staff were largely strategically placed based

on need, with languages offered at the center closest to the neighborhoods with high

concentration of those speakers, but proximity to home did not guarantee that it was the

most convenient site for all families. Importantly, Jenny also points out that the concerns

over language access were likely not on anyone’s radar. Despite the multilingual

multiethnic identities of front-facing staff, those with the power to invest in more staff

were either less aware or less concerned with this need.

To complicate this, even when there were staff who spoke additional languages,

there were a few cases of staff who fell to the extremes in either going out of their way to

assist non-English speaking families and those who sometimes even resisted their

capacity to do so. In terms of extra efforts to support the administratively disadvantaged,

more than one staff member kept track of the newly arrived families, one to connect them

with community resources and another to follow-up and make sure that they had received

their placement information. While beyond the scope of their job, these staff were

determined to help protect families and set them up for success. One staff member told

me that he did individual follow-ups with these students to make sure they knew where to

go to school once they had been assigned. He explained, “If I wasn’t calling them… the

last family sat there for two months waiting, but didn’t think to call back. They believe in

the system and when we tell them they will receive a letter, they think they will receive it

because they are supposed to.” While this example is the closest to the concerns that Herd

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and Moynihan (2018) share about how administrative burdens push clients away from

receiving resources, in the case of compulsory choice here, clients do not truly exit the

system but instead double their administrative burden: because these students still needed

to go to school, they would have return to the Welcome Centers to re-register weeks later

and begin the process over again.

Meanwhile, supporting non-English speakers sometimes placed extra mental and

emotional demands on staff, especially if they were expected to be the only one serving

multiple language groups in one day; these recent immigrant families typically needed

more help navigating the system, were more likely to struggle with literacy (in any

language), had more questions, and therefore took a lot of time in a process that was

already plagued with long waits. In two cases I heard staff reveal that they sometimes

resisted supporting clients in their native language. Kelly, a multilingual worker, seemed

overwhelmed by multiple requests to help translate simultaneously into multiple

languages. In response, she declared “The word bank is closed on the weekends. My

name is not Rosetta Stone.” In another case, Najma, a temporary bilingual worker, told

me that when parents notice she can speak their native language, even if they also speak

English “they ask too many questions. It takes so much longer […] If they get

comfortable, then they try to see if they can have you get them in. […] I wish I spoke a

language that wasn’t used in Boston.” Here Najma explains that she found that speaking

in the first language of families increased the parents’ assumption, or at least hope, that

she could grant them some advantage in the placement process (which she could not). In

addition, it simply took too long. As a result of the limited investment in these staff, their

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hope as a silver bullet to decrease the learning, compliance, and psychological costs for

all families in the district ultimately fell short.

Unequal Technology

During my fieldwork, use of technology was the most common strategy to improve

administrative burdens. Cameron, the monolingual leadership-level staff member mentioned

earlier, was a big advocate of these innovations because there was more room to change the

system at the practice level than the policy level. This directly aligns to the argument put forth by

Herd and Moynihan (2018) that shifts in administrative burdens are often “policymaking by

other means.” Cameron also argued that while “technological improvements have the ability to

help both, especially when we get the ability to people to do things on a cell phone because most

people, both 'haves' and 'have nots' I would argue do have cell phones,” these improvements still

“probably benefit them [the haves] more than the 'have nots'.” Technology most captured the

challenges of reducing administrative burden for all families in theory, versus the complex

intersections of family needs in practice. In reality, there was wide variation in technological

access, familiarity, and literacy for the families served by registration sites.

Stacy described barriers to technological access as determined by several factors

including accessibility, socio-economic factors, and generational divides. Regarding

accessibility, she explained “you can’t always assume every family has a computer at home. You

can’t assume sometimes all these families have access to things. That’s what I hear from a lot of

other colleagues who have friends or families who come from Cape Verde or Haiti or El

Salvador. It can be anywhere.” Unequal access to and familiarity with comfort with technology

were a challenge for many of the innovations implemented by the district, particularly those

designed to decrease the stress of unpredictable waits in the registration sites themselves. These

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included efforts to let families who pre-registered be able to make appointments (Appointment

Plus) and two different digital queuing systems (Waitlistme and QLess) that allowed all families

to get text notifications and see their place in line. Staff commented, and I noticed while

observing, that many families could not use the computer kiosks that hosted the digital queuing

systems, as they were unfamiliar with a standard keyboard and assumed the screen would be a

touch-screen. In addition, all of these initiatives were English-only (Pre-registration,

Appointment Plus, Waitlistme), or English and Spanish only (QLess). The advertisement for the

new appointment system makes this clear (see Image 3). The flyer was only released in English,

and while the first step is to “select a language,” it is accordingly also in English. While the

names of the district languages are listed at the bottom of the flyer, the asterisk for step one

makes it clear that this is not guaranteed.

