Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
Hall, Todd, Chantal Hailey, Jeremy Prim, Janeria Easley. Racial Disparities and Black Parents’ School Preferences: Evidence from a Survey Experiment. The Urban Review. (Forthcoming)
Nearly half of Black parents have access to public school choice, but choice may not provide equitable and supportive school environments. Qualitative research documents Black parents worries that majority-White schools with more resources and higher test scores may over-discipline, underestimate, and exclude their children. Yet large-scale studies rarely examine what Black families desire in potential schools, including how they navigate potential tradeoffs between high school quality and denigrating school racial climates. This survey experiment examines the extent to which test score gaps and suspension gaps between Black students and their non-Black peers deter Black parents from choosing schools with higher overall test scores and lower overall suspension rates. We randomly assign a large, national sample of Black parents (N = 1,677) to examine a school profile vignette where the school has overall high academic achievement and low suspensions rates but includes either one, both, or neither academic and discipline gaps to assess how test score and suspension disparities affect Black parents’ school preferences and perceptions. We find that racial disparities in student discipline and academic outcomes, on average, diminish Black families’ desires to enroll in high-achievement schools and their perceptions of student belonging. These findings align with qualitative research showing that well-resourced, high-achieving schools are less appealing to Black families when they marginalize Black students and that schools’ unequal punishment of Black students shapes Black parents’ evaluations of potential educational spaces.
Chantal A. Hailey and Brittany Murray. Disentangling the Threat: Experimental Evidence on White Parents’ Racialized Perceptions of Multiple Dimensions School Safety. Socius.
Parents cite concerns about safety when making school choice decisions; however, conceptions of school safety are both ambiguous and racialized. This paper provides experimental evidence on the effect of school racial composition on parents’ perceptions of multiple dimensions of safety: socio-emotional, violence, biological, and school order. Using a survey experiment where respondents examine hypothetical school profiles with randomly varied school characteristics such as demographics and school quality, we find that White parents overall, across income and political spectra, and with differing endorsements of racial stereotypes rate schools with predominantly Black, Latino, and Asian populations as socio-emotionally unsafe, predominantly Black and Latine schools as violent and disorderly, and predominantly Black schools as biologically hazardous. Results illuminate how these racialized perceptions of multiple dimensions of school safety reinforce stigmatizing narratives of racialized schools that serve to exacerbate school segregation and the uneven distribution of educational resources across schools.
Chantal A. Hailey. Choosing Schools, Choosing Safety: How Multiple Dimensions of Safety Shape School Choices. AERA Open.
American Sociological Association Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility: Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award, 2018
School choice programs have grown substantially over the past 30 years, enabling families to make school selections unbounded by their residential locations. While studies document families’ stated preferences for school safety, few quantitatively and comprehensively examine which safety components associate with families’ actual school choices. Leveraging New York City high school applications, I find that families factor multiple dimensions of safety into their school choices. Independent of schools’ academic, demographic, and geographic characteristics, families screen out schools with higher neighborhood and school violence and disorder; and metal detectors in the initial elimination phase of their decisions, and prefer schools in lower violence neighborhoods in the subsequent, more detailed decision-making phase. Families’ choices suggest variation in safety priorities by race and academic background. White, Asian, and higher-achieving students prioritize protection from neighborhood and school violence; Latine and Black students particularly prioritize lower school disorder; and White students ranked schools with metal detectors lower.
Chantal A. Hailey. Racial prisms: experimental evidence on families’ race-based evaluations of school safety. Social Forces.
