881155

research-article2019
EPXXXX10.1177/0895904819881155Educational PolicyPotterton

Section II: Sociology of School Choice Politics and Education Markets

Educational Policy
2020, Vol. 34(1) 166­–192
Parental Accountability, © The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0895904819881155
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Market

Amanda U. Potterton1

Abstract
I introduce the concept of parental accountability by examining how parents
understand and cope with what I characterize are pressures fostered
by the long-standing public-school choice market in Arizona. Parental
accountability refers to the sensemaking, experiences, and consequences
that are related to decision-making in a school choice environment, wherein
parents’ feelings about their child’s schooling may be intense, emotionally
stressful, malleable, cyclical, and ongoing—not static. I argue that parental
accountability is a necessary concept for understanding these reforms. The
analysis, based on data collected from a study using ethnographic methods,
reveals contradictions between parents’ perceptions of their responsibilities
to public institutions and pressures to make private choices. Many parents
acknowledged that socioeconomic and racial inequities may be exacerbated
in some market-based, public-school choice systems. I show how school
choice policies and programs can place unique pressure on parents that they
experience as a distinct form of accountability.

Keywords
educational policy, equity, marketing, parent involvement, politics of
education, social context, education reform, public education, accountability,
charter schools

1University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA

Corresponding Author:
Amanda U. Potterton, Department of Educational Leadership Studies, College of Education,
University of Kentucky, 111 Dickey Hall, Lexington, KY 40506, USA.
Email: amanda.potterton@uky.edu
Potterton 167

In this article, I introduce the concept of parental accountability by exam-

ining the ways in which parents understand and cope with what I charac-
terize are pressures fostered by the long-standing public-school choice
market in Arizona. Accountability is a foundational concept for school
choice reforms (Garn & Cobb, 2008; Potterton, 2018b). Parental account-
ability refers to the sensemaking, experiences, and consequences that are
related to decision-making in a school choice environment, wherein par-
ents’ feelings about their child’s schooling may be intense, emotionally
stressful, malleable, cyclical, and ongoing—not static. I argue that paren-
tal accountability is a necessary extension and concept for understanding
these reforms. This analysis, based on data collected from a study using
ethnographic methods, reveals contradictions between parents’ percep-
tions of their responsibilities to public institutions and pressures to make
private choices. Many parents acknowledged that socioeconomic and
racial inequities may be exacerbated in some market-based, public-school
choice systems. Yet, they had to make immediate decisions for their chil-
dren which, some acknowledged, were in tension with their support for
just and equitable public schooling for the common good.
Little qualitative research has specifically examined parents’ extended
experiences with school choice in an increasingly complex accountability
environment. Individuals perceive accountability and school choice policies
in many different ways, and their interpretations are patterned by both per-
sonal and collective concerns (e.g., Ball, Bowe, & Gewirtz, 1996; Jennings,
2010). As Garn and Cobb (2008) observed, “Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’
dictates winners and losers in the educational marketplace while parents’
school-related goals for their children remain either tacit, undocumented or
both” (p. 14). Herein, I show how school choice policies and programs can
place unique pressure on parents that they experience as a distinct form of
accountability.
I first examine relevant sociological literature and then under-developed
and problematic theoretical assumptions related to parents’ participation in
facilitating an invisible hand of the education market via school choice. I also
briefly describe Garn and Cobb’s (2008) existing typology including its four
models of accountability: bureaucratic, performance, market, and profes-
sional. Next, I rely on empirical findings from interviews that were a part of
ethnographic research conducted over a nearly 2-year period in a metropoli-
tan area of Arizona, a state with long-standing school choice policies and
programs. I illustrate how parents in one district public school and in its sur-
rounding community dealt with mounting social and cultural pressures that
they faced as competition between both public and charter schools in their
neighborhood increased.
168 Educational Policy 34(1)

My findings revealed an understudied phenomenon—parental account-

ability is an important component to school choice that often trumps other
factors related to meaning- and decision-making. It is well known that par-
ents do not always follow market logic (e.g., Lubienski & Lubienski, 2014;
Schneider, Marschall, Teske, & Roch, 1998; Smith & Meier, 1995). The pres-
sures that are placed on parents in a mature education market are laden with
both faulty assumptions and contradictions related to access, individual ver-
sus public priorities, and the permanence of choice. The three research ques-
tions that guided this study are as follows:

Research Question 1: How do parents in a mature school choice market

perceive and engage with a district public school of choice and its sur-
rounding community, including its charter schools?
Research Question 2: How do parents understand school policies includ-
ing, but not limited to, school choice policies?
Research Question 3: What influences families’ school choices?

Conceptual Framework and Literature

Market Assumptions
Advocates frame school choice policies as beneficial because they create
education markets, reduce government oversight of schools, and create more
efficient education systems over the longer term (Chubb & Moe, 1990;
Friedman, 1955). When parents have the freedom to act as consumers,
schools will improve as they compete for students (Carlson, Lavery, & Witte,
2011; Chubb & Moe, 1990). On the supply side, markets release schools
from bureaucratic control, which will allow them to be nimble and competi-
tive (Friedman, 1955). Critics argue that school choice creates winners and
losers in a commodified education system because such policies tend to favor
students and families with greater access to information and resources and
may provide incentives for schools to exclude students who require more
resources or are more difficult to teach (e.g., Lacireno-Paquet, Holyoke,
Moser, & Henig, 2002).
Thus, school choice policies may further marginalize students who live
in poverty (Lubienski, Gulosino, & Weitzel, 2009; Renzulli & Evans,
2005), students who have disabilities (Garcy, 2011), and students who are
English-language learners (Lacireno-Paquet et al., 2002), leading to
greater segregation (Orfield, Frankenberg, & Associates, 2013).
Researchers have also shown how media increasingly influences a school
choice reform climate that is often rooted in ideology or even political
Potterton 169

partisanship rather than on facts (Belfield & Levin, 2005; Henig, 2008;
Malin, Hardy, & Lubienski, 2019; Reckhow, Grossmann, & Evans, 2015).
This is important because the politics of school choice affect stakeholders
on the ground and the decisions they make (Belfield & Levin, 2005;
Reckhow et al., 2015).

