Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools:
Public Montessori, Fit and Conflict in the Era of School Choice
A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of
Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Mira Debs
Dissertation Advisor: Frederick Wherry
December 2016
2
Abstract
Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools:
Public Montessori, Fit and Conflict in the Era of School Choice
Mira Debs
2016
One of the fundamental social problems in America is how to create racially diverse schools.
While policy makers are slow to fix underlying housing segregation or return to busing, creating
racial diversity through school choice is widely popular across the political spectrum. How can
school choice create more racial and socioeconomic diversity, instead of increasing segregation?
School choice scholars have emphasized how structural obstacles and parental resources
combine to disadvantage poor families. Such research has given little attention to the school
choices themselves. Many urban American public schools offer educational themes to attract
families and create racially diverse schools, yet there is little research examining how parents
experience a school theme. The concept of “conflicted fit” is introduced to describe the
experience of parents who feel aligned with the school theme on some dimensions and at odds on
others. To illustrate the negotiation of fit, I examine one case where school diversity intersects
with school choice, public Montessori schools, which have been around since the 1960s and
currently number over 500 public schools nationwide. Montessori is a progressive educational
pedagogy that emphasizes letting children learn at their own pace in multi-age classrooms and
using hands-on materials developed over a century ago by Maria Montessori. Though parents
negotiate a fit at all types of schools, the process is particularly salient in Montessori schools
3
because the distinctive pedagogy acts as both a force of attraction for some parents and of
repulsion for others.
In the first study of public Montessori and school diversity, I use a multi-method approach,
including two years of participant observation at two school sites, interviews with 81 parents,
school administrators and policy makers, archival research and an original database of the
student demographics of the 703 public Montessori schools opened over the last 50 years. I
examine why public Montessori schools have such salience as sites for school diversity and
racial contestation, how parents negotiate a fit both during and after their children enroll, and the
way in which this interpretive process impacts their connection with the school community.
The findings indicate the enduring racial and socioeconomic diversity of the public Montessori
sector. In contrast to researchers who have argued that parents of color do not support
progressive, open-ended forms of education, I use archival and interview sources to detail how
parents and educators of color have repeatedly created Montessori programs as culturally
responsive education for communities of color. But some public Montessori schools also have
exclusionary enrollment practices, and several schools around the country that began with
racially diverse student populations have experienced white gentrification, leading to some
backlash in communities of color.
In addition, interviews at two public Montessori magnet schools demonstrated that parents had a
wide range of responses to the pedagogy, becoming either true believers, conflicted parents or
satisfied good-schoolers. In particular, almost half of the parents of color experienced public
Montessori as a “conflicted fit” where they valued the social learning but were concerned about
academic rigor. Rather than suggesting inherent incompatibility to particular racial groups, this
interpretive conflict reflects the need to examine the diversity of the Montessori teaching force,
the balance between Montessori fidelity and adapting to the needs of individual students and
families, and for educators to talk about education in ways that are meaningful for a variety of
audiences.
The findings complicate current discussions of school choice that have largely overlooked the
impact of the particular choices themselves. The findings suggesting the importance of
incorporating parent and student’s experience of school choices as complex, interpretive and
ongoing evaluations into broader discussions of structural obstacles and parental resources. The
project concludes with recommendations for supporting parents of racially and
socioeconomically diverse backgrounds in theme-based choice schools like Montessori.
4
5
Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori, Fit and Conflict in the Era of School
Choice
© 2016 by Mira Debs
All rights reserved.
6
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
9
Chapter 1
Introduction
13
Chapter 2
“Montessori for all?”
36
Chapter 3
Public Montessori between Social Reform and Elite
Schooling
77
Chapter 4
“Untouchable Carrots”: School Choice in Hartford
130
Chapter 5
Enrolling is believing?
155
Chapter 6
“I just need more rigor”: Conflicted Fit inside the school
Chapter 7
Building Community Among Diverse Families
Chapter 8
Conclusion
Appendix A: Best practices for Public Montessori schools to create and
maintain diverse student enrollments
189
214
239
250
251
Appendix B: Methodological Appendix
Appendix C: Interviewees
276
Appendix D: Interview Questions for parents
279
Works Cited
281
7
For Philando Castile
1983-2016
JJ Hill Montessori School, St. Paul, Minnesota
“He knew the kids and they loved him”
(E. Brown 2016)
8
Acknowledgements
I am so grateful to the parents, teachers and principals who welcomed me into their
communities and shared their stories with me, allowing me to highlight the extraordinary
diversity of their schools and the work that remains to be done to move from desegregation to
full integration (Tyson 2011). I am reminded of Robert Weiss’ invocation: “at such times, I have
felt doubly privileged: privileged to be permitted into the respondent’s life and privileged again
for the opportunity to learn.” (1994: 127). I dedicate this work to you, and thank you for the
privilege of learning from you.
I was fortunate to begin a PhD in the sociology of education at Yale through a chance
encounter with Patricia Maloney. Though Yale does not have an education school, she told me
about a group of sociology graduate students studying education, and then invited me to join
their reading group. I learned so much from being part of this informal community including
Patricia, Jeff Guhin, Matthew Laurence, and Marianne Wilson. Lizzy Carroll invited me to teach
in Yale’s Education Studies program, giving me a home as I finished the dissertation.
Ron Eyerman, Jeff Alexander and Phil Smith also welcomed me to the Sociology
department, helping me to revive my long dormant study of Giotto frescoes and introducing me
to cultural sociology. As a committee member, Ron always provided insights and unconditional
support to move forward on the research. Fred Wherry arrived at Yale just as I was beginning to
formulate this project, and I couldn’t have asked for a better ethnographic mentor. He effortlessly
helped transform a vague discussion of parents in New Haven to suggesting that I write about the
public Montessori school in New Haven I was helping to start. Fred knew intuitively when to
help steer the ship, and when to send me off on my own. I knew my research was progressing
9
whenever Fred put his hands together and said, “This is good.” Kimberly Goyette graciously
joined the committee from a distance and added so much through her insights on school choice
and education more broadly. Thanks as well to Marcus Hunter who also advised long-distance
and gave me critical comments about letting the theory emerge from my interviewees.
Annette Lareau invited me to the “Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools” conference at the
Russell Sage Foundation, bringing me into the small community of sociologists studying school
choice. I am grateful to her and the many other scholars who gave feedback on this project
including Allison Pugh, Rene Ameling, Linda Renzulli, Thad Domina, Alison Gerber, Mitchell
Stevens, Joanne Golann, Linn Posey-Maddox, Maia Cucchiara, Mary Pattillo, the Yale CCS
workshop and the Northwestern Ethnography workshop, and several anonymous reviewers. I
count myself fortunate to have moved in parallel academic paths with Fiona Rose Greenland on
two continents. She proved a valuable sounding board as we pondered the cultural meaning of
Montessori and Waldorf schools.
