"Your Heart Is Breaking for Them:" the Racialized and Gendered Burden of School Pushout on Families

Background and Purpose

The processes through which parents exercise agency in schools remains under examined. Particulinary how parents are able to exercise agency to prevent or stop carceral practices, most saliently school push out. To better explore these dynamics I used qualitative data from a comparative case study to answer the question, “How do parents exercise situated agency prior to, during, and after their child is transferred from a neighborhood school to an alternative school?” The analysis extends existing scholarship on the impact of carceral practices on families by identifying gendered and racialized burdens of school push out masked as voluntary transfer to alternative schools.

Methods

Findings derive from longitudinal interviews with 14 Mothers split evenly between 2 neighborhood high schools. Across the interviews, Mothers expressed that their child’s transfer from a neighborhood high school to an alternative high school impacted their family life. After investigating this finding more closely using the flexible coding method, I recognized that Mothers’ parental agency was inhibited by the gendered and racialized administrative burdens of the transfer process. In this paper, I approached this finding as a unique comparative case that could extend existing theoretical insights on school push out as well as describe unexplored dimensions of school transfer, a generalizable phenomenon.

Results

Three findings emerged: 1) Mothers’ ability to prevent school transfer was racialized and gendered, 2) the administrative burdens of the transfer process were racialized and gendered, and 3) the experience of school transfer impacted family systems. In the longitudinal interviews Mothers described pre-transfer moments, the transfer process, and life after their child transferred to an alternative school. I was able to make comparisons across two school sites and between the experiences of Black and white Mothers. These contrasts were particularly salient in the pre-transfer moments. Black Mothers described racialized gendered humiliation and disrespect by school administrators who treated their family as a problem that needed to be removed from the school via the transfer process. In contrast, white Mothers described having agency to speed up or slow down the transfer process based on what they felt was in the best interest of their individual child. While Black Mothers and white Mothers both described the gendered administrative burdens of navigating transfer to an alternative school, Black Mothers described the ways these gendered burdens intersected with racial stereotypes. Ultimately, Black Mothers described the transfer of their student to an alternative school as a form of alienation that rippled through their family system.

Conclusion and Implications

The analysis has salience beyond the interpersonal dynamics of families transferring from a neighborhood school to an alternative school. First, I add to existing knowledge of the school transfer process by framing transfer to alternative schools as a form of school pushout. Second, I extend theory on school push out by considering push out as a consequential experience for parents and families. This provides important insights for how policy can protect the educational rights of families and prevent carceral practices in education.