Image 3: District advertisement for new Appointment system, November 2016

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The free, standard, or basic interfaces were designed for an English-only clientele, and

each additional language cost a great deal of time31 and resources32 that were not readily

available. While these might decrease the psychological costs of unknown wait times, they only

did so for English-speaking families who were technologically literate, and only did so at the risk

of additional administrative burdens on staff and psychological costs for families.

Another type of initiative that relied on technology to decrease learning costs for families

was an informational video called “How to Register Your Child in Boston Public Schools.” The

video was developed by the Welcome Services department in preparation for January registration

in 2017. It was available both on YouTube and playing on loop through giant monitors at each

registration site’s waiting room. The video itself is just over four minutes, and walks families

through the steps of the process: (1) going on line to www.discoverbps.org to get your custom

list of schools and information on each school; (2) visit a Welcome Center with the proper

documentation, complete your paperwork, and meet with a Registration Specialist to process

your case. While well intended, John, a bilingual staff member, pointed out to me that the video

tells families to do things before arriving such as “pre-register before coming, but they’re already

here.” While intended as a tool to improve access for families, if most families only accessed the

video after arriving at registration sites, it would provide them with critical information too late

to be of use.

During my days sitting and observing in waiting rooms, I grew tired of and soon tuned

out the upbeat intro music, flashy montage of multi-ethnic students in classrooms, and even the

important steps of the process. While this video was an important innovation and upgrade from

31 Interviews with IT staff suggested that providing web-hosted text in languages such as Arabic and Chinese would take “ages,” even with the translations already available. 32 I observed several pitch meetings with product developers, and in all models, each additional language often cost several thousand dollars per language on top of a product that could already have a base price of nearly $20,000.

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either text-heavy information guides or the dated slide deck of sometimes decades old

announcements about the district, this resource did not serve all families equally. Rossie

explained to me that there was a disconnect between the “innovation” of the video and the needs

of the families she served:

Like the video that we have over there. They are forcing me to put something in an office where 98% of the population [speak languages other than English]. You are forcing [us] to have a video in English. Because you want to say that you did the video in all the centers? That’s nothing over here. That’s noise. This is not being culturally sensitive.

While the video was narrated by a multilingual staff member of color and features several other

staff members of color, the video was only filmed in English and only displayed English

subtitles. This English-only resource was a mismatch in all of the waiting rooms across the

district, where a linguistically diverse set of families waited to participate in the registration

process.

Ultimately, while the video was intended to decrease the learning costs of all families, it

only serves those who speak English. While the bodies in the video are of staff of color,

affirming and mirroring the diversity of the district families, the institutional decision to have a

bilingual staff member speak in English (and provide closed caption in only English) highlights

the gap between what the district could do to value the linguistic capital of other families and

what it chooses to do instead. Given that the information the video provides is most useful to

those who access it before arriving at the registration sites, this resource additionally privileges

those who are technologically literate and both knew to and were able to use the district’s

website to find it.

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The Consequences of White Noise: Improving Access vs. Hand-holding

Most of the examples above highlight district efforts to reduce administrative burden for

all families but failed to address the ways they unequally serve the most marginalized. However,

this is not to say that all staff viewed those initiatives negatively. Peony, for example, who was

cited earlier for her critique of billboard distribution, was also very positive about the district’s

website as a resource for families. However, other staff members were conflicted not in which

interventions were successful, but whether or not the persistent or resulting inequalities were the

responsibility of the district or the families themselves. Jessica, a monolingual staff member,

described this tension to me in this way:

I don’t know, I guess, I mean they’re making that choice not to know. […] I mean, some are just got here, or don’t know- this is their first time in the city, the country, whatever. So […] of course you don’t know which schools to go to. You know what I mean? But people who are born and raised in the city, and have lived here with their child the last four years… I don’t know how much more hand-holding you can do. […] I don’t know. Like are we going to start hanging out in beauty salons and nail salons to get this information out there, or are we? I don’t know. But shame on people who don’t do the research ahead of time, that are able. Like if you have a fancy new phone, you can look something up on the internet.

Here Jessica differentiates between those who choose not to know and those who could not

possibly know. Her comparisons are differentiated both by immigration and geography—born

and raised vs. recently arrived—as well as by racialized, gendered, and classed tropes of beauty

salons and nail salons. Jessica suggests that there is a limit to the responsibility of the district to

continue to try and decrease administrative burdens around at least the learning costs of school

choice and registration. The implication that everyone “can look something up” on their smart

phones relegates the burden to the family and away from the district, which Jessica frames as

legitimate in their abdication of their responsibility to serve these families.

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Despite Jessica’s charged frustration with families, later in the interview she pointed out

that it was important that the district use available information (explicitly referencing the surveys

underlying the research of Fong and Faude, 2018) to try and reach some of the known hard to

reach neighborhoods. She explained to me that the district should “spend some time and money

in those neighborhoods getting the information out there. […] We need some serious feet on the

ground, although they should be doing it themselves, they’re not. So let’s not punish the kids,

and I guess concentrate on those two areas.” In this interview, Jessica moved back and forth

between her discomfort with “hand-holding” certain families and her willingness to prioritize

funding to better support outreach in those areas that have proven to be home to the hardest to

reach families, even if it should be the responsibility of mothers instead of the district.