The Invisible Hand of the Market

These often-polarized debates do not help us understand how individuals,
families, and community members actually negotiate this complicated land-
scape, nor do they consider the ways in which communities are shaped by
school choice policies. The notion of an invisible hand of the market (Smith,
1776/2003) suggests that, within a free market, individuals will likely pro-
duce goods that are beneficial for and desired by those around them. Yet
Stiglitz (2006) observed that

. . . the reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not
there . . . whenever there are “externalities”—where the actions of an individual
have impacts on others for which they do not pay, or for which they are not
compensated—markets will not work well . . . externalities are pervasive,
whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets—that is
always . . . some regulation is required to make markets work. Government is
needed, almost all would agree, at a minimum to enforce contracts and property
rights. The real debate today is about finding the right balance between the
market and government (and the “third” sector—governmental non-profit
organizations). Both are needed. (para. 9-12)

For market-based school choice systems like the long-standing one in

Arizona, Friedman (1955) predicted that parental choice would “. . . improve
the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of
bureaucracy” (p. 144). LeGrand (2007) also recommended an alternative
“other invisible hand” through carefully planned and competitive organiza-
tional (and private) structures.
However, neoliberal reforms aimed at privatizing educational services can
reduce equity in the public sphere because market-based behaviors create
winners and losers (e.g., Apple, 2006; Hursh, 2007). There are implications
for school choice policies that promote certain school sectors over others
without considering evidence related to the intended and unintended effects
for students, families, teachers, schools, and communities. Important social
equity and justice issues might be neglected, and risks include further segre-
gating and isolating some students and families (Verger, Steiner-Khamsi, &
Lubienski, 2017).
170 Educational Policy 34(1)

Parents Reponses to Market Accountability

Existing sociological studies that add to our knowledge and theoretical under-
standing about parents’ choice processes highlight complicated aspects of
middle- and upper-class parental choice (e.g., Altenhofen, Berends, & White,
2016; Berends, 2015; Lareau, 2014). An important body of school choice
research examines parents’ roles in school choice (e.g., Ball et al., 1996; Ball
& Vincent, 1998; Bell, 2009; Ellison & Aloe, 2019; Holme, 2002; Horvat,
2012; Lareau, Evans, & Yee, 2016; Rhodes & DeLuca, 2014). Elsewhere,
researchers have examined how parents engage (or not) in choosing schools.
For example, Lareau (2014) suggested that, although middle-class parents in
her study did rely on social networks to gather information about schools, in
many instances they did not engage in systematic research when choosing
their children’s schools, even though the decision was extremely important to
them. However, Altenhofen et al. (2016) found that families in high-income,
suburban neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado, did “do their research” (p. 1)
when choosing schools, whether they were traditional public schools or char-
ter schools. This research included checking test scores, visiting schools,
meeting with principals, and using their social networks to make decisions
(Altenhofen et al., 2016). Yet, less developed in the literature is how market
mechanisms specifically influence parents and families in their choices, and
how parents struggle through these processes (Billingham, 2015; Fong, 2019;
Kimelberg & Billingham, 2013; Posey-Maddox, McDonough, & Cucchiara,
2014; Potterton, 2018b).1

Parents’ Roles in Choosing

Other researchers have analyzed more localized effects of charter schools
“on the ground.” Studies about school choice policies’ potential for racial
exclusion and class stratification (Stambach & Becker, 2006), charter
school autonomy (Finnigan, 2007), and autonomy for teachers and admin-
istrators in private versus public schools (Glass, 1997) describe a range of
important factors affecting schools and, potentially, parents’ choices in a
school choice system. Qualitative studies investigating parental choice pro-
cesses including parents’ construction of choice sets (e.g., André-Bechely,
2005; Bell, 2009; Olson Beal & Hendry, 2012; Villavicencio, 2013) and the
effects of school choice programs on parental engagement (McGinn &
Ben-Porath, 2014) highlight tensions and conflicts between individuals and
communities. They also illustrate the primacy of education as an equitable
public good versus an individualistic private good. For example, in New
York City, parents chose charter schools based on their perceived sets of
Potterton 171

