Many US school districts made statements expressing commitment to racial equity after George Floyd's murder. How did they describe this commitment? What underlying assumptions about race and education do these statements reveal? Which districts made statements, and which remained silent? What do these statements tell us about organizational legitimacy and performative commitments to racial equity? My dissertation uses an original dataset to answer these questions using computational text analysis methods.

 Racial Equity Work in K-12 Schools

While research has examined how corporations and universities have approached Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) for several decades, most of this research has focused on what practices "work" in firms. But research has done less to understand the lived experiences of DEI professionals. I conducted interviews to better understand the perspectives and give voice to these professionals, particularly those who work in elite K-12 private schools in the mid-Atlantic region. This work has important implications for efforts to achieve racial equity in education given the current politicized attacks on DEI and open discussion of racism in schools.

With my co-author Emily Handsman, I have written an article describing how DEI work varies between public and private K-12 schools. We bring together sociological theories of racial ideology and inhabited institutionalism to purport one way we see this work varying across institutional sectors. This article is forthcoming at Socius.

Citation: Handsman, Emily and Bonnie Siegler. Forthcoming. “Inhabited Ideology: Diversity Ideology and Approaches to Racial Equity Across Institutional Sectors.” Socius. 

If you are a DEI Professional who is currently working or previously worked in a elite K-12 school, please email me at bonnie[dot]r[dot]siegler[at]columbia[dot]edu to learn more about participating in this study. Thank you to all who have contributed!

Survey Experiments

 With my co-author, Greer Mellon, I have conducted a set of survey experiments examining how school racial composition affects parents preferences.  We contribute to this growing field by examining anti-Asian bias in white parents preferences. Our data show that white parents in the US prefer elementary schools with fewer Asian students. White parents believe their children won't “fit in” at schools with more Asian students and are willing to make tradeoffs in academic quality to choose whiter schools. This paper adds to growing consensus that parents form school preferences based on school racial composition, driven in part by beliefs about "belonging" in schools (see Billingham and Hunt 2016, Hailey 2022, Hailey 2022, and Billingham et al. 2020), and an even stronger consensus that increasing parent school choice will not increase school racial integration. 

Citation: Mellon, Greer, and Bonnie Siegler. 2023. "New Experimental Evidence on Anti-Asian Bias in White Parents’ School Preferences." Sociology of Education 96(4): 255-274. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407231173933

Diversity and School Choice Narratives

I have also conducted interviews with parents about their experience of public school choice. This work is currently under review, so no more details can be provided at this time.