Nina, a bilingual staff member, also wrestled with understanding the administrative

burden on certain families given all of the different efforts that the district had undertaken to

lower the learning costs for families. During one part of our interview she was trying to reconcile

why registration was so slow that year. She listed off several possible explanations including

lower birth-rates as a result of the recession a few years earlier, to political reasons with

immigrant families fearful of formal government offices in the wake of Trump’s election, to the

reality that many families may not have moved to Boston yet. Beyond all of these explanations,

however, she felt baffled. “Where are you?” she asked, in reference to the families who had not

yet arrived. While there were many factors she would consider, she was clear that district

outreach could not be the cause: “I just can’t understand that people don’t know. I refuse to say

that’s the reason. Because the billboards. It’s been in radio. It’s been- we sent out to all the

providers [such as head start, health clinics, etc. ...] There is newsletters. We have meetings with

the family group. They all know…” Here, Nina emphasized what conditions might legitimate

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parents’ inability to access the system but remained skeptical that district shortcomings could

also explain low turnout. Some of these statements contradicted those made earlier by Jasmy,

who wanted the district to use radio. Because district outreach varied year to year, and staff had

varied (but typically limited) access to knowing what outreach was done, such contradictions are

not surprising.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This paper uses a case study of Boston Public Schools to look at the intersection of two

different literatures, that of administrative burden in public policy and that of race, language, and

power. Broadly, this paper begins to tackle the question of what administrative burdens persist in

a public policy arena when all families do participate, and what language gaps reveal about the

administratively disadvantaged. Specifically, this paper asks: What initiatives have been

implemented to decrease administrative burdens in Boston? Who benefits or is excluded from

these efforts? and, how do staff understand the administratively disadvantaged? I find that

Boston has a robust history of trying to reduce administrative burdens for its families and

continues to seek new ways to do so. Nevertheless, these efforts to serve all families fall short of

serving non-English speaking, immigrant groups despite a decades-long history of raciolinguistic

diversity in the district and attention to these groups in early initiatives. As a result, the constant

efforts to reduce administrative burdens become white noise, both allowing for the cumulative

advantage of English-speaking and wealthier (and therefore also, white) families alongside the

drowning out of a systemic failure to serve the most marginalized families in the district.

This paper contributes to both the research on education and administrative processes by

affirming the role of language identity (as linked to, but independent of nationality and

ethnoracial identity) in scholarship on inequality. When we look intersectionally but fail to listen

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for the ways that language gaps proliferate in our institutions and exclude families, we fall short

in our ability to fully recognize and therefore mitigate inequalities. However, I caution against

just identifying language as another variable through which we filter our systems, because even

the English language fluency of these same bodies has never been enough to guarantee full

access to institutional resources (Rosa, 2018). As school choice policies continue to expand,

more attention to the ways that administrative burdens shape access and experiences of

registration for all families is needed. Boston Public Schools’ compulsory choice model is one

window through which we can examine administrative burdens, and the efforts to ameliorate

them, look like in the context of a progressive, comparatively well-funded, equity-focused

district.

The findings here are therefore complicated. It is promising that the district shows such

extensive commitment both in its history of and breadth of efforts to reduce administrative

burden for its families. These initiatives matter. They likely have made a difference for many

families and are a useful menu of options that other institutions should consider when seeking to

reduce the costs on their clients. However, these initiatives also demonstrate how good intentions

can simultaneously respond to and produce white noise that drowns out the needs of the most

administratively and socially marginalized. In a majority-minority district such as Boston, where

nearly half of all students’ first language is not English, initiatives that fail to consider the

language needs of parents exclude a majority of its families. Therefore, while the efforts to

support families are important, failing to do so for most of its families, and in particular for its

multiply marginalized families of color, only compounds the inequalities of access to this high-

stakes process of determining educational opportunity.

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APPENDIX A: Flyer for the Piloting of Pop-Up Welcome Centers (Fall 2017)

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APPENDIX B: Vietnamese Survey, Marked up by Staff Member (2017)

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CHAPTER 5: The Paradox of Compulsory Choice

This dissertation sought to better understand school choice as a process. Boston Public

Schools is an ideal site for this study, given its longstanding history of both desegregation

efforts, diverse district demographics, and required school choice at all grade levels. In a district

with nearly 57,000 students, over 125 schools, and ten different languages formally recognized

by the district, this project focuses on the experiences, practices, and perceptions of the street-

level bureaucrats and other staff who implement the district’s policies and practices. These staff

have been almost entirely invisible in both scholarship and policy conversations around school

choice, despite their central and critical location in bureaucracies to implement or resist how

policies are enacted.

This project was driven by three research questions:

1. How do institutional processes (re)produce inequalities?

2. How do district staff perceive their work and the families they serve in

relation to these processes?