choices and access to them, and Villavicencio (2013) showed how these
choice sets were smaller among Black and Latino low-income parents than
they were for White and Asian families.
Likewise, parents’ experiences of choosing schools in a West Coast urban
school district revealed institutionalized race and class problems with school
choice processes (André-Bechely, 2005). Advantaged families learned “the
strategy for playing the game” (André-Bechely, 2005, p. 292) when making
choices, which ultimately reproduced schooling inequalities. Similarly, while
parents in New Orleans, Louisiana, used more than standardized test scores
to decide where to enroll their children, parental engagement in school choice
processes was oriented toward individuals’ needs for specific schools, rather
than for systematic changes of public structures that might lead to decreasing
district-level stratification (Olson Beal & Hendry, 2012).
Mavrogordato and Stein (2016) used mixed methods including surveys
and case studies in charter schools to better understand choice processes for
Latino and non-Latino parents and found that, while there were similarities,
reliance on social networks and language barriers were significant points of
divergence. In another study, Mavrogordato and Harris (2017) found that cur-
rent English learners were less likely to enroll in schools outside of their
assigned, zoned ones than students who were former or never English learn-
ers. These in-depth studies, along with others presented, uncover complexi-
ties within settings that challenge simple theories related to market rationality
and the image of a mystical, invisible hand of the market that positively
moves public institutions forward. Rather, they bring to the forefront deep
concerns about equity and access.
Finally, Ball et al. (1996) suggested that, as competitive advantages are
promoted through school choice (e.g., in the forms of open enrollment and
charter schools), parents’ obligations and duties of choosing schools become
increasingly weighted, both ideologically and in practice, toward the indi-
vidual and “proactive consumer,” as “. . . education is subtlety repositioned
as a private good” (p. 110). Ball et al. (1996) explain that

Choosing a school often emerges as a confusing and complex process. In some

ways the more skilled you are the more difficult it is. The more you know about
schools the more apparent it is that no one school is perfect and that all schools
have various strengths and weaknesses. (p. 94)

This study brings these bodies of literature together to show how the con-
cept of parental accountability can be used to explain parents’ negotiations
and complicated decision-making processes that occur in, likely, any school
choice system. Furthermore, this abundant and yet separate gathering of
172 Educational Policy 34(1)

findings has implications for thinking through how parents understand and
take part in school choice in local settings, and the crucial assumption that
parents, as consumers, will facilitate the invisible hand of the market. It is
imperative to understand parents’ experiences and actions in a variety of
contexts and school choice processes, and how the studies that have been
completed might be connected by the concept of parental accountability I
propose here.

A Typology of Accountability Models

Garn and Cobb (2008) developed a typology of four models of accountability
and explain how they are all embedded in a school choice environment.
These are bureaucratic, performance, market, and professional. Bureaucratic
accountability includes rules and norms that ensure compliance and monitor-
ing of systems, and in ways that are legal and, ideally, democratic. Performance
accountability refers to the ways in which schools are ranked through various
assessment measures. Market accountability refers to the aspect of choosing
schools, and the resulting viability of or closure or opening of schools.
Finally, professional accountability assumes that practitioners are experts in
their fields and, thus, can maintain responsible and beneficial self-monitoring
and decision-making for the overall success of students and schools. These
four models were all indeed present and in various, overlapping ways in
Arizona’s school choice market (see Potterton, 2018b). In this study, I extend
their typology by documenting a fifth form of accountability, parental
accountability, or the pressure that is placed on parents in school systems
where one or more forms of school choice are operating simultaneously.

Data and Methodology

Site Context
This study focuses on a subset of interviews from a larger qualitative study
that used ethnographic methods (e.g., Potterton, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2019).
Interviewees were members within the Southwest Learning Site school
(hereafter SLS),2 which is a district-run public school in the Desert Public
School System (DPSS), and its surrounding community. The school’s com-
munity consists of parents with children attending the school as well as others
who share deep commitments to the school and its community by maintain-
ing active affiliations with it even after their formal connections to the school
have ended. For example, members taking part in school events include some
alumni, retired teachers, and, particularly relevant to this study, some parents
Potterton 173

whose children used to attend the school but have moved to competing char-
ter schools.
Arizona’s intra- and inter-district open enrollment policies have created a
situation wherein students and families may choose schools and take part in
public activities both inside and/or outside of the school districts and physical
neighborhoods in which they live (Arizona Revised Statutes [ARS] § 15-816).
The policies have created open flows of students into and out of adjacent
districts (Powers, Topper, & Potterton, 2019; Powers, Topper, & Silver,
2012), and, as such, a significant number of students from other districts
attend SLS or nearby charter schools. As a result, Arizona’s open enrollment
policies blur neighborhood boundaries that used to be delineated by school
attendance boundaries.
The community I studied is unique because it contained a number of
groups organizing around a public school that is largely, though not entirely,
middle-class. Many parents were knowledgeable about local, state, and
national education policies, and especially Arizona’s policies (see, as exam-
ples, ARS § 15-181; ARS § 15-816; ARS § 15-2,402; ARS § 43-1089, for
policies related to charter schools, open enrollment, tax credit donation pro-
grams, and empowerment scholarship accounts). SLS had experienced an
increased entrance of low-income families when the school’s administration
sought to diversify the population through intentional bussing, and these stu-
dents were more racially and economically diverse. The school was relatively
newly designated as a Title 1 school. Its test scores and performance ranking
had also declined over the past few years.
Concurrently, two high-profile and “high-performing” charter school
organizations, or Education Management Organizations (EMOs), opened
locations near the school. Strong Establishment and Masters Group charter
schools, known for their nationally competitive academic rankings, were
both situated close to the school and surrounding community. Multiple par-
ents voiced their concerns that the opening of these high-profile charter
schools was perhaps partially, if not largely, responsible for some parents’
decisions to transfer out of SLS and other nearby public schools and into
the EMO charter schools. That is, some EMOs advertised themselves as
providing private school educational experiences in a free public charter
school setting.
During my initial time in the field, some community members were
working to pass a school bond measure. Voters had rejected similar initia-
tives in previous years, which suggested declining support among voters
for public schools. Thus, the school provided a rich setting for an analysis
of school choice reforms as they were experienced in a community setting
with many families who had generous levels of social, cultural, political,
174 Educational Policy 34(1)

and economic capital. Knowing this, I conducted participant observation

as a researcher who was attentive to how these forms of capital might pos-
sibly create and reproduce advantages (Ball, 1993; Bourdieu, 1977;
Lareau, 2000).