My writing partners Kenna Barrett, Laura Barraclough, Cathy Solomon, Madeline Pèrez
and Sandy Gill gave me considerable moral and intellectual support. Finding Sandy’s
Birmingham paper on the internet in 2009 led to the unexpected pleasure of making her a
colleague and a friend, and was even more thrilling when she spent six months in New Haven,
much of it across the table from me. To Jack Dougherty, the Hartford school choice consigliere,
and Madeline Pèrez, Robert Cotto, Adrienne Vitullo and Kelly Goodman, my education writing
group, who fueled this project with regular deadlines, baked goods and a willingness to read
rough rough drafts. The group’s expertise in the history of Sheff and school desegregation,
Hartford school choice and school-based ethnography were particularly invaluable. A special
thanks is due to Fayre Makeig who helped edit this dissertation as a gift of friendship.
10
Jacqueline Cossentino and Keith Whitescarver of the National Center for Montessori in the
Public Sector provided introductions to many of the key players in the Montessori community.
The American Montessori Society supported my attendance at several Montessori conferences
via an AMS research mini-grant. The late Denny Schapiro wrote and published the Public
School Montessorian from 1988-2014, placing issues of race and class front and center in the
Montessori community years before I started to think about this topic. Thanks as well to
Montessori readers Annie Frazer, Katie Brown, Erin Trondson, Lindsay Pollock, Angela Murray
and Terry Ford. Thanks to my transcribers Patricia Guggisberg in Kansas City and Claude
Annoh and his assistants who gave me a legitimate reason to send large amounts of money to
Ghana.
Final thanks goes to my family and friends. My parents, Philip and Susan Lutgendorf,
and my sister, Claire Lutgendorf McPhee, provide lifelong examples of intellectual passion
combined with love, humility and a predilection for scaling mountains. I am happy every
morning to wake up next to Alexandre Debs who gracefully works to split our “second shift”
(Hochschild and Machung 1989) and fills it with music and laughter. Our New Haven friends,
particularly Andrew and Analis Quintman and Kate and Josh Borenstein sustained us. My inlaws, Diane and the late Chaouki Debs provided extended childcare at critical times when Alex
and I both needed to conduct academic travel. My children’s teachers and caregivers let me
concentrate on work knowing my children were happy. A final thanks to my children, Francesca
and Gabriel. Your presence was both an obstacle and a doorway to completing this project. I
might have finished much faster without swimming, throwing rocks in ponds and weekends
where “the fun never ends!” But the project in this form would never have existed without the
privilege of becoming your parent.
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Chapter 1
Introduction
In November 2014, Cincinnati, Ohio was hit by an early snowstorm. Despite the frigid
conditions, fifty residents remained camped outside for a week. This was not a homeless
encampment. Inside the tents were parents hoping to secure spots for their children at
Cincinnati’s Dater public Montessori school. TV news cameras came to film the cluster of snowcovered tents forming a mini-Everest base camp. Black parents in fur-lined hooded parkas, a
Latino father in a ski mask, a white parent, his face illuminated by a tablet screen, all huddled
around a backyard fire pit.
Image 1: Parents camped out in the snow outside Dater Montessori School in Cincinnati. (Source
Davis and Petracco 2014)
The “Dater-Waiters,” as they called themselves, found a positive meaning in their frigid
sacrifice. Parent Denianne Gardner, who was first in line and served as unofficial organizer of
the group, said the waiting confirmed the value of the Montessori parent peer group: “These are
13
the kind of parents and students you want to be surrounded by” (Backscheider 2014). Another
waiting parent, Valerie Jenkins, wearing a furry snow-covered top hat, commented, “The
community has been so nice and brought us donuts and coffee and food and firewood. It shows
us this is the right choice, and we haven’t lost our minds” (Davis and Petracco, 2014). For the
Montessori-aspiring parents camped in the snow, the community of like-minded parents was an
affirmation that their sacrifice was a worthy one.
Image 2: Parents huddled around a fire outside Dater Montessori school. (Source: Cincinnati
Enquirer, Patrick Brennan)
Not all Cincinnati residents shared their view that the weeklong glacial campout was a necessary
sacrifice. Writing in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Greg Landsman, a white parent and education nonprofit director, compared enrolling in Cincinnati’s most desirable magnet schools to the blood
sport of The Hunger Games, a dystopian young adult novel where teenagers are drafted to fight
to the death in an annual game for the amusement of spectators. He criticized the economic
unfairness of the process, writing, “these parents can afford to take vacation days, and they have
14
a spouse and other family members at home to watch their kids or cover for them while they're
away camping out” (2014). To Landsman, the snow campout was a demonstration of privilege
showing that the system was unfair to the poorest parents. In Cincinnati, the campouts to enroll
in a Montessori magnet school showed how desperately parents wanted to access this type of
education, but also highlighted the underlying inequities in who could wait in line for this scarce
resource.1
While in Cincinnati a group of parents were camping out for public Montessori, that
same year, in North Charleston, South Carolina, black parents were protesting against a public
Montessori program replacing their traditional neighborhood school. The previous spring, the
School Board had proposed that a small Montessori program of several classrooms at Malcolm
Hursey Elementary School be expanded to take over the entire school. Black residents worried
that the move would have broader consequences in reshaping their neighborhood, linking the
move to broader white gentrification happening throughout Charleston. A journalist in the
community’s black newspaper worried that “The consequence of the Board's vote is black
students will be uprooted from their neighborhood school and bused out to make room for the
white 'upper crust' moving in” (Gadson-Birch 2014). Black Hursey parents and community
members wanted students to have a choice of both programs, Montessori and traditional, and
they attended a Charleston Board of Education meeting to protest the decision (Gadson-Birch
2014).
1
Perhaps in part as a result of this news coverage and in an attempt to create greater equity in the system, in 2015,
Cincinnati got rid of the first-come, first-served policy and replaced it with a controlled choice lottery. In the new
system, 30 percent of seats at magnet schools are allocated to students who attend “targeted neighborhood schools”
that are deemed underperforming, and the remaining 70 percent of seats are allocated via a district-wide lottery
(Cincinnati Public Schools 2016).
15
Image 3: Charleston, South Carolina Black parents hold up signs to protest plans for a schoolwide
Montessori conversion of their local elementary school. (Source: Tolbert Smalls Jr., The
Chronicle)
The conflict even pitted some black residents against each other. Charles Monteith, a black
parent of three children at Hursey, wrote a letter to the school board in support of the program
and was immediately accused of being the puppet of hidden special interests. Black school board
member Reverend Chris Collins wrote, “I know somebody put you to write this letter” (Bowers
2013). Monteith replied that no one had put him up to write the letter, and promptly decided to
run for the school board himself (Bowers 2013). Monteith’s explicit mention of his race and
Collins’ skepticism that Monteith was an ‘authentic’ Montessori supporter reflect a stereotype
that Montessori attracts predominantly white families. The vote to make Hursey a school-wide
Montessori school passed, 5-4, in a tense and closely watched vote in March 2014. Public
Montessori had secured a victory, but racial tensions continued around this particular form of
schooling.
Fanaticism, dedicated parents, elitism, choice, equity and civil rights: how and why does
public Montessori education elicit such different meanings, particularly in communities of color?
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Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools examines these and other cases as the first study of the
public Montessori movement’s racial and socioeconomic diversity. Public Montessori schools,
with 503 programs in 2015-16, currently make up approximately one eighth of an estimated
4,000 Montessori programs in the United States, the majority of them private schools (AMS
2016). Montessori, a pedagogy invented by Maria Montessori at the turn of the 20th century, is
known for mixed-age classrooms where students have time for self-directed, open-ended work
using hands-on materials. These schools are sometimes held up as a model for creating racially
and economically diverse schools (Cavazos 2016, McNeely and Pate 2011), particularly in an era
where voluntary school choice has become the preferred policy choice to counter rising school
segregation (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley and Orfield 2008, Orfield, Kucsera and Siegel-Hawley
2012). But researchers also find that school choice separates and stratifies students and families.