3. How do staff perceptions further exacerbate or mitigate these inequalities?

To investigate these questions, I used a mixed-methods approach. This included qualitative

interview data with fifty district staff members regarding their perceptions of families, policies,

and daily work practices; over one thousand hours of intensive, full-time participant observation

during the 2017-2018 school choice season in registration sites, public meetings, and internal

staff meetings; a survey of several thousand families regarding their demographics, preferences,

as well as their perceptions of and barriers to the process of registration; administrative data on

registration demographics; and content analysis of archival and contemporary documents to

contextualize and historicize my findings.

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Through this mixed-methods study in the Boston Public Schools Welcome Centers I find

that when school choice is compulsory, the racialized, linguistic, gendered, and classed structural

inequalities persist. Rather than eliminating barriers that unevenly impact individuals seeking

services and resources, institutional practices that constitute “policymaking by other means”

(Herd & Moynihan, 2018), protect the interests of elite, white, English-speaking families in

districts similar to how scholars have documented stratification in other social service

organizations. Despite stated intentions to reduce administrative burdens and serve all district

families, the system’s complexity instead becomes white noise with the opposite effect. The

winding bureaucracy on the road to registration too often operates within the black box of school

choice. However, in this compulsory model, the inequalities are laid bare in crowded waiting

rooms, English-only flyers, and staff who over and over again do not counsel families on how to

align their school preferences with their constrained school choices.

Each empirical chapter of this dissertation takes on one assumption about what might

allow school choice inequalities to dissipate, and shows how even in a progressive, multilingual,

compulsory choice contexts, white, English-speaking, elites are privileged at each stage of policy

implementation at the expense of their less-advantaged peers. While this project does not speak

to input data (what choices families have access to in their choice lists) or outcome data (which

schools families are assigned or ultimately attend), it does unveil how institutions structure,

label, and treat families during the transformation of school choice policy into bureaucratic

practices. I demonstrate that even diverse institutions providing public goods stratify families

through the process in the same way that we expect private institutions to stratify inequalities.

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My empirical chapters reveal how families are treated unequally and inequitably at every

stage of the process, mirroring the findings of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading critical race

scholar: “it is fairly obvious that treating different things the same can generate as much

inequality as treating the same things differently” (as cited in Collins, 2000, p. 23). Chapter four

documents the uneven outreach to families about the timelines, required documentation, schools

they were choosing from, as well as the overall process. I found that non-immigrant, English

speaking, and white families from certain neighborhoods were disproportionate beneficiaries of

the district’s delayed, incomplete, and poorly translated information dissemination to families.

Chapters two and three document the unevenness of families’ experiences in registration sites,

while waiting to be served by staff (2) and from staff’s perceptions on the information they do

and do not have and can and cannot give (3). In each chapter, I document the ways that

inequalities are visible in the queuing systems and wait times of families (2), the information

access and transparency of staff (3), and the materials available to families (4).

Importantly, each chapter calls into question one aspect of school choice that is often held

up as a hope for issues of equality. While we might assume that greater participation in school

choice would mean that families would have to spend less time navigating the complex system

due to its likely standardization and “one stop shopping,” chapter three illuminates how even

wait times become stratified when everyone participates. While we might assume that access to

formal information like that provided directly by districts or schools would level information

asymmetry, in both chapters three and four we see that information is constrained by district

turmoil, resources, and prioritization (or lack thereof) in translation and dissemination of

documents.

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Additionally, my empirical chapters show how neutral, bureaucratic language and diverse

family demographics and needs are both misrecognized, collapsed, and organized according to

pre-existing and intersecting hierarchies of deservingness. Staff interpretations, despite their

understanding of structural constraints and individual needs, often relied on racialized, gendered,

and classed typologies. Savvy parents were described as having pre-registered for the process,

known what schools they wanted, known when to come register, and rarely asked any questions

that might burden or embarrass staff. These same parents were also disproportionately white,

non-immigrant, English-speaking, wealthy, mothers and fathers, from particular historically elite

neighborhoods. Lazy parents did not know when to register, what their choices were or what

they wanted, took up staff members’ time and slowed them down, asked questions that staff

could not answer, and consistently had to return repeatedly to complete the process. These

parents were mostly described as mothers of color, sometimes non-native English speakers and

immigrants, poor, and with multiple children in tow.

What was powerful about these categorizations from staff, is that staff could articulate the

structural barriers to entry and still they often perceived those who failed to successfully do so as

challenging. The bottom-line from exhausted staff seemed to be: “We’ve done all we can. It’s

out there. Why are these families continuing to make things so hard?” Institutional constraints

and disinvestment tell part of the story of why the process of school choice, registration, and

assignment in Boston is so stratified. While the mechanisms of stratification may be unique to

this case and these spaces, those who are advantaged and those who are not are all too familiar.