Racial segregation is an enduring social reality in the United States. Since safety is central to residential and educational decisions, one explanation is, when choosing neighborhoods and schools, individuals use racial composition to signal safety. However, few studies have focused on race-based perceptions of school safety. To examine racialized school safety beliefs, I leverage an original survey experiment with 995 White, Asian, Latine, and Black eighth-grade parents and students. Respondents examined school profiles with randomly varied racial compositions, school and neighborhood safety ratings, metal detector presence, and graduation rates. Among Whites, Asians, and Latines, school racial composition shapes their beliefs about school safety, even when schools have identical safety ratings and security measures. White and Asian respondents believed that Black and Latine schools were less safe than White schools; Latine respondents believed that Black schools were less safe than all other schools; and school racial composition did not influence Black respondents’ beliefs about school safety. Non-Black respondents, with stronger anti-Black and anti-Latine personal racial biases and more knowledge of cultural stereotypes of Black violence, were more likely to express race-based beliefs about school safety. Non-Black respondents’ anti-Black perceptions of school safety contributed to their avoidance of Black schools. These findings suggest that anti-Blackness undergirds the public imagination of physical spaces and has implications for understanding contemporary segregation, discrimination, and racial inequality.
Murray, Brittany and Chantal A. Hailey. Missing the Forest for the Trees: Toward a Networked Racial Analysis of White Parents in Education Policy and Research . Educational Researcher.
Education policy research on White parent opportunity hoarding overlooks whiteness studies and focuses on individual-level behaviors. In this article, we advance a racial network analysis of White parent collectives to better understand how White parents reinforce racial hierarchies in schools.
Hailey, Chantal A., Brittany Murray, Rachel Boggs, Jalisa Broussard, Milani Flores. 2023. Unmasking racial avoidance: Experimental evidence on parental school choice and public health policies during the Covid-19 pandemic. Social Science and Medicine.
COVID-19 drastically changed the school choice landscape as families considered schools with varying public health protocols as well as academic and demographic characteristics. Our understanding of families’ preferences during the pandemic is limited, however, because it primarily derives from surveys asking parents about a single school characteristic. We aimed to understand how families’ preferences for schools’ racial composition and public health policies may interdepend. We conducted an original school choice survey experiment with U.S. White parents in August 2021. Parents indicated their willingness to enroll their student in hypothetical schools with experimentally randomized school quality ratings, racial and socioeconomic demographics, and COVID mitigation strategies (i.e. instructional modalities, mask and vaccination mandates). We find novel causal evidence that White parents’ preferences for schools’ racial demographics and public health policies are interdependent. Among otherwise similar schools, parents expressed stronger preferences to avoid Black, Latinx, and Asian schools when there were fewer COVID mitigation policies. Relatedly, parents required more stringent COVID protocols for their children to attend predominantly Black, Latinx, and Asian schools while showing no preferences for COVID policies among predominantly White schools. The interdependence of preferred racial demographics and public health polices was amplified among White parents who held stigmatizing beliefs about Asian populations carrying the COVID virus and pro-White sentiments. Although Democrats expressed stronger preferences for schools with more COVID mitigation strategies than Republicans, for White parents across the political spectrum school racial composition and COVID mitigation preferences interdepended. This study suggests families may leverage flexible student assignment policies and schools of choice to enroll in or avoid schools based on both preferred public health policies and racial demographics. Districts should consider how adopting strong public health policies during infectious disease outbreaks may help mitigate hardened racial avoidance and school racial segregation.
Hailey, Chantal A. 2022. “Racial Preferences for Schools: Evidence from a Survey Experiment with White, Black, Latinx, and Asian Parents and Students” Sociology of Education
Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with NYC families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects White, Black, Latinx, and Asian parents’ and students’ willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics potentially correlated with race, White and Asian families preferred White schools over Black and Latinx schools; Latinx families preferred Latinx schools over Black schools; and Black families preferred Black schools over White schools. Results, importantly, demonstrate that racial composition has larger effects on White and Latinx parents’ preferences compared to White and Latinx students and smaller effects on Black parents compared to Black students. To ensure results were not an artifact of experimental conditions, I validate findings using administrative data on NYC families’ actual school choices in 2013. Both analyses establish that families express heterogenous racialized school preferences.