As public Montessori schools expand rapidly in the choice environment of charters and magnets,
these schools are at the front lines of the broader debate about school choice as an exclusionary
or empowering practice. As such, their story is a microcosm of the broader conflicts around
public school choice.2
I started this ethnographic project, as many ethnographers do, with a different focus. I
was thinking about how parents might view enrolling children in racially integrated schools as a
form of civic engagement. But as I talked to parents, few saw their decision in civic or diversity
terms. Instead, many parents talked about the obstacles in selecting a school. They also talked
about the meaning of the school choices themselves. Many parents were especially enthusiastic
about Montessori education, but some parents of color at both of my research sites felt conflicted
2
I include district, magnet and charter schools as part of public school choice, excluding private schools and school
vouchers. Although some researchers and policy makers debate whether charter schools are public schools as they
are run by private organizations receiving public funding, I follow Kahlenberg and Potter (2014), Frankenberg,
Siegel-Hawley and Wang (2010) in considering them public schools.
17
about Montessori, and their criticisms connected to a broader public Montessori backlash among
parents of color around the country. As a result, I began to link my inquiry of public Montessori
to broader questions of choosing schools and how parents felt about these choices afterward. I
learned that parents chose public Montessori schools for a variety of reasons, and that they had a
wide range of relationships to the Montessori pedagogy with important implications for their
broader relationship to their children’s schools.
In recent years, driven by magnet, charter and the small schools movement, theme
schools have expanded in large urban districts like New York, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Denver,
Dallas and Washington, DC. In marketing campaigns, parents are instructed to choose a school
that is a “good fit” for their child (BPS 2014, NYCDOE 2016). This question of how parents
perceived their “fit” with the theme of a given pedagogy or school is one that few scholars have
examined in much detail. Moreover, as public schools, these theme schools are sites of tension
between “public” goals of educating citizens, and “private” goals of serving consumers in a
customized choice marketplace (Labaree 1997). While families and private schools might be
particularly attentive to the “fit” of a school, public schools receiving public funding have a
greater obligation to be reflective of the communities they serve. How do these public and
private tensions play out in public theme schools?
One way to examine the rise of a marketplace paradigm of education is to question the
concept of a “good fit” which is often discussed in personalized and naturalistic terms focused on
the innate uniqueness of each child. In reality, a good fit is a social construct, and one that is
highly contingent on the family’s racial background and socioeconomic status. Finding the
“good fit” requires that parents conceive of their children as unique individuals with particular
needs (Pugh 2009), conduct detailed research to find schools they perceive as compatible, and
18
either have luck in the lottery process, or have a range of alternative options. Succeeding in all of
these steps requires parents to have significant resources at every step of the way. Many parents I
encountered did not have these resources. Instead, they experienced what I term a “conflicted
fit,” a sense of uncomfortable belonging, feeling aligned with a school on some dimensions and
at odds on others. Despite the district’s marketed promise of a “good fit,” once their children
enrolled in a school, they had limited options to change.
To better analyze the social construction of fit, this study poses several key questions:
● Why are public Montessori schools, past and present, spaces of both racial diversity and
racial contestation?
● How do parents, particularly parents of color, negotiate a fit after enrollment?
● How does parents’ experience of a fit or a conflicted fit impact their interactions in the
school community and their ability to take advantage of other school choice options?
To answer these questions, I conducted ethnographic, interview, statistical and archival research
over a two year period (2013-2015) at four primary sites: (1 and 2) the parent communities at
“Birch” Montessori Magnet and “Vine” Montessori magnet (both pseudonyms), two Montessori
magnet schools that were created as part of a school desegregation plan in metro Hartford, CT,
one of the most economically and racially polarized regions in the United States; (3) several
school choice venues in Hartford; and (4) national Montessori conferences. I will present each
Hartford Montessori school setting in more detail in Chapter 5, but here I present a brief
overview of my research methodology.
I chose two Montessori magnet schools that were racially and socioeconomically diverse
and sought after, maintaining long waiting lists, despite their location in poor and sometimes
violent urban neighborhoods. Both schools were affiliated with Association Montessori
Internationale (AMI) and advertised their fidelity to the Montessori method. One school had
19
been racially diverse from the outset and the other was an existing community of black and
Latino students that was adding a large number of suburban families as part of the process of
becoming a magnet. Importantly, I wanted to understand what a school community looked like
when so many best practices were in place. Not only were the schools racially and
socioeconomically diverse through a lottery that balanced Hartford and suburban parents, they
had a free preschool program beginning with three-year-olds, and all students were bused to
school once they turned five. Because of Montessori’s focus on students learning at their own
pace, there was no racialized tracking (Tyson 2011).
My ethnographic work at the two Hartford school sites spanned from 2013-2015
including one year of intensive observations in the 2013-14 academic year and numerous followup visits at one of the sites throughout 2014-15. First, in the spring of 2013, to immerse myself in
Montessori pedagogy, I took a month-long early childhood assistant training offered at one of the
schools, which gave me a detailed introduction to one school site and a number of school staff
from both schools who trained alongside me. Starting in the fall of 2013, I visited each school at
least once a week, often more, and observed parent drop-off and pickup, parent meetings during
the day and evening community-wide events. I attended trampoline parties, potlucks, and both
routine and contested Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) meetings.
In order to capture the stories of a broader group of parents than those who regularly
attended PTO meetings, the schools gave me permission to randomly select parents to interview,
and I spoke with these parents in the spring of 2014. To make the interview process more
worthwhile to parents with challenging work schedules and limited time, I offered interviewees a
$20 Wal-Mart gift certificate to participate.3 In total, I interviewed 81 people: 44 parents from 32
3
One principal recommended Wal-Mart gift cards, noting that the store’s central Hartford location made it easy to
access and might appeal to Hartford families. Several upper-middle-class parents visibly blanched when presented
20
randomly selected families plus an additional 7 interviews with PTO involved parents. I also
conducted formal and informal interviews with 8 Hartford-area school administrators and policy
makers and 22 interviews with national Montessori educators around the country. (For more
methodology details, see the Appendix B.)
The names of the schools, staff and parents I observed have all been changed, some
identifying characteristics altered, and my data stored securely in accordance with IRB protocol.
Local Hartford-area administrators I interviewed gave their permission to be named in the study.
At the national level, because I was writing a history of public Montessori that had never been
documented, the Montessori educators I interviewed were eager to have their real names used.
As I listened to parents at the two schools, I became more aware of the difficulties
inherent in navigating Hartford’s incredibly complex multi-tier choice process. To learn more
about this process, I attended other magnet schools’ information sessions, magnet fairs, focus
groups on magnet lottery marketing, Sheff Movement Coalition meetings and parents testifying
at the State Department of Education.
