LEARN MORE
about our project's topic, goals, and plans for data confidentiality.
PROJECT GOALS
​
We are proposing a study to learn about the experiences of parents in Philadelphia as they navigate different types of schools and different geographic spaces in which those schools are located. In particular, we would like to focus on lifting up the voices of people who are otherwise often left out of the scholarly literature. This study serves to answer two questions that are crucial to understanding how schools should think about school choice and disaster response, two areas that will be critical for education reform over the next few years: (1) what does it mean to attend school outside of your home neighborhood and (2) how are parents from different walks of life experiencing their child’s schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic?
BACKGROUND
​
Where children go to school has historically been closely linked to where they live. Over the last 30 years, however, that link has been weakened by the expansion of all kinds of school choice programs, including charter schools, magnet schools, and private school voucher programs. In Philadelphia, roughly 70% of children attend a school that is not their assigned neighborhood school. Given that so many families are leaving their neighborhood to go to school, it is important for us to understand the relationship between neighborhoods and schools.
Different types of schools respond differently to challenges. As the world experiences the largest disruption to education in modern history as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, those differences have been magnified. School districts in cities like Philadelphia were unprepared to stop in-person education and transition to distance learning, and as a result, students in those districts have received an uneven and inefficient education since the schools closed in mid-March. This study will qualitatively examine the differences in the experiences of private and public school parents during COVID-19. As we move forward and begin to imagine what education will look like in a post-coronavirus world, these qualitative experiences will become increasingly important for informing the responses of schools to large-scale disasters.
​
DATA PRIVACY
​
Only our small team of researchers and advisors will have access to the raw data we collect. After transcribing our interviews, we will aggregate, de-identify, and analyze all of our data. It will then be used as evidence for the conclusions we draw in our senior thesis papers. However, we hope that by collecting these stories, our impact will reach beyond our senior theses. As such, the anonymized data may be used to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals. With these stories in mind, we also intend to develop a set of recommendations to send to the University of Pennsylvania or the School Board of the School District of Philadelphia.
​
​
​
This study is sponsored by