Hailey, Chantal A. 2022. “Racialized Perceptions of Anticipated School Belonging” Educational Policy
Families indicate that fit and safety are priorities in school selections. It is not clear, however, whether school racial composition shapes families’ perceptions of anticipated school belonging. Using a survey experiment with students and parents actively choosing NYC schools, I find that families expressed racialized judgments of belonging. Among schools that were otherwise similar, respondents anticipated belonging most in schools with the highest proportion of their racial group and least belongingness in schools with the lowest portions of their ingroup. Families’ race-based assessments of school quality could be a key mechanism to explain racial segregation in school choice programs.
Sattin-Bajaj, Carolyn, Jennifer Jennings, Sean Patrick Corcoran, Elizabeth Christine Baker-Smith, Chantal A. Hailey. 2018. “Surviving at the Street-Level: How Counselors’ Implementation of School Choice Policy Shapes Students’ High School Destinations.” Sociology of Education 91(1): 46–71.
Popkin, Susan, Janine Zweig, Nan Astone, Reed Jordan, Chantal A. Hailey, Leah Gordon, and Jay Silverman. 2016. “Coercive Sexual Environments: Exploring the Linkages to Mental Health in Public Housing.” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 18(1): 163-182.
Popkin, Susan, Chantal A. Hailey, Janine Zweig, Nan Astone, Reed Jordan, Leah Gordon, and Jay Silverman. 2016. “Coercive Sexual Environments: Development and Validation of a Scale.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence: 1-23.
Research Reports and Book Reviews
Hailey, Chantal A. 2018. “Book Review of Live and Let Live: Diversity, Conflict, and Community in an Integrated Neighborhood by Evelyn M. Perry.” City & Community 17:529-531.
The Urban Institute and MDRC. 2015. “Choice Neighborhoods: Baseline Conditions and Early Progress.” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: Washington, DC.
Hailey, Chantal and Priya Saxena. 2014. “HOST —Helping Families, Building Community.” Washington, DC.: Urban Institute.
The Urban Institute. 2013. “Developing Choice Neighborhoods: An Early Look at Implementation in Five Sites.” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: Washington, DC.
Popkin, Susan J., Megan Gallagher, Chantal Hailey, Elizabeth Davies, Larry Buron and Christopher Hayes. 2013. “CHA Residents and the Plan for Transformation.” Washington, DC.: Urban Institute
Buron, Larry, Christopher Hayes and Chantal Hailey. 2013. “An Improved Living Environment, but…” Washington, DC.: Urban Institute
Hailey, Chantal and Megan Gallagher. 2013. “Chronic Violence: Beyond the Developments.” Washington, DC.: Urban Institute
Popkin, Susan J., Jennifer Comey, Molly M. Scott, Elsa Falkenburger, Chantal Hailey and Amanda Mireles. 2012. “DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative: Needs Assessment and Segmentation Analysis.” Washington, DC.: Urban Institute
Hailey, Chantal. 2011. “Influences on School Choice for Relocated HOPE VI Residents” Howard University College of Arts and Science Senior Theses.
Winner, Howard University College of Arts and Science Top Social Science Senior Thesis
Hailey, Chantal. 2010. “Education of Children Relocated Through HOPE VI: Madden/Wells.” Urban Institute Academy, Class of 2010 – No. 1. Washington, DC.: Urban Institute
Hailey, Chantal. 2009. “HOPE VI: The Contribution of Community and Supportive Service Program to Residents’ Self-Sufficiency at East Capitol Dwellings.” Howard Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Scholar Journal.
Research Blogs and Magazines
Hailey, Chantal. 2013. “Helping families thrive: Lessons from Chicago’s public housing transformation.” Urban Wire, June 13, 2013.
Hailey, Chantal. 2013. Lessons from Chicago’s Public Housing Transformation. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development PD&R Edge: An Online Magazine.
Hailey, Chantal. 2013. “The Devastating Impact of Persistent Crime on Teens.” CityLab, March 14, 2013.
Chantal A. Hailey 