While my ethnographic experience in Hartford could be a study in itself, I was inspired
by Mitchell Stevens research on local homeschooling parents in the context of a national
homeschooling movement in The Kingdom of Children (2001). I was curious to learn how much
national Montessori organizations included public Montessori, and I eventually conducted
participant observations at five national Montessori conferences in 2013-2015, including AMI
and American Montessori Society (AMS) conferences. I attended formal sessions and browsed
Montessori memorabilia stalls (“who ever knew there were so many blingy Montessorians?”
asked Barbie, who was surprised by the popularity of her rhinestone “Mad about Montessori” t
with the Wal-Mart card and either declined it or said that they would donate it to their child’s teacher for classroom
use.
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shirts at a Texas Montessori convention [Field Notes, March 28, 2014]). In total, I conducted
over 470 hours of participant observation.
To build a history of public Montessori, I consulted archival records via ERIC, the
Proquest Historical Newspapers Archive and the AMS archives at the University of Connecticut.
I interviewed 22 public Montessori educators around the country. I also created two original
datasets. The first is a historical dataset of the 705 public Montessori schools that have opened
since 1912. The second is a dataset of the 300 schoolwide public Montessori schools open in
2012-13 with demographic information and demographic information of their surrounding
school districts.4 This multi-method research has enabled me to construct an account that studies
public Montessori in the past and present from the grassroots to the national level.
This study has three main arguments. First, public Montessori’s appeal among a wide
range of parents as an individualized learning experience has made it a key model for racially
and economically integrated schools. This study highlights in particular the activism of
Montessori parents of color demanding this option for their children. Second, despite this
activism among parents of color, Montessori’s popularity and location in districts that offer
school choice have made it particularly vulnerable, both historically and today, to being diverted
to serve predominantly middle-class and white students. Finally, educators’ assumptions that the
method is good for all children has led them to overlook the particular concerns of families with
4
The unique dataset, the American Public Montessori Historical (APMH) Dataset of the 705 public Montessori
programs from 1912 to 2015, was derived from several data sources: the National Center for Montessori in the
Public Sector 2014 Census, the Public School Montessorian 2005 directory, the 1993 Montessori Public Schools
Consortium (MSPC) list and the National Center for Educational Statistics, which contains school data back to
1987. It does not include Head Start and publicly funded Early Childhood Centers. I also matched the schoolwide
programs with NCES data on their racial and economic student demographics and those of the surrounding district.
The dataset does not evaluate the fidelity of the public Montessori programs. If programs were reported to NCMPS,
Public School Montessorian or MSPC as Montessori programs and/or if they had Montessori in the title in the
NCES school database, they were included in the dataset. My research indicates that only a few schools use the
Montessori name without some connection in their curriculum, and those handful, like the Einstein Montessori
charter schools in Florida, were not included in the database.
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alternate views of the purposes of education—families who experience what I call a “conflicted
fit” with the Montessori template.
This interpretive process of “conflicted fit” highlights one of the dilemmas of public
school choice as it currently exists in complex urban school systems. Parents often choose based
on limited knowledge or limited availability, are forced to choose too early with limited
opportunity for movement later on and end up at schools that are misaligned with their
preferences. These arguments add to broader conversations on how to create diverse schools
through school choice and how to equally empower all students and parents within school
communities.
School Choice, Racial Diversity and Theme Schools
Researchers have consistently shown that students benefit from attending racially diverse
schools. Students in diverse schools have higher achievement in mathematics (Berends and
Penaloza 2010, Newton 2010), literacy (Benson and Borman 2010) and build more expansive
social networks (Braddock and Gonzalez 2010, Goldsmith 2010, Wells et al. 2009). As public
policy has moved away from mandated desegregation, creating racially and economically diverse
schools through choice has emerged as the most palatable policy alternative (Frankenberg,
Siegel-Hawley and Orfield 2008, Kahlenberg and Potter 2014, Orfield and Frankenberg 2013).
In addition, in the last twenty years, a demographic shift of middle-class, mostly white families
choosing to live in cities and send their children to public schools has made creating such school
diversity potentially easier to accomplish (Billingham and Kimelberg 2013, Cucchiara 2013,
Kimelberg and Billingham 2013, Posey-Maddox 2014).
Yet this diversifying potential is limited by research showing specific barriers for poor
23
families. Although school choice is often marketed as empowering to all students, a research
consensus argues that, in most cases, school choice privileges higher-resourced families who are
more likely to actively select schools (André-Becheley 2005, Ball and Vincent 1998, Horvat,
Weininger and Lareau 2003, Pérez 2011, Roda and Wells 2013). Middle-class urban dwellers
engage in a high-stakes competition to secure a desirable public school option (Makris and
Brown 2016, Pérez 2011, Roda and Wells 2013, Stillman 2012) including buying into white
gentrifying neighborhoods (Cucchiara 2013, Makris 2015, Posey-Maddox 2014) and relying on
their social networks for “hot knowledge” (Ball and Vincent 1998). White families also
frequently use school choice as a means to exit public school systems with a majority of student
of color (Renzulli and Evans 2005). In contrast, poor families, when they participate in the
choice process at all, are often choosing differently, focusing on necessities like proximity to
home, school security, and availability of after-school care (Pattillo 2015, Pattillo, DelaleO’Connor and Butts 2014, Pérez 2011, Rhodes and DeLuca 2014, Smrekar and Goldring 1999).
In theme schools, meanwhile, public school choice is designed around a particular
curriculum or educational philosophy (for example, Montessori, International Baccalaureate,
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics [STEM], and dual-language). These theme
schools can be magnet schools or charter schools. In the 1960s, district-organized magnet
schools were developed around a particular theme to act as a “magnet” to attract predominantly
white families to districts with a majority of students of color leading to school desegregation
(Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley and Orfield 2008, Rossell 1991, Smrekar and Goldring 1999).
Researchers find that magnet schools create racial diversity (Archbald 1988, 2004, Frankenberg
and Siegel-Hawley 2008) though they can also increase racial and economic segregation in
neighborhood schools (Saporito 2003, Smrekar and Goldring 1999).
24
Starting in the 1990s, charter schools, publicly funded schools operated by a private
organization, have embraced specialized themes as a way to attract students (Jabbar and Wilson
2016, Wohlstetter 2016). Unlike the racially diverse magnet schools, charter schools are often
more segregated than their surrounding districts, either creating “white flight” from district
schools (Renzulli and Evans 2006) or enrolling primarily students of color (Frankenberg et al.
2010). A small number of charter schools have missions of “intentional diversity” (Wohlstetter
2016). Frequently, these intentionally diverse charters and magnets use progressive pedagogies,
like Montessori, focused on student-centered learning combined with strategic location in a black
or Latino neighborhood (Jabbar and Wilson 2016, Makris and Brown 2016, Metz 1986). But as
theme schools have expanded in urban districts, few researchers have examined how parents
experience these different types of schools after their children’s enrollment.