A FINAL ROLL OF THE DICE

Staff meetings typically consisted of two-hour marathons of bureaucratic tedium. At the

last staff meeting I attended during my time in the field, however, it was game day. Staff were

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given custom monopoly money, with the faces of their department’s leadership transposed onto

the front. Each game was assigned an entrance fee, but staff could easily earn more “Republic of

Welcome Services” dollars by singing karaoke to a song of their choice, streamed from YouTube

on a computer kiosk in the waiting room. There was skee-ball, with the highest quality schools as

the hardest targets to hit but promised the biggest reward. The lowest performing schools not

only cost you your entrance fee, but yielded little or nothing in return. One Latina staff member,

pulled me to the table that had “Go 2 Homebase” set up on it (Image 1).

Image 1: Custom Go 2 Homebase game board

Go 2 Homebase was a registration specific game board designed in the spirit of Chutes

and Ladders. Unlike Chutes and Ladders however, a game that describes itself as “entirely

random chance,” Go 2 Homebase quickly revealed just how little was up to chance in the race

from registration to assignment. On my second or third roll I landed on the pink space marked

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“pre-registration” and got to move ahead nine spaces because of my “luck.” The staff member

burst out laughing and shook her head, “See? Your people always skip ahead.” I shrugged

uncomfortably, smiling, but hoping that at least in this game board version she might have the

same “luck” as I did. She did not. Instead, she had to take the longer path towards the finish line.

With each twist of Go 2 Homebase, players faced additional obstacles. With each obstacle, it

became more and more clear how my positionality as a white, monolingual English speaker, with

no special education needs or barriers to getting “the right” documents to prove my residency, all

accumulated into the advantage of more easily and quickly getting assigned a school. Many turns

later, I won the game of Go 2 Homebase by a wide margin.

When I asked my respondents what school choice meant to them, and how they would

design it in Boston if they were given all of the power and money to change it, they most

commonly told me: stop investing in the apparatus of choice and instead invest in improving the

schools themselves. No matter what one thinks about choice in abstract, or what it would take to

make it more equitable, school choice can never reconcile the reality that in contexts with lots of

choices there are typically too few high-quality schools available. Given this, I argue that school

choice is not an opportunity or a system that can be improved by including more families.

Having all families choose, as shown in the case of Boston, does not undo how school choice is a

racialized game that obscures enduring educational inequalities related to privatization, white

opportunity hoarding, and the meritocratic myth that underlies our democracy.

Further, even in this compulsory choice model in which all families had to choose, there

were additional inequalities in the process of choice and registration as well. Although

participants are told that they roll the same dice when applying to Boston Public Schools (quite

literally, through the language of playing the “lottery”) the game plays out quite differently

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depending on the social location of families and how institutional practices mitigate, exacerbate,

or ignore those inequalities. In this game board version as in reality, the families who

successfully access pre-registration move ahead, while families who are missing registration

documents or who speak a language other than English each face delays. As the registration

process makes all too clear, as either a road map or a game, two parents with different social

locations likely will not start the process with the same advantages, finish the process at the same

time, or be treated the same way by the system along the way. In this dissertation, I identify the

consequential, albeit mundane, practices that shape these experiences. I examine the ways that

institutionalized racialized logics, routines, and assumptions stratify family access, knowledge,

and treatment in this compulsory choice system .

INVESTING IN THE ILLUSION

In one interview, Cameron described the vicious and endless loop of complexity and

inequality in this way:

I think the things that would benefit the 'have nots' more is simplifying the system and because it's so complex, that actually advantages people who... actually, let me put it this way: All these systems were designed with equity in mind but as a result, great complexity evolved because we tried to make this clause to make this fair, or this clause to make this fair, but as a result, by adding those additional clauses, you actually made it less fair because only the 'haves' knew about them. So it actually created an unequal system.

Cameron points out how constant tinkering, grandfathering, and the adding of qualifications to a

plan only increases its complexity, not its transparency. The district’s internal 2016-2017

“Assignment Rule Book” was nearly 100 pages long, single spaced. No number of rules, or

clarifying clauses change the foundational challenge that undermines choice: there are not

enough high-quality seats or high-quality schools for all students, no matter how you define high-

quality. Part of the challenge of fixing the enduring problem of racially and class segregated

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schools it that it requires political will, financial investment, and a common interest in serving all

children. For these reasons, this has never been realized. There is no solution that simultaneously

allows for complete choice, low cost, and high equity outcomes in school assignment. Without

enough high-quality or even desired schools, this is an impossibility even before accounting for

individual preferences, logistics, geographies, or the educational program offerings of a

particular school. While in the field, I once came across a district document that illustrated these

impossibilities. The document had a simple, blocky graphic that mapped out the relationship

between cost and equity: to increase equity, one has to be willing to invest accordingly.

We already see this in practice. The closer any district gets to neighborhood schools in its

policies, the more money a district can save, but the more segregated a district will be. This

solution would be the simplest (logistically, not politically) and most cost-effective approach,

one that could save Boston over $100 million dollars or more than ten percent of its total budget.

