UC Berkeley

Research shows charter schools are more segregated by race and class than traditional public schools. I investigate an under-examined mechanism for this segregation: Charter schools project identities corresponding to parents’ race- and class-specific parenting styles and educational values. Such identities are constituted by conformity and uniqueness claims reflecting cultural logics—especially the ascendant logic of school accountability, which compels standardization despite pressures on charter schools for locally situated innovation.

To analyze these tensions, I use computational text analysis to detect emphasis on educational ideologies in the websites of all charter schools operating in 2015-16. In particular, I use Structural Topic Models to discover a range of latent themes; I then use word embeddings and dictionary methods to measure inquiry-based learning (IBL), a particularly niche-specific ideology. Finally, I implement mixed linear regression models to test the relationships between ideological emphasis and school- and district-level poverty and ethnicity. I thereby transcend methodological problems in scholarship on charter school identities by collecting contemporary, population-wide data, and by blending text analysis with hypothesis testing.

I find that the websites of schools serving white and affluent students and districts are more likely to emphasize academics (e.g., course information, IBL), while schools serving those in poverty or people of color place greater emphasis on standards, college preparation, and programs and services for the disadvantaged (e.g., nutrition, virtual learning). For IBL, precise statistical models show that these relationships are robust, even when objective measures of school quality are considered. These findings suggest charter school identities are both race- and class-specific, outlining a new mechanism by which school choice may consolidate parents by race and class—and paving the way for behavioral and longitudinal studies. This dissertation contributes to literatures on school choice, quantitative methods, and educational stratification.