Some researchers suggest that parent’s racial/ethnic and social class backgrounds
influence the types of school they select, and that schools with certain themes under-enroll
students of color. They argue that middle-class parents prefer open-ended, creative schools while
working-class parents opt for traditional, highly structured schools with a focus on academic
basics (Calvo 2007, Petrilli 2012, Petronio 1996, Pugh 2009, Schneider et al. 1998, Stillman
2012). When race and class are closely linked in a community, these preferences can often
manifest themselves as racial preferences for particular types of schools, although Lacy (2007)
highlights important differences within the black middle-class. Furthermore, others have
questioned whether progressive theme schools with flexible and open-ended curricula might
even be harmful to students of color by overemphasizing skills when students need to first
acquire content knowledge (Carter 2001, Delpit 1995, Hirsch 2010). Initial research of other
desirable theme programs like gifted and talented programs (Roda 2015) and International
25
Baccalaureate (Donaldson 2016) suggests such programs under-enroll students of color. If theme
schools have a potential benefit of attracting a racially and socioeconomically diverse student
body, one unanswered question is the extent to which these schools are self-selective by
disproportionately appealing to one group over others.
The Marginalized Experience & Involvement of Parents of Color
Inside racially diverse schools, many scholars have found that black and Latino parents
experience marginalization in their involvement and interactions with teachers and fellow
parents, though this has been studied in mostly traditional schools, without looking at the impact
of the school theme. In some cases, black and Latino parents’ participation is often limited by the
dominance of white parents in these schools (Cucchiara 2013, Cucchiara and Horvat 2009,
Lareau and Horvat 1999, Posey-Maddox 2013, 2014), although others call for expanding the
definition of participation to recognize the hidden contributions of families of color and lowincome families outside the framework of the PTO (Lopez, Scribner and Mahitivanichcha 2001,
McKenna and Millen 2013, Williams and Sanchez 2012). In addition, scholars have also
identified that a predominantly white teaching force can intentionally or unintentionally
discriminate against students and parents of color (Delpit 1995, Ladson-Billings 1998, Lewis
2003, Lewis-McCoy 2014, Lightfoot 1978, Tatum 2003). To encourage the participation of
parents and the achievement of students of color, researchers have advocated for curricula to be
culturally compatible (Jordan, Tharp and Baird-Vogt 1992, Tabachnick and Bloch 1995) and
have argued for the importance of culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogy (Gay 2010). These
studies have highlighted worrisome experiences of exclusion among black and Latino parents,
yet by focusing on traditional schools, they have largely sidestepped conversations around the
26
meaning and interpreted meaning of particular educational choices. To what extent does school
theme interact with these processes?
School “Fit” and the Importance of Parental Interpretation
Examining how parents interpret the meaning of a school’s messaging, and its specific
theme, if relevant, is critical to understanding their experience of a school. In later grades,
students become critical interpreters, but in the younger grades, parents are the ones making
sense of their children’s schools. While schools frequently market the idea of finding a match
between student and school through “fit,” parents really only comprehend the full extent of a fit
after enrollment. Some parents find the elusive “good fit,” but many other parents experience the
choice process and subsequent enrollment as what I term a “conflicted fit,” feeling aligned with a
school on some interpretive dimensions and at odds on others. And while in the popular
parlance, fit can be used vaguely, as in the lexicography of competitive preschool admissions
(Quinn 2010), or as a way to avoid saying something unpleasant (i.e., “It wasn’t a good fit for
us”), the idea of a conflicted fit should be examined with precision and specificity. While many
of the physical and symbolic structures of a school might influence parents’ assessment of fit,
how they define education is often central to this process of interpretation. Examining schools
with specific themes brings these interpretive contestations to the forefront.
The development and use of a conflicted fit builds off several recent studies of diverse
communities in a variety of educational contexts. Lewis-McCoy (2014) and Lewis and Diamond
(2015) examined how black parents were marginalized in suburban schools districts. Jack (2014)
studied the various types of “social dissimilarity” experienced by black students at an elite
university, and Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) looked at how the social class background of
27
college women a large Midwestern state university impacted their social fit or isolation. Like all
of these studies, I argue that a sense of belonging is linked to critical outcomes for parents and
students. Building off these studies, I argue for a stronger examination of the meanings that
parents and students attach to particular educational choices.
The Montessori Method and Public Montessori Schools
Public Montessori schools are valuable sites for examining questions of “fit” because of
their difference from traditional schools alongside the diversity of their student populations. As
such, they function as a “unique cases” (Small 2009a), highlighting mechanisms present but less
obvious in other school contexts. An individual might feel a conflicted fit in any school,
university or workplace, but the initial strangeness of Montessori to most observers helps
highlight the process.
Montessori schools are also places where we might hope to see high levels of educational
equity. While policy makers have recently “rediscovered” early childhood education, it has been
foundational to Montessori education since 1907, providing an opportunity for early-intervention
and building all children’s social awareness, ability to focus and the development of rich
vocabularies. Children work on individual projects and at their own pace, allowing for
differential instruction and a wide range of abilities in a single classroom. Teachers believe in the
potential of every child, encouraging them with positive discipline and building their
independence by giving them two- and three-hour blocks of uninterrupted work time. Instead of
rows of desks, students work at tables or on the floor, and move freely around the classroom. The
classrooms, usually several hundred feet larger than a traditional classroom to accommodate the
additional movement, are filled with wood shelving, plants, and brightly colored equipment
28
including beads, geometrical objects and miniature washtubs, hands-on materials specifically
developed by Maria Montessori. The children eat their lunch at tables with real plates, silverware
and cloth napkins that they later wash and fold. The curriculum emphasizes community building,
and students develop strong relationships with a teacher who works with them for three years.
In the last fifty years, the public Montessori movement has experienced exponential
growth in the public sector. In 2015, a total of 503 public Montessori programs enrolled
approximately 125,000 students (Debs 2016). While public Montessori is minute relative to the
roughly 99,000 American public schools, Montessori is the dominant alternative pedagogy in the
public sector, where its share is significantly larger than that of Waldorf, Reggio Emilia and
other progressive pedagogies (APWE 2015, NAREA 2016). Moreover, this trend is
international. There are public Montessori schools in the United Kingdom (Hansen 2007), the
Netherlands (Karsten et al. 2006), Thailand (Educateurs San Frontières 2016) and India
(Gopalan 2014). Figure 1 shows the steady increase in American public Montessori schools over
the last 50 years.
29
Figure 1: Growth of public Montessori school programs, 1912-2015
A critical different from other progressive pedagogies, public Montessori has its roots in
racially diverse and high-need schools, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 3. This racial
and socioeconomic diversity continues today and makes public Montessori more diverse on
nearly all measures in comparison to U.S. public school averages. Nearly half of public
Montessori programs are in urban areas (Debs 2016). In 2012-13, 51 percent of the 300
schoolwide public Montessori programs enrolled a racially diverse student body (between 25 and
75 percent students of color), 23 percent of schools enrolled a majority of students of color (75100 percent students of color) and the remaining 26 percent were majority white schools (0-25
percent students of color). These schoolwide public Montessori schools serve a higher proportion
of students of color than the national average. In the public sector, 54 percent of public
Montessori students are black, Latino, Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander, or multiracial
(referred to here as students of color) in comparison to 49% of all public school students. Black
students are actually overrepresented by 11 percent in comparison to average enrollment rates
nationwide. Moreover, public Montessori school students, and in particular, black and Latino
30
students, are more likely to attend a racially diverse school than the national average (Debs,
2016).