However, in a climate of fiscal disinvestment, charter expansion, and the creeping dominance of

privatization, there is no guarantee (and I would argue, even expectation) that the amount of

money saved on transportation would ever amount in a similarly proportional (or even a large)

investment in schools.

The history of public schools in America is almost exclusively a story of segregated

schools, either as a result of neighborhood schools which have always been the most common

model, or schools of choice. The first “choice” schools in the United States did not emerge until

after the 1954 Brown v Board ruling that racially separate schools were inherently unequal, and

these were voucher models that “provided white students in Virginia public funds to attend

private academies in order to avoid attending public schools with Blacks” (Lowe, 1995, p. 192).

Other “freedom-of-choice” plans operated for a few years in the southern U.S. and sustained

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“constitutionally condemned dual school systems” (Bell, 2009:80). Moore asserts that “quite

obviously, there exists no historically or legally supported right to be free from racism in

education for students of color” (2008, p. 12); the question of integration is therefore not a

question of school assignment models, but of inequitable investment, design, and willingness to

educate students of color.

The other option is to shift back to robust desegregation efforts immediately following

Brown v Board. These were expensive, fraught, but did begin to integrate schools. Unfortunately,

many of the most effective strategies have been rolled back by the courts (Ayscue et al., 2018;

Linn & Welner, 2007). Regardless, even within the bounds of the law, the more controlled the

school choice system is, the less likely school placements will be determined by individual

parent choices and the more expensive it will be to facilitate both the bussing of children and the

bureaucratic oversight. Even without high success rates in increasing integration in Boston, the

district already spends a higher proportion of its budget.

What several years following Boston’s school choice and assignment has made me

wonder, is given all of this investment in this illusory and paradoxical model of compulsory

choice, how many students currently attend the equivalent of their neighborhood school in

Boston? Given the current policy’s cost, complexity, and confusion for all families, perhaps that

money could be better invested in those students who need more access, or better yet, in

investing in the development of schools of quality for all families. The most recent equity audit

of the Home-Based Assignment Plan began to examine important questions comparing it to the

former zone policy, such as: did student travel times decrease? Or, how much competition do

students from particular neighborhoods have for high-quality seats? However, it is also important

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to measure the proportion of students (by neighborhood and subgroup) who already go to

neighborhood schools.

Do certain neighborhoods, or are particular subgroups (e.g. white students) more likely to

have access to neighborhood schools in either model? How might this align with past and current

research on opportunity hoarding in education (Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Sattin-Bajaj & Roda,

2018)? If certain subgroups are advantaged in each policy model of assignment, as I suspect they

might be albeit in different ways, what implications might this have for how we understand

racialized capitalist exploitation in public choice systems? Future research should take up this

question, and examine the price that districts are willing to (and currently) pay for the illusion of

choice, both with regards to administrative burden as discussed in chapter four and also in

explicit fiscal expenditures.

RECOMMENDATIONS

As a critical scholar, I believe that racism is ordinary, transformative, and enduring.

However, I am also committed to working to eliminate racial oppression. In particular, given my

interest in studying the mundane ways and spaces that white supremacy operates, many of my

recommendations exist within these bureaucratic weeds. Just as I have argued that institutions

are powerful forces that shape inequalities, I also believe in their potential to mitigate them. My

recommendations are therefore often very explicit, detailed, recommendations for the Boston

Public Schools staff (or other districts) to take up. However, these recommendations extend to

other broader bureaucratic systems as well. I begin with recognition of the progress that the

district has made already since the completion of my fieldwork, and then continue to comment

on several shifts that would help the existing system better mitigate the inequities identified by

this project.

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District Progress

Since the completion of this research in the fall of 2017, the district has already taken

several important steps to address the inequities in their system. Some have been of their own

design, and some were the result of explicit collaboration following my data collection and

analysis. A brief list of some of the changes, are:

• Revised choice lists and choice guides (Appendix A)

• Revised newspaper information guide with key to explain choice lists (Appendix B)

• Introduction of the word “Priority” in Round 1 advertisements

• Subtitles for registration informational video in all 10 district languages

• Development of a document production/revision timeline for all external communications

• Adaption of survey into workflow allowing for in-department analysis of inequities

While many of the changes are around language, clarity, and distribution of information,

particularly as it relates to bridging information gaps before parents arrive at the center, these are

critical and necessary steps nonetheless.

Integrate the White Line

Chapter two showed how participating in pre-registration decreased the amount of time

that parents had to spend in centers and increased staff’s perceptions of those families. It also

was highly stratified by race, class, and English-language status. The district should prioritize the

translation of the resource immediately before another choice season excludes families on the

basis of language/nationality, in violation of both the current Department of Justice agreement

and the 14th amendment (U.S. Department of Justice, 2012). Additionally, given that the district

already provides informational outreach in the late summer and early fall to families, non-profits,

and community organizations, this could be an opportunity to also expand the types of families

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who know about and therefore are able to use the pre-registration resource. This would

simultaneously expedite more families in the process and decrease the information gaps between

families who know and make their school choices before arriving and those who do not.

