Good Neighborhoods, Good Schools: Race and the “Good Choices” of White Families

The community and school decisions that parents make are some of the most monumental decisions in the lives of their families. These decisions, made at critical points along the life course, not only affect the everyday lives of parents and their children but contribute significantly to a family’s life chances, their future prospects, and their identities. In a system of persistently segregated neighborhoods and vastly unequal and increasingly resegregated schooling, the stakes are high: accessing “good” schools and “good” neighborhoods is not always easy to do, and ultimately not everyone gets the chance. While these are indeed individual choices, the community and school decisions made by parents are highly structured in a context of systematic socioeconomic and educational inequality.