These figures highlight the diversity inside public Montessori schools, yet we know
relatively little about the experience of these students of color and their families. Montessori
schools are unfamiliar to most parents who first encounter them, and most such schools provide
extensive parent education. Recent public debates suggest that this orientation process may be
particularly fraught for parents of color. As the two opening episodes of this chapter
demonstrate, during fifty years of public Montessori education in the United States, black and
Latino parents have been passionate Montessori supporters and detractors. Black educators and
parents alike have made the case for Montessori’s distinctive benefit to students of color (Hall
and Murray 2011, Kunjufu 1984, Turner-Essel 2015). On the other hand, black and Latino
parents organized against public Montessori programs in San Francisco and Santa Cruz,
California; Memphis, Tennessee; and Charleston, South Carolina (Benham 2010, Bowers 2013,
Burnette 2014, Schapiro 2013).
Part of Montessori’s desirability as a public school option comes from its predominance
in private schools alongside the appeal of its individualized curriculum for a diverse cohort of
students (Metz 1986). Prior research examining why parents choose Montessori (Murray 2008,
Parker 2007, Zarybnisky 2010) has focused on parents’ curricular understanding without
considering their racial/ethnic background. Public Montessori research has concentrated on the
challenges of preserving pedagogical fidelity in the public sector (Daost and Suzuki 2014, Kahn
1990, Kostin 1995, McKenzie 1994, Van Acker 2014) or examining student outcomes (Dohrman
et al. 2007, Lillard and Else-Quest 2006, Lopata, Wallace, and Finn 2005) with only a few
studies considering the outcomes of students of color (Ansari and Winsler 2014, Brown 2016,
31
Rodriguez, Irby, Brown, Lara-Alecio, & Galloway, 2005). More recently, a handful of
researchers have begun examining the academic, disciplinary and culturally relevant pedagogy
for black and Latino students in public Montessori schools (Ansari and Winsler 2014, Brown and
Steele 2015, Banks and Maixner 2016, Stansbury 2014, Trondson 2016, Yezbick 2007).
Dissertation Overview
In what follows, I explore how public Montessori offers insights into the strengths and
challenges of creating racially diverse schools through choice, and particularly how it is
experienced by families of color. More broadly, I propose that parents’ experience of schools,
and specifically school theme, plays an important role in understanding how parents choose
schools and how they are involved with them once their children enroll. Chapters 2 and 3 situate
public Montessori in a national context. Chapter 2, “Montessori for All?,” introduces Montessori
pedagogy for those unfamiliar with it, and discusses the challenge of implementing Montessori
effectively for a diverse set of students. Chapter 3 outlines the social history of public Montessori
schools in the United States, highlighting its appeal to broad constituencies of parents,
particularly parents of color; its development in magnet and charter schools; alongside the
continued challenges in keeping public Montessori schools accessible to the poorest families.
Moving from the national story to focus on public Montessori schools in one city,
Chapters 4-7 focus on the experience of parents at two public Montessori schools in Hartford,
Connecticut, to examine in detail how parents experience a school with a particular pedagogical
school theme. I move sequentially through the public school experience as a parent might
encounter it, from the moment of choice, to entering the school to participating in the parent
community. Chapter 4, “Untouchable Carrots: School Choice in Hartford” places two Hartford
32
public Montessori programs in the context of Sheff vs. O’Neill, a landmark Connecticut
desegregation program launched in the last decade that has been nationally recognized as a
model for school diversity. Even in this scenario, the poorest families of color face barriers in
enrolling in the public Montessori schools, and I examine the structural obstacles that create
inequality in the choice system. Chapter 5 introduces two Hartford public Montessori schools,
Birch and Vine Montessori magnet, schools that enroll a racially diverse population of Hartford
and suburban students. I examine how parents group themselves in three broad categories, “True
Believers,” “Conflicted” parents and the “Satisfied Good Schoolers” as they make sense of their
choice after enrollment. Chapter 6 examines the experience of parents who feel conflicted about
Montessori and examines why more of them are black and Latino than white. Chapter 7,
“Building Community Among Diverse Families,” examines the parent interactions at both
schools, and how, despite the efforts of many parents to build connections, parent leadership
organizations end up dominated by middle-class predominantly white parents with the most time
and cultural capital to contribute, creating a parent agenda and a power dynamic that is
antithetical to the overall mission of school desegregation.
“School Choice, Fit and Creating Diversity,” the conclusion, returns to the larger
questions raised in the dissertation about creating diversity through school choice, and how
theme-based schools present opportunities and challenges for realizing this potential. It also
outlines policy considerations emerging from this research that could be used to create more
equitable choice processes. Finally, a methodological appendix reflects on some of the
challenges of conducting fieldwork while being an active participant in the field.
Conclusion: The Importance of Beliefs in Schooling
33
Public Montessori schools represent the potential of school choice systems to create more
racially diverse schools through offering parents desirable school themes. But in broader systems
with scarce high-quality public schools, it remains challenging to maintain equity when faced
with overwhelming parent demand. Inequitable admissions structures limit the poorest families
from applying and enrolling in choice schools. Furthermore, assuming that parents choose
according to the principle of a “good fit” overlooks several issues underlying the match between
families and school theme. Some families have access to more school choices than others, and a
particular pedagogy, like Montessori, may be presented to families with underlying ideas of
educational privilege that may prove alienating to families without such privilege.
Public Montessori schools offer an excellent lens for examining the larger role of cultural
meaning in school choice and parent involvement, first because they have a rich and alternative
pedagogy, and second because a wide range of meanings are attached to Montessori education
by parents of diverse backgrounds. If parents struggle to access and “fit” with Montessori, this
mismatch has broader implications for educational equity in urban public school districts where
schools compete in the market for a “good fit” while many parents experience anything but that.
While I have aimed to present an account of public Montessori that is historical and both
national and local in scale, my account is by no means comprehensive. I hope that future
researchers take this study as a starting point to elaborate on both the history and the social
context of public Montessori schools.
Lastly, as school choice continues to expand around the country with an increasing
number of charter and magnet schools, this project calls for further in-depth, qualitative research
examining the lived experience of the parents and students making school choices. I argue that
belief, experience and interpretation are critically important to understanding how parents
34
interact with schools. Like the classic Monty Python comedy sketch about a building shored up
entirely by the belief of its residents, academic research in a variety of subjects has demonstrated
that belief and perception hold powerful sway over tangible outcomes.5 Similarly, in my
observations and interviews, I found that parents’ beliefs about their children’s schooling, both at
the moment of choice and after enrollment, could prove a powerful determinant on their
engagement with the school, their ability to benefit from the social networks of school parents,
and their decision to keep their child enrolled (Hirschman 1970).
As public attention increasingly focuses on America’s deepening inequality, its gaze
returns to efforts to create racially and socioeconomically diverse schools. There is much to be
gained from these efforts for students of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds. Studying
public Montessori schools allows us to examine one of the most successful choice programs in
creating such racial and economic diversity. Examining the fragile reality of such diversity
compels us to consider what additional measures are needed at all choice schools to provide
equal access and empower all students and families.
5
Psychological research has shown that female and minority students can internalize negative stereotypes through
“stereotype threats,” that may undermine their performance on high-stakes tests and college persistence (Spencer,
Steele and Quinn 1999; Steele 1997; Steele and Aaronson 1995). In medicine, the placebo effect has a long history
of helping to heal patients (Price, Finnis and Benedetti 2008). And psychological research on faith and positive
mental health has shown strong links between these intangibles and physical healing (Gillum et al. 2007; Koenig et
al. 1999; Lutgendorf et al. 2004).