Redefine and Redistribute Choice List Logics

As the policy currently stands, choice lists are determined based on a concept of

providing each family with all schools within a mile, all citywide options, and additional schools

of high-quality if needed (see Appendix B). However, this produces an equitable floor, or

minimum number of quality schools for all families. Because there is no cap on the number of

quality schools or seats that a family has access to, the gap between lists can be cavernous

(Levinson, 2015). As the district wrestles with its shifting definitions of quality and attempts to

assuage school leaders through these shifts through the use of “hold harmless” provisions that

artificially inflate rankings, the artificiality and uselessness of these tiers has become more and

more explicit.

If the goal of tiering is to distribute quality, as defined by test scores, more equitably

across the district, there are other implementation plans that could do this using the current

algorithm. For example, rather than make unique programs (such as bilingual or Horace Mann

charter schools citywide), the top tiered schools could be made into “citywide” offerings. While

this would also cost more as the high-quality schools are not evenly distributed across the city,

this would democratize access in a way that no other controlled choice model has. While the old

zone model allowed for this to some extent, at that time, students who were within a “walk-zone”

were given priority and/or had seats reserved for them during assignment. Without quality

schools close to home for all families, democratizing access to all tier one schools would

minimize the opportunity hoarding of quality by certain communities.

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Use Parent Preferences to Counsel Families

Another tension in the process is the assertion that all schools are quality schools (when

they are not) but the reality that families do value different school characteristics when making

their school choices. The family survey (n=1776) offered over a dozen options for families to

select, and both the mean and median number of preferences that parents selected was four.

Given that the district now integrates this survey question into their intake procedure, this could

be a strategic, efficient, and meaningful way to counsel families who are making their school

choices for the first time in the Welcome Centers. Additionally, many of the categories that

families most often identified as important to them are already on the choice form. These include

school start and end times (60%); close to home (72%); academic performance as measured by

MCAS (65%). The only two options that were highly selected but not on the choice form are the

school’s before and after school programming (48%) which could be assessed using other district

information and the school’s “reputation” (61%) which although subjective, could be

approximated with more information on each school. This approach would allow staff the

flexibility to counsel families on schools of best fit for families, without the same amorphous

liability of determining what is a “good” or “bad” school.

FUTURE RESEARCH

Diversifying Research on “Choosers”

To be sure, this dissertation does not focus primarily on the voices of families who have

to, by virtue of the required system of choice, participate in this complex system. Instead, it is at

its core an analysis of school choice from the point of view of the staff who implement it. While

designing this study, I carefully considered my methods with attention to the question: “Who’s

story am I able to tell?” As a monolingual English-speaking individual, already my own

190

limitations would exclude a large (and already regularly excluded) sample of families. This

project therefore focuses on staff in part because their multilingual capacity allowed me to begin

to see what barriers are typically invisible to researchers like myself. While limited to staff

interpretations of family needs, this research has begun to open the black box(es) of what this

process is like for a range of families rather than a select few.

However, this is not to say that I only looked to staff perceptions. I complemented my

interview data from staff with ethnographic observations of both staff and families, as well as a

family survey, these are no substitution from a more systematic examination of how families

navigate the process, how they feel while doing so, and what their concerns, challenges, and

hopes are in the process. Unfortunately, the survey was disproportionately completed by English-

speaking families in the district, despite its availability in all ten district languages, and therefore

likely overrepresents these linguistically privileged33 families despite capturing a range of

experiences. Participant observation was also important to see families engage in various stages

of the process, but I only engaged with families at times when they were idly waiting: I did not

interrupt staff/family conversations, parents filling out paperwork, or even parents exploring

resources to determine their school choices. Further, my interactions were also limited to

informal conversations and limited by my lack of language capacity. While staff was willing to

translate some questions for me, it was important that I did not slow down the already long

process, and I know that any translation is at least one step removed from a guardians’ intended

narrative.

Therefore, much more research is needed to engage directly with the experiences of

families who are navigating compulsory choice systems. In particular, attention needs to be paid

33 With regards to both English speaking status and overall literacy levels in any language.

191

to geographic, ethno-racial, immigration, linguistic, class, and gendered differences of those

guardians engaged in school choice processes. Investigation into one particular group alone will

not speak to the complexity of diverse school choice systems, nor can it capture the varied

experiences of these different communities and families. Without intentional sampling and

qualitative research in these different communities, scholarship risks reifying assumptions of

which parents are engaged and which parents participate in choice and why that is the case.

The Enrollment to School Closure Pipeline

My time in the field accidentally coincided with a school closure. School closures can

sometimes be a simultaneous combination of trauma, logistics, and even necessity for cash-

strapped struggling districts. School closures have been studied in many ways, ranging from their

relationship with school to prison pipelines, the simultaneous chronic disinvestment and

privatization in education, and racial inequalities more broadly. However, less is known about

how school closures are linked to the enrollment and assignment processes. As district funding is

often linked with student enrollment, and school closures are often of under enrolled schools

themselves, more research is needed to understand the role of district practices, processes, and

policies related to school choice and assignment that inform the conditions in years prior to

announcement of school closures.