Semi-Structured Interviews
As part of the larger study, I conducted and analyzed 37 interviews with 35
parent participants (see Table 1).3 During my fieldwork, I considered indi-
viduals to be potential participants if they were parents at SLS or if they were
engaged in the larger SLS and neighborhood community in another way. For
example, some parents considered SLS as a potential school for their child,
but ultimately chose to enroll them somewhere else. Others had once enrolled
their children at SLS and subsequently moved them to a nearby charter
school. One parent chose to homeschool after great deliberation. These inter-
views are the focus of this analysis. Interviews were transcribed “verbatim”
(Maxwell, 2013, p. 126) in most cases except for some side conversations
that were important for building trust and increasing interviewees’ comfort
levels but were not related to the study. I employed inductive snowball sam-
pling (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014), as participants recommended
other parents and as I met more stakeholders.
Parents’ affiliations overlapped. I show this in Table 1 by noting if
parents: (a) were affiliated with SLS, either currently or previously when
their children were younger; and (b) were self-identified Spanish-speaking
parents. Mark was the only interviewee who did not have children in or
near the DPSS. Rather, he ran an organization for parents to help them
advocate for their children’s needs based on his personal experiences
advocating for his children with special needs who attended schools in
another district. I interviewed Mark because a parent in the DPSS sug-
gested that I talk with him due to his advocacy work, and because he has
supported parents who were fighting for their children’s needs in some of
the study’s relevant EMOs.
Interviews lasted 2 hr on average and all except for two were in person. I
prepared a broad set of questions that I wanted to ask all participants (inter-
view questions available upon request) that were guided by my research
questions. Many conversations took an emotional turn when we discussed
respondents’ children, friendships, and their own pasts, and the challenges
they encountered when making difficult choices that affected their families. I
listened and encouraged individuals to expand on their thoughts and, in many
cases, to expand upon the feelings they openly expressed when talking about
choosing schools for their children.
Potterton 175

Table 1. Semi-Structured Interview Participants.

SLS, current Self-identified Spanish-

Participant or previous speaking parent
1 Adelina X X
2 Alejandra X X
3 Ana X X
4 Luna X X
5 Sofía X X
6 Violeta X X
7 Eleanor X
8 Ellie X
9 Grace X
10 Joan X
11 Josha X
12 Joy X
13 Lynna X
14 Marcus X
15 Marie X
16 Marsha X
17 Megan X
18 Mike X
19 Monica X
20 Nadia X
21 Robert X
22 Ron X
23 Samuel X
24 Sarah X
25 Tom X
26 Vicki X
27 Carla
28 Erica
29 John
30 Laura
31 Marissa
32 Mark
33 Matthew
34 Shannon
35 Tanya

Note. SLS = Southwest Learning Site school.

aDenotes that Josh and Lynn were interviewed twice.
176 Educational Policy 34(1)

Analysis
I used a variety of tools for coding the data, including a codebook, reflexive
writing in the form of jottings and memos (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011;
Lincoln & Guba, 1985), and first- and second-cycle coding (Miles et al.,
2014). I did not pre-develop codes, although I do not assume that researchers
are ever necessarily theory-free. My first-level codes included

accountability, agency, change, community, contradictions, cultural capital,

culture, emotions, exit, interaction and complexity of structure, culture, and
agency, leadership, market behavior, perceptions, political, process of choosing,
reasons to move schools, resistance, social capital, structure, want better or
different that I had.

In later coding cycles, I followed Miles et al.’s (2014) instructions for moving
from codes to patterns or themes, by inserting “individual codes associated
with their respective data chunks” (p. 89) into matrices and themes after find-
ing commonalities and conceptual links.
I also analyzed my data through a lens that assumes that policy construc-
tion results from a complicated interplay between structures, cultures, and
agency (Datnow, Hubbard, & Mehan, 2002), and I used this organizing frame
as an entry-point for reading and understanding my data. To more robustly
understand school choice policies and practices, rather than prioritize one or
another of these three areas and place the others in the background, I consid-
ered all three concepts to better engage the non-linear, messy, and multidirec-
tional aspects of individuals’ and groups’ cultural, political, economic, and
social lives (Datnow et al., 2002). These aspects of social life both transform
and are transformed by market-based school choice policies and practices.
Datnow et al. (2002) explain these multidirectional interactions between
structure, culture, and agency as the complex, continual co-construction of
policies built in the process of practice.
Sewell (1992) also wrote the following about the relationships between
structures, culture, and agency. Structures are

constituted by mutually sustaining cultural schemas and sets of resources that

empower and constrain social action and tend to be reproduced by that action.
Agents are empowered by structures, both by the knowledge of cultural
schemas that enables them to mobilize resources and by the access to resources
that enables them to enact schemas. . . . structure is a profoundly cultural
phenomenon, and from ordinary anthropological usage because it insists that
structure always derives from the character and distribution of resources in the
everyday world. (p. 27)
Potterton 177

The findings below are the result of my analysis that acknowledges the mul-
tidirectional interactions between structure, culture, and agency, and the
understanding that agents’ actions are influenced by without being strictly
determined by structures, but that those structures and actions are deeply
dependent upon and reinforced by the inequitable flow of resources (Datnow
et al., 2002; Sewell, 1992).

