About.

My book, The Color of Homeschooling (NYU Press 2023), draws on in-depth interviews to compare the schooling choices of 96 Black and white class advantaged mothers living in the Northeastern United States. Half of each group teaches their children at home and half send their children to non-homeschools. School choice, which places the responsibility of selection on individual families, is central to contemporary U.S. education debates. Yet homeschooling, an option that transfers labor from schools to home, is often overlooked. My research offers a new frame for understanding school choice by bringing homeschoolers into the conversation. Across school types, women’s narratives reflect drawing on their class resources to the intensive work of navigating schooling options, while the meaning and experience of this work are shaped by race. I have an article published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity from the research that shows Black class-advantaged mothers explain choices meant to protect their children from racial discrimination experienced in schools. White class-advantaged mothers worry about schools not catering to their child’s academic or behavioral needs, while the process is imbued with racial meaning. Across races, mothers explain picking up the slack when schools “fail” their child. This pushes these highly educated women out of paid employment and into unpaid caregiving positions, what I call a racialized insecurity shift to highlight the intersections of race, gender, and class in how families navigate school choice. I received generous funding for this project through the Center for Research on Families’ Dissertation Fellowship and the Graduate School’s Dissertation Grant at the University of Massachusetts. The project was also a semi-finalist for the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Program through the National Academy of Education.