35
Chapter 2
Montessori for All?
Introduction
In February 1907, Maria Montessori, a young Italian doctor and university professor, was
called in to help design a program for young children in Rome’s troubled San Lorenzo
neighborhood. Rome, like other European and American cities, was rapidly growing, and San
Lorenzo was its neighborhood of last resort, called the “shame of Italy” for its concentration of
homeless squatters, prostitutes and criminals (Kramer 1988/1976). To address these dangerous
and unsanitary conditions, a group of wealthy bankers developed an urban renewal plan to clear
slums and build tenement apartments for around 1,000 people. The developers gave preference
to married couples with children, in the belief that such families were relatively stable, but the
children soon created an unanticipated problem. While the parents worked, the children who
were too young to attend school were left unsupervised, vandalizing the new buildings in their
boredom. The developers wanted a solution to keep the children out of trouble.
Maria Montessori had garnered attention for her work with special needs children at the
Orthophrenic School in Rome and was interested in working with “normal children.” At the San
Lorenzo apartments, she ended up with a room of fifty to sixty children, ages two to six. Here
she opened the first Casa dei Bambini or Children’s House. Working with a young female
assistant and a shoestring budget, Montessori improvised, borrowed and experimented. She
brought in materials she had adapted from earlier educationalists Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and
Édouard Séguin to use with the special needs children. She also stocked the first classroom with
toys, but observed that the children ignored the toys in favor of “real” work—sweeping, washing
36
and working in a child-sized kitchen and working with her special “didactic” learning materials.
From this, Montessori concluded that young children sought out meaningful work instead of
imaginative play. As a result, Montessori classrooms today engage children in tasks of “practical
life,” including the same activities carried out in the Casa dei Bambini over a century ago.
One day, after observing the children flock to choose their own materials when a locked
cabinet was left open, Montessori and her assistant moved the materials to low shelves and
allowed the children to choose freely. Over the next month, Montessori and her assistant
observed a transformation occur. Children who had previously been disorderly spontaneously
became organized, dignified and courteous. The change was so dramatic that the assistant
attributed divine intervention, commenting “It must be the angels inspiring them” (Montessori
1996:110). The children disciplined themselves, cleaned up the classroom and “exploded” into
reading, sharing their mutual delight in deciphering letters until each child wanted to learn what
the others had mastered.
Montessori was most struck by the fact that the children found tremendous focus and
satisfaction in their work. She recounted the story of a little girl who was so young she might
have been expected to “flit from one thing to another.” Instead, she began pairing different-sized
cylinders to matching holes and became so absorbed in the work that she wasn’t aware of the
children singing around her. She didn’t even notice when Montessori “gently picked up the
armchair in which she sat, with her in it and put it on a little table.” As Montessori observed,
“From the time when I had begun to count, she had repeated the exercise forty-two times. She
stopped, as though coming out of a dream, and smiled as if she were very happy” (Montessori
1996:103). From such observations, Montessori determined that children had an innate desire to
37
learn, and when they were given the independence and flexibility to repeat their work until they
mastered it, they achieved a state of joy.
News of these reformed urban ruffians quickly spread. The Italian prime minister’s
daughter and the king and queen of Italy came to visit the tenement courtyard. The children
taught their parents lessons in hygiene, and gradually, Montessori described how the entire
tenement transformed as windowsills that had once held broken saucepans were now decorated
with potted geraniums (1996:113). In newspapers around the globe, Montessori was credited not
only with educating children but driving urban renewal (Kramer 1988/1976).
As a result of this early success, educators from around the globe, European baronesses
and public educators alike, adopted her approach. In 1911, four years after the first San Lorenzo
classroom, there were Montessori classrooms in Australia, Argentina, France, England, for the
children of the Russian czar in St. Petersburg, and in a few public schools in Italy and
Switzerland. Schools were planned in India, China, Mexico, Korea, Argentina and Hawaii
(Kramer 1988/1976).
As Montessori worked with children at the Casa dei Bambini, she was also developing a
universal theory about all children, not just poor children. She talked about a “social movement
on behalf of the child” and wrote in manifesto-like terms about the liberation of children from
their slave-like dependence on their parents:
No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child. Historically, the
oppressed – slaves, the servant class and finally the workers – were minority groups who
sought their redemption through social change, often in open battle between the
oppressed and their oppressors. The American Civil War was fought against the
institution of slavery, the French revolution against the ruling classes and modern
revolutions to realize new economic forms…But the social problem of the child is not
only of class, race or nation. The child who does not function socially is one who
functions solely as an appendage of an adult…What is the child? He is a reproduction of
the adult who possesses him as if he were a piece of property. No slave was ever so much
38
the property of his master as the child is of the parent.” (Montessori 2007:3-4, my
emphasis)
In this expanded vision of Montessori’s method, she linked her work to social movements and
revolutions around the world fighting for freedom for the “oppressed.” Unlike earlier
revolutions, the problem was not “class, race or nation” but a global phenomenon of adults who
treated their children like “property.”
In arguing that the primary goal of teaching was to liberate children through
independence and autonomy, Montessori was similar to education contemporaries including
Friedrich Froebel, the German creator of the play-based kindergarten movement, Rudolph
Steiner, the German founder of the Waldorf method and John Dewey, the American progressive
education leader. They were all reacting to early 20th-century school designs that took
inspiration from factory models of efficiency, grouping children into same-age classrooms so
everyone would learn the same thing at the same time, dividing the day into smaller segments of
instruction and rotating students through the school at the call of a bell (Callahan 1964).
But unlike the other progressive reformers who focused on preserving play and
supporting the imagination, Montessori had a positive orientation toward practical work. She
believed children developed self-efficacy, a sense of freedom and happiness through work, and
not just any kind of work, but menial work like washing tables and polishing boots. Only after
these were mastered were children ready to learn sophisticated tasks like spatially mapping out
the Pythagorean theorem. In her valuing of practical work, she was trying to chart a middle way
between the brutal realities of industrial child labor and the social reformer’s “priceless” child
39
who had no practical function in society (Zelizer 1985).6 In Montessori’s envisioning, children
could be both priceless and contributing members of the family through engaging in domestic
tasks in the home. Notably, Montessori made no gender distinction in these tasks, giving boys
and girls the same responsibilities.
Montessori’s early work at the San Lorenzo tenement focused on some of Italy’s poorest
children. Despite coming from two-parent-families with stable housing, the children were
frequently malnourished (Montessori 1996:100). The Children’s House program was free. The
second Montessori program in Rome included “children so impoverished that two of them did
not even have homes, but slept at night with their mother in the hallway of a tenement building
on a mattress of straw” (Kramer 1976/1988:149).
Despite their poverty, these students were already screened for family stability in order to
become residents of the tenement apartments, and Montessori imposed several additional
conditions on her students. Students could be expelled for turning up to school unwashed or in
soiled clothing, being “incorrigible” or if their parents were disrespectful to staff or “destroy[ed]
through bad conduct the educational work of the institution” (Montessori 1912:70-71). Thus,
children with bad behavior, those from chaotic households or with belligerent parents were not
allowed to participate. In this way, the first Montessori classrooms inscribed a paradox that
contemporary Montessori educators still face, a desire to serve all students, alongside practices to
create stability and order that can become barriers for the poorest children.