Findings
Parental Accountability: An Important Dimension of School
Choice
Parents at SLS and in its surrounding community dealt with mounting social
and cultural pressures as competition between both public and charter schools
in their neighborhood increased. Many experienced what I describe as paren-
tal accountability concerns that proved to be an important component of their
school choice experiences. Furthermore, these concerns, which were related
to fears about making a potentially bad or wrong social and emotional choice
for their children often, but not always, trumped other factors related to
meaning- and decision-making such as schools’ rankings and student achieve-
ment results. The findings and examples provided here reveal an understud-
ied phenomenon that shows how the pressures that were placed on parents in
a mature education market were, at least in this setting, laden with contradic-
tions related to access and school cultures, individual versus public priorities,
and the permanence of choice. The parents’ experiences highlighted the fra-
gility of public-school institutions and the instability of parental choice.

Parental Pressures, School Cultures, and Students’ Voice

As parents were choosing schools for their children, and as they searched for
the best schools, they discussed what they perceived as pressures to choose
schools with the highest rankings, highest community profiles, or to, as one
parent said, choose what is currently “trendy.” According to some parents, such
a decision could potentially mean that children ultimately were placed in an
environment that may or may not be socially and emotionally healthy for them,
or in places that might lead them to have narrowly focused learning experi-
ences. Parents’ efforts to choose the best schools for their children had the
potential, for some, to place unjustifiable stress on students in the process.
Other parents felt a deep sense of accountability and responsibility to pro-
vide their children with better opportunities than the ones they had. For
example, one father’s emotional description of schools being a place where
178 Educational Policy 34(1)

children should feel safe and free to “be themselves” was also evident in his
description of his own experiences in high school. He connected his experi-
ences to what he saw as a need to provide school spaces for young adults to
feel included. In choosing schools for his daughter, he was directly affected
by these experiences and he felt a great responsibility to provide a safe space
for her. He even thought that a new “culture” of schooling, including charter
schools like the one where his wife worked, could be helping with this, too:

I mean, everyday in high school, every single day, I was either pushed around
by somebody, or I was called a [derogatory name], because I pierced my ears,
and dyed my hair and wore all black. . . . I’m not kidding you, it was every
single day. Because I didn’t walk the line that other kids thought you were
supposed to walk, I was considered this crazy freak. We would walk into stores,
into a department store, and people would follow us like we were criminals. I
mean, it was a different culture, but I think that, because of people like us
becoming adults and seeing a need and working toward things . . . I mean I look
at things like people accepting people who are covered in tattoos now and not
blinking, people having dyed hair . . . a lot of times people don’t even notice,
they don’t pay attention to it anymore because it is becoming engrained in
culture. And I don’t wanna sound conceited about it, but I think that my
generation of people who grew up like me . . . who were constantly abused,
we’re like, “That’s stupid. People can just be what they wanna be,” and schools
like the one my wife works at are creating a culture where the kids . . . can go
somewhere where they can feel included.

For him, schools offering a safe and healthy culture was both a priority and
responsibility. This was in direct tension with his strong view that charter
schools should not aim to replace or compete with district public schools.
Other parents also spoke about culture. Ellie and Marcus had a child who
would be attending SLS for kindergarten. In making their choice, they talked
about their careful process, about including their preschooler in their deci-
sion-making process, and about where they agreed and disagreed about what
was important for them as parents to their child:
Marcus: I didn’t like [a nearby school] from the get-go.
Amanda: Okay, can I ask why?
Marcus: The culture.
Ellie: The parents.
Marcus: I didn’t really vibe on the cultural, “We’re great, we know we’re
great,” and that kind of thing. Academics to me is probably third our
fourth on the list. Diversity, class size, comfort, those are the things that
really matter to me because I think we’re talking about the difference
Potterton 179

between an A school and an A- school or A+ school. We’re not talking

about the difference between a school here and then one with metal
detectors. Any of the choices we made would have been good, but how
do we feel about the school and how [their child] felt when we ulti-
mately had him finally look at a couple of these schools? How did he
feel? [These] were things that we thought were of critical importance.
Ellie: This is where we differed a little bit, because I really do want the
academics and there are some resources and some extra boosts that
come with going to a wealthy school, whether we like it or not. They
just have some benefits and it will lead to other schools, etc., whereas
going from SLS where I am, honestly, a little worried about the aca-
demics and the rigor, I do think it will be harder to go to the next step
at other schools.

Ellie really liked the culture at SLS, though, and felt confident about keeping
a close eye on her son’s academic progress. Ellie said,

Whereas, the feeling at SLS where you can show up at any time, go help in the
classroom, go meet your kid, have lunch with your kid, and the fact that there’s
mixed grade classrooms, really added the component where they have to adapt
to your kid. So, whereas I don’t think the classroom is going to be necessarily
rigorous enough for my kid, because I’m just hard . . . I do have the option to
go in there and say, “You know what, I think he’s mastered that, let’s talk about
what else he can do and I’ll help you, whatever you want me to do to get him
onboard.”

