Social Construction Is Racial Construction: Examining the Target Populations in School-Choice Policies

We examine policy influencers' perceptions of the targets of school-choice policy across five states, exploring how constructions varied for White and racially minoritized families, whether policy actors conceived of the "target" of policy as the child or the parent, and how these racialized constructions varied across different types of school-choice policies.

We conducted 56 semistructured interviews in 2019 with state-level stakeholders across five states.

We found that policy actors generally viewed White families as strong and racially minoritized families as weak. However, for both groups, we found variation in whether these constructions were positive or negative and differences between students and parents. We find that social constructions are fluid, with varying, sometimes conflicting and contradictory views of racially minoritized and White parents in the same period, within the same state context. Despite the salience of race throughout social constructions of the target population, policy actors primarily used color-evasive references. In general, we found little variation in policy components at the state level.

Our work demonstrates how racialized social constructions matter for equity in school-choice policy, with implications for local, state, and federal policy and for future research.