School closures also produce educational refugees, or students who are displaced by the

policy decision to close a school. Logically, those students need to somehow find new schools to

attend. In the beginning of my time in the field I observed Welcome Center staff for over one

hundred hours in make-shift registration sites, at door-knocking outreach events, and at

information events beyond the scope of their already grueling schedules. The additional labor

(both physical and emotional) of these staff is largely invisible to both the public and to

192

researchers. However, more is needed to understand staff perspectives on this emotional dirty

work of school closings, as well as the broader system-costs of closures. From the student/family

perspective, more research is also needed to understand what conditions, if any, mitigate the

damage of school closings on their students’ educational trajectories. If school closings are going

to continue as districts attempt to reconcile shifting demographics, limited resources, and the

intensification of school choice, what practices and policies might increase the number of

students who gain access to higher-performing schools or other indicators that predict important

individual outcomes? These projects could be mixed-methods in design and use archival research

including district documents and newspaper reports, statistical and spatial analyses of school

demographics, assignment, and achievement data, and interviews with key stakeholders

including district staff, community members, and school staff.

193

APPENDIX A: Family School Choice Guide (2017)

Understanding Your School Choice Form

Thank you for your interest in Boston Public Schools. This guide will help you understand your school choice form. If you need additional information about a school, registration specialists are happy to show you each school’s profile on our website, www.DiscoverBPS.org, or provide you with a printed copy of the DiscoverBPS guide.

Please note:

● All schools on your choice list are sorted by a measure of quality where Tier 1 is the highest quality, and then by distance from home.

● For English Learners, district recommended programs appear first and are labeled with a letter “R”.

School Name and Program These are the schools and programs available to you. There can be multiple programs within a school and within a grade, such as general education, advanced work class, dual language, and more. You may make as many school/program choices as are available. Due to the unique language, special education, and academic needs of your child, you may have one or more program choices for a school. Please note that all programs are subject to change. Distance and Transportation This section displays the distance of the school from your current address and what transportation, if any, is provided by the school district. Transportation provided by the district includes buses and T-Passes depending on grade level. Typically, all schools within one mile of your home do not have transportation provided (unless labeled otherwise). School Quality Your choice form has two different measures of school quality. In both measures, schools with a number 1 are the highest performing schools. For additional measures of quality, including input from parents, students, and schools, you can view your customized School Quality Report on www.DiscoverBPS.org. District Tier is based on two years of standardized test data from 2013 and 2014. The District Tier is an indicator of school quality that includes student growth, proficiency, and family engagement. Tier 1 is the best rating and Tier 4 is the lowest rating. DESE Level is calculated by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and is based on the last four years of test data. Level 1 is highest performing and Level 5 is lowest performing. Level 5 schools have been taken over by the state due to academic performance. Additional Requirements Some schools have additional requirements for admission aside from ranking them on this choice form. If you choose a school with additional admission requirements, you may need to submit other application materials to the school in order to indicate your interest in that school. School Hours Listed school hours are for the regular school day and do not include any before and/or after school programs that may be available at the school. Please see www.DiscoverBPS.org or contact the schools to learn more about additional program offerings.

Finally, consider what is important to your family. This may include attending a school close to home, academic performance, availability of before and after school programs, transportation eligibility, athletic programs, dress code, and more.

194

APPENDIX B: Home-Based Key Graphic (2018)

School Assignment Policy

7BostonPublicSchools.org/welcomeservices

BPS has a Home-Based student assignment policy to assign K0 through grade 8 students. All of our high schools remain citywide options for all students.The Home-Based plan uses a student’s home as the starting point.BPS offers a customized list of school choices to ensure that every family has access to high-quality schools, no matter where they live. Every family has a choice of at least six schools; most will have between 10 and 14 choices. English Learners and Special Education students may have modifications to their choice list depending on their individual needs. See page 13 for details.

The list includes:{{ Every school within a one-mile radius of the home

{{ As needed, nearby, high-quality options

{{ Specific program offerings for the grade of the child, such as a bilingual program, a K0 program, citywide options, regional options, and/or an Advanced Work Class (AWC) program

{{ School determined by earlier policies, such as a school that changed building locations

Students who apply during priority registration have the best chance of assignment to their top schools. The Home-Based plan uses an algorithm, similar to a lottery, to determine assignment based on both a random number and a series of priorities (see page 8 for details). As a result, we cannot guarantee an applicant will be assigned to one of his or her top choices. Also, due to limited numbers of seats, we cannot guarantee assignment for K0 or K1.

Home-Based KeyExample for K2 student living at 2300 Washington Street, Roxbury

{Schools within 1 mile{Additional high-quality options{Citywide options{Closest school for early learners (EEC/ELC){Other

195

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