Overall, Ellie and Marcus appreciated that SLS was a school that was open
and welcoming for parents, and they both felt like they had the resources
and the invitation to work alongside teachers at the school to help their son
in whatever ways were necessary. Ellie and Marcus’ choice for their son to
be a part of the decision-making process also shows that it was important to
them for his voice to be respected and heard. They had the ability and
shared resources to change schools if they wanted to or felt a need to do so
at any time.

Parental Pressures and Anxiety

Other parents faced pressures and heavy weights when choosing their chil-
dren’s schools. One parent who is also a teacher and has children who are
now adults talked with me about the strain she saw being placed on parents
with young children as they navigated choosing schools. She said,
180 Educational Policy 34(1)

I feel sorry for young parents, there’s so much pressure put them . . . I remember
reading an article several years ago where it said if you don’t pick the right
preschool, they won’t get into the right college. I hope that’s not true.

Parents with young children also talked about this emotional process of
choosing schools. This anxiety and frustration was apparent in a number of
comments from Tanya, a mother with a young daughter:

There’s always, like, an Achilles’ heel to everything. And that’s, like, the
difficulty with any choice. No matter where we go, I think I’ll have some
buyer’s remorse. [There will be a lot] of struggles at the beginning and we’ll be
like, “Oh, did we make the right choice?” Maybe that other one would’ve done
this better. This part would’ve been better there. So there’s never a perfect
thing.

This realization was also reflected in Marissa’s explanation to me that,

although there were aspects of the charter school’s curriculum at her chil-
dren’s school that she strongly disliked, she was faced with the understanding
that, if she took them out of the charter school, she might never have a place
for them again because “the waitlist on that school is impossible.”
Other parents seemed to view the stress involved with school choice as, at
times, too much to handle. As Marissa suggested, waitlists were potentially
powerful in influencing families’ decisions about their children’s schooling.
Another parent, Joan, explained her dislike of school choice lottery systems
which, according to one EMO’s website, are used to randomly place families
on a waitlist when there are more applications than places available:

And then I started looking into [a school in the area], but the drive was too far.
And I don’t like the lottery system. The lottery system, if I ever learned that
something had a lottery . . . I just didn’t want to deal with a lottery. And all my
girlfriends were doing lottery so they were all totally stressed out with the
lottery system. So that was one thing.

Joan spoke again later in our conversation about her friends whose children
were in the lotteries at various schools in the area. She said that one friend
decided to “go to Agave,” one of the nearby district public schools. She asked
a friend,

“Why are they going to Agave?” And she says, “Because they got so stressed
out not [being] given those lotteries [not being chosen off of the waitlist at the
charter school] that they just chose the school that was closest to them and they
just chose Agave.” So after a while I think parents just get stressed and choose,
just to get in. They’ve got to choose somewhere!
Potterton 181

Individual Versus Public Priorities

Most parents felt that it was very important to not only choose a good school,
but to provide a good social experience for their children, and some even to
the point of sacrificing notions of what was good for “public” schools and the
common good. For example, Shannon, a mother whose young child tried out
a number of schools in the area before she finally decided to homeschool
him, ironically talked about how important it was for her to provide the expe-
rience for her son that both she and her husband had growing up—which
included going to public schools. Few parents explicitly mentioned how,
compared with other nearby public schools, a greater number of students who
lived in poverty and received free and reduced price lunches attended SLS
since the school sought to diversify the population through intentional bus-
sing. Shannon did, when she commented on how she saw a lack of school
boundaries to be problematic for a “community.”
Schools, for her, were opportunities for families to build communities and
might be better if they were focused only upon the children who lived within
a specified border. Her thoughts about students’ access to schools via open
enrollment reveals an undercurrent of socioeconomic and cultural inequity
that occasionally surfaced. Shannon said,

I understand the concept in the beginning of what open enrollment was

supposed to do, but when you look about how [SLS] is in the [Desert]
neighborhood yet it’s a Title I school . . . and you’ve got all these people
from miles away bringing them up to this neighborhood because that’s
supposed to benefit them, but we’ve lost our sense of community now. So
everybody who goes to your school, they don’t even live in your neighborhood
. . . Why can’t we keep that money in the neighborhoods where it belongs?
That’s what makes [Agave, a local district public school in a high-income
area near to SLS] school such a good school now, is that so much family
money is still being put into that school. Why not make you move to that
neighborhood for that reason? Our property taxes are higher for that reason
and, therefore, keep the government money in the neighborhoods and in the
schools where it belongs. And then those schools are building stronger
communities around themselves as well.

Shannon’s account does not consider how schools in the different neigh-
borhoods received different amounts of money, through government fund-
ing and individual donations. Some of the schools in the district raised a
particularly large amount of money that was allocated just for their own
schools and were able to provide more resources for their students.
Although she had made the choice to homeschool her son, Shannon felt
182 Educational Policy 34(1)

pressure and a desire to also create a close-knit and unstructured social

environment for him, much like the more traditional neighborhood public
schools that she and her husband had experienced in their own childhoods.
She knew that her struggles to make connections with other families would
be ongoing, were especially complicated by her choice to homeschool, and
that she would be constantly re-evaluating and justifying to her husband,
extended family members, and even to herself, where and how her child
would attend school.

Permanence (or Impermanence) of Choice

Such impermanence and ongoing justification of choices was not uncom-
mon among the parents. Tanya’s daughter attended five schools and she
was preparing for a sixth move by the start of second grade. Tanya’s love
for her only child and her desire to ensure that she would be happy and
successful in school was obvious during my time with her. Tanya was vis-
ibly tearful when we talked about her concern for her daughter’s happiness
and her own feelings that she had failed her daughter up to this point in her
education. Quite poignantly, she said near the end of a long conversation
about the choices she was making for her daughter and her schooling, “ . .
. And this is it, maybe, that I will never be satisfied.” The quest for the best
social and cultural school setting for her daughter had become, in some
ways, an unreachable summit. Tanya was struggling with how this might
affect her elementary school-aged daughter, and she even talked about her
hopes for where she will attend college. She expressed a genuine fear of
failing her daughter because of her immediate school choice process.
Likewise, in an informal conversation during my fieldwork, one parent
commented that she thought more about her child’s preschool than her
parents ever thought about her college.
One mother who identified as a Spanish-speaker discussed difficulties
for parents who were English learners. Alejandra spoke of the “the game
of education in this country.” She felt that some parents could not take part
in school choice because they did not yet know the language well enough
to understand the process, nor did schools have adequate resources for
translations. Such frustrations and pressures for some public-school par-
ents who expressed strong love for their children and yet felt disconnected
from the public schools where their children attended were time-consum-
ing and at times burdensome. Beyond just choosing schools, the pressures
that some parents who were English learners felt to ensure that students’
grades, and schools’ state-assigned grades, were high was also very impor-
tant. Alejandra’s expectation was that it is parents’ responsibility to learn
Potterton 183

how to navigate Arizona’s public-school system and revealed how results

on standardized tests were, for her, important without question for under-
standing parents’ choices. She said, “It is important that we have good
grades in this school. If we are a C and others come from another state then
they won’t want to come here!” Alejandra’s heartfelt comment reflects an
assumption that everyone comes to Arizona already understanding that
they have the option to enroll their children in a wide range of public
schools beyond their neighborhood schools, or that they have sufficient
resources to learn “the game of education.”
One mother, whose children attended SLS when they were young,
acknowledged the inequities apparent in Arizona’s school choice policies and
programs:

But we knew about this school two years before he ever went there. We had
gone and visited and talked to teachers and got to know them, watched what
they did, before he ever went. Most people don’t have that luxury.

Carla, another mother with children in school, remembered how hard

every decision was when moving her children multiple times and to differ-
ent types of schools. Although her perspective now is that she “lamented
over every decision” yet everything worked out for one of her children,
she explained how difficult it was when she was struggling to find the right
setting for him:

So that was just a bad experience. We pulled him out in seventh grade and put
him back at [a local private school]. So he did his final year, eighth grade, back
at [the private school] again. So that poor kid had been in one, two, three, four
schools, all within two miles of each other.

Finally, it is helpful to understand that, as parents “walked the line” between

choices that were good for their families and those that were good for public
schools and society, their perceptions and actions often evolved.
Most parents were not against charter schools per se. Many, though, were
against unfettered free-market policies built on the assumption that these pro-
grams could lead to better schools for all. Most parents were not duped by
this assumption and, in fact, struggled quite openly with the problems that
they had with some school choice options in their area, especially when they
were market-oriented. Still, some moved their children multiple times across
traditional public, charter, and private schools. Indeed, unfettered choice, one
mother claimed, was also ironically moving schools toward conformity as
they fought to keep up with each other. The school choice process for parents
was more complicated than theories related to “winning” and “losing.”
184 Educational Policy 34(1)

Discussion and Implications

Parental Accountability as a Concept
Garn and Cobb’s (2008) typology of four models of accountability in a school
choice environment address bureaucratic, performance, market, and profes-
sional accountability (Garn and Cobb, 2008), and the data from this study
illuminate those four models in many ways (see also Potterton, 2018b). I
propose that the concept of parental accountability is an important extension
to their typology that can help researchers and practitioners better understand
inequities built into a neoliberal, market-based school choice system (Apple,
2006; Hursh, 2007). As can be seen above, the pressures that are placed on
parents in a mature education market are laden with both faulty assumptions
and contradictions related to access, individual versus public priorities, and
the permanence of choice.
Also, there were clear differences in how parents with relatively more
social, cultural, and economic capital and those with less participated in
school choice. On one hand, parents who had a surplus of social capital and
networking resources, as well as financial savings, were more likely able to
take part in Arizona’s school choice programs compared with those who may
not have had the same access to resources. On the other hand, some parents,
as described by Alejandra, did not have adequate resources to take part in the
system. In practice, parents who knew about tax credit programs and open
enrollment options for district public schools and charter schools were the
parents who were more likely to use them. The assumption that everyone can
freely take part in a school choice market to make the best choices for their
children is faulty at best and dangerous, as well. While some parents out-
wardly expressed their voices and choices, many were also reflexively influ-
enced by a wide array of powerful forces within the structures and culture of
their school and community.
For example, Tanya’s only child will have been enrolled in multiple differ-
ent schools by second grade and, beyond the stress that Tanya disclosed about
the high-stakes pressures of finding a school where she and her child could
feel bonded, she also felt like she had thus far failed. Beyond how parents
both internalized and externalized various notions of accountability and
choosing schools, it was not, as the dominant rhetoric in the school choice
literature and popular media debates suggests, as simple a process as finding
the “best” fit, sending your children there, and then being a part of a system
that would eventually allow the best schools to succeed and the worst to
unravel via the invisible hand of the market. In this community, school choice
was much more complicated, and parents’ choice processes did not necessar-
ily have a clear beginning or end. For some, the process was ongoing.
Potterton 185

During the 2 years while I was collecting data, I found myself thinking
that there were families, children, and even larger communities being imme-
diately and concretely affected in the present while the market-based model
unfolded in a more abstract way (e.g., Potterton, 2018c). I met other parents
whose feelings of sadness and fear about making a school choice mistake
were in many ways similar to Tanya’s. Furthermore, the experiences of some
Spanish-speaking and English-language learning mothers at SLS were
encumbered with inequities and injustices as they attempted to navigate a
complicated and confusing school choice environment.

Fragility of Public-School Institutions in a School Choice Market

Families’ choices in this study were ultimately driven by complex feelings of
anxiety, fear of making mistakes, reasoned evaluations (Altenhofen et al.,
2016), and a desire to make good choices. Parents focused on notions of com-
munity and ideas about accountability. SLS was changing, was fragile, and
existed in a high-stakes school choice environment, and parents were finding
themselves considering whether to stay or to leave (see Potterton, 2018c).
This, of course, is a premise of market-based school choice systems, and my
analysis highlights how parents experienced and felt intense notions of paren-
tal accountability in the context of competitive policies and programs.
These findings contribute to the extant literature surrounding the effects
of school choice policies and programs from the perspectives of parents.
The fragility of public schools in a market-based public-school choice sys-
tem and a better understanding of parental accountability and the intense
pressures placed upon families in a market-based public-school choice
system should not be ignored as school choice policies and programs con-
tinue to expand globally. As many of the parents in this study demon-
strated, unfettered choice had the potential to be discomforting and
unsatisfying. It even caused at least some parents to feel like maybe no
school would be good enough. Yet parents were also open to the potential
for schools of choice to offer unique opportunities for students, and most
also openly cared for traditional public schools.

Conclusion
My intention in this article was to introduce the concept of parental account-
ability as an important extension to Garn and Cobb’s (2008) framework of
accountability in school choice reform contexts. Implications for using this
concept expand beyond the Arizona context. Parents elsewhere or anywhere,
such as those with children with autism or other learning differences, may
186 Educational Policy 34(1)

face an even more unique set of parental accountability pressures and con-
cerns when they make choices, whether they be for district public, charter,
or private schools (e.g., Sherfinski, 2018; Sherfinski & Mathew, 2019). A
limitation in this analysis is that it is a qualitative study that is set in a single
local context. However, there is an important space for naturalistic general-
izations based on the analysis presented here (Stake & Trumbull, 1982). In
other words, the findings in this study may be relevant for understanding
school choice and parental accountability pressures in other contexts. Stake
and Trumbull’s (1982) position is that, although there is a dominant belief
that improved educational practice can only come from formal generaliza-
tions, research may be read about, reflected upon, argued, and vicariously
experienced by many.
Although Arizona is viewed as a school choice experiment in the “Wild
West” (Maranto & Gresham, 1999), parents and children do not necessarily
experience this as an exciting adventure, but are focused on the reality of
their children’s schooling. It is important to view local contexts, or the
“small,” with a “big” lens (Greene, 1995), to portray the individuals and
groups in this community as humanized and significant “in their integrity and
particularity” rather than as “objects of chess pieces” in a system (p. 10).
Parents’ decisions needed to be immediate and could not wait for markets to
work themselves out. And so, parents’ lines were sometime drawn and then
re-drawn—they were fragile and yet complex.
Findings from this study in Arizona are relevant for thinking through how
parents understand and take part in school choice, and they problematize our
understanding of parental accountability pressures and concerns for parents
in both marginalized and dominant socioeconomic and racial groups. They
also provide evidence for the usefulness of the concept of parental account-
ability that I proposed here. It is imperative to understand parents’ experi-
ences and actions in a variety of social class contexts, and the complicated
details involved, or not involved, in school choice processes. As school
choice policies and programs continue to grow, these types of findings are
helpful for understanding the factors driving education markets in settings
across the United States and beyond.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.
Potterton 187

ORCID iD
Amanda U. Potterton https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8020-4251

Notes
1. As children get older, their parents may be less involved in school choice deci-
sions. For example, Condliffe, Boyd, and DeLuca (2015) determined that, during
the transition to high school, youths themselves, although constrained by district
policies, academic backgrounds, peers, and family impositions, were usually the
key players in making choices about their schooling rather than their parents. See
also Phillippo (2019).
2. All names and places are pseudonyms.
3. Two individuals were interviewed twice, once at the beginning of my time in the
field and once near the completion. This is because these two parents, Josh and
Lynn, were a part of my exploratory pilot study in my initial research phases.
The opportunity to gain their perspectives over time was especially fruitful for
analyses.

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Author Biography
Amanda U. Potterton, (PhD, Educational Policy and Evaluation, Arizona State
University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership
Studies in the College of Education at the University of Kentucky. Her research
and teaching interests include the politics of school choice, educational leadership,
charter schools, privatization and public education, and the justice-related implica-
tions of these policies for students living in poverty, for students with special edu-
cation needs, and for students who are English language learners. Potterton’s cur-
rent research focuses on how public school stakeholders, including parents,
students, teachers, school leaders, and other community members, interpret and
experience school choice policies and practices in local settings.