This paradox has been particularly acute in the contradiction between two central
Montessori teachings: “following the child,” using observation and reflection to adapt the
surrounding environment to fit the needs of the child, alongside maintaining the Montessori
6
Her emphasis on work scared some American educators. Jenny Merill who introduced Montessori to American
teachers in the Kindergarten-Primary Magazine in the spring of 1910 was generally positive about the approach, but
worried “We fear she is getting to near child labor.” (Merill 1910 in Kramer 1976/1988:153)
40
method’s pedagogical fidelity (Cossentino 2006). As Montessori began to codify her method, she
moved away from the early period of observation and experimentation she practiced in San
Lorenzo. In the face of surging international demand for her methods and profiteers trying to turn
a dime on the latest educational fad, she sought to control training courses, the didactic materials
and the activities of the national Montessori societies. As biographer Kramer explains, this was
partly a financial consideration linked to Montessori’s decision, in 1910, to abandon her
lectureship at the University of Rome in order to focus her full attention on spreading her new
educational method (1976/1988). As a result, her income relied on teacher training courses and
selling Montessori materials. Montessori was also a single professional woman with a secret
illegitimate son, Mario, the product of an affair with a former colleague, who was being raised
by a foster family in the Italian countryside. After her mother’s death, Mario came to live with
Montessori, and she became the sole breadwinner for her son and her father. In part because of
these financial responsibilities, Montessori was increasingly proprietary over her method, and
she repeatedly sought to create a boundary (Lamont and Fournier 1992) around it, even if this
meant shutting down Montessori-inspired schools and training centers and limiting the method’s
expansion. From that time forward, she no longer participated in a dialogue with the broader
education research community.
Tensions in Montessori’s own philosophy led to conflicts among her followers when
putting her ideas into action. For instance, when do practitioners heed her guidance to “follow
the child” even if it means deviating from best Montessori practice? To what extent can
Montessori teachers innovate and improve to adapt to the needs of their children? Who has the
authority to give a Montessori teacher training? Montessorians have debated and wrestled with
these questions for decades, and this chapter dives into what one Montessorian called “the rich
41
stew” of Montessori, a movement united by Maria Montessori’s philosophy around education
but diverse in educators’ responses to these questions.
The next chapter serves two competing purposes. The first is to introduce the multifaceted cultural logic and context of Montessori, particularly public Montessori. While this
chapter is organized around components of the Montessori curriculum, Chapter 3 moves
historically, presenting a chronology of public Montessori in America. The second purpose of
this chapter is to demonstrate how Montessori educators work to preserve a distinctive
educational form in ways that has sometimes limited its reach in serving a high-need population
of students. In particular, it focuses on five relevant issues : (1) a focus on pedagogical purity
that has created organizational divisions and led many Montessorians to be skeptical of public
Montessori; (2) the tension between “following the child” and the insistence that children adapt
to a particular Montessori environment; (3) Montessori’s unique teacher education program,
whose location outside most universities can make it too expensive for a diverse teaching staff;
(4) Montessori materials that enable individualized learning but can also be cost prohibitive; and,
last, (5) a failure of Montessori educators to sufficiently respond to critics in the education
reform movement who argue that progressive educational methods don’t work for poor students.
In the face of these challenges, numerous examples exist of Montessori teachers working
successfully with poor students and students of color. I highlight some of these counternarratives as well.
In this chapter, I tell this story through fieldwork, archival documents, including the
Public School Montessorian published from 1988 to 2014, observations at national Montessori
conferences and interviews with Montessori educators and parents.
42
Montessori Schisms and the Quest for Pedagogical Fidelity
In 1988, Jill Otis, principal of the public Audubon Montessori School in New Orleans,
wrote in the inaugural issue of the Public School Montessorian that she felt isolated. Her
colleagues in New Orleans public schools viewed Montessori as a “‘play school’ with an air of
bemusement.” At the same time she experienced “isolation from the Montessori
community...where success tends to be greeted with the smug attitude that if it’s public, it’s not
Montessori” (Otis 1989:6). For Otis, directing a public Montessori school was a combination of
not being public enough for her public school colleagues and not Montessori enough for fellow
Montessorians. Why have public school educators and private Montessori educators been so
skeptical about public Montessori?
These concerns have been focused around preserving Montessori standards, a central
concern during Maria Montessori’s life and one that has continued to consume her followers,
leaving them both organizationally divided and skeptical of public Montessori. Montessorians
repeatedly argue over the blurred line between innovation and preservation. Writing in the 1991
Montessori Public School Consortium Newsletter, MSPC director Tim Duax writes, “Good
Montessori practice is not static and immutable, but adapts appropriately to cultures and times.”
In the same article, he concludes on a different note, “Those who wish to adapt, cull,
modify...may wish to continue their creation with an original name as well. It is within the limits
of the original Montessori framework that we can find an infinity of applications and creative
insights” (1993:5). In Duax’s framing, authentic Montessori adapts, but if it adapts too much, it
is no longer Montessori. Similarly, Lakshmi Kripalani, a Montessori consultant trained in India
by Maria Montessori and an editorial writer for the Public School Montessorian, repeatedly
editorialized about maintaining “pure” Montessori practice while also arguing that “undesirable
43
rigidity as well as that of extreme laxity exists in all types of Montessori schools. We are being
sidetracked when we defend either extreme” (Kripalani 1990). Montessorians must both
maintain high standards and not be too extreme in following them. How are Montessorians to
understand where that balance lies? While the insistence on pedagogical purity has kept
Montessori on the sidelines of the American educational landscape, it has been a great strength,
preserving Montessori’s distinctive if divided culture (Whitescarver and Cossentino 2008).
In practice, this interpretive balancing act between adaptation and tradition has
commonly been fought out through Montessori organizations, a conflict that began when Maria
Montessori withdrew support for the nascent American Montessori movement in the 1910s,
effectively shutting it down. Montessori was reintroduced on a mass scale to the United States in
the 1950s by Nancy McCormick Rambusch, who later founded the American Montessori Society
(AMS). Rambusch’s and AMS’s efforts to publicize Montessori in America, adapt it to an
American context, and bring the training of Montessori teachers into universities led to the rapid
diffusion of Montessori private schools and training centers in the early 1960s (Meyer 1975), but
speedily placed Rambusch in conflict with Mario Montessori, who now led his mother’s
organization, Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), from a base in Amsterdam. Mario
Montessori was suspicious of Rambusch’s efforts to “modernize” and Americanize Montessori
and sought to preserve his mother’s legacy.7 By 1963, after a dispute over teacher training turned
into a screaming match between Montessori trainers, Rambusch’s American Montessori Society
(AMS) formally split off from AMI (Kripalani 2005; Whitescarver and Cossentino 2008).8
7
It can be hard for a non-Montessori reader to keep AMI and AMS acronyms straight. I suggest thinking “I” for
“International” to remember AMI’s base in Europe and focus on preserving Montessori’s teachings, and to think of
the “S” as “the ‘States” to remember AMS as the American group that updates Montessori practice.
8
Povell (2009) and Whitescarver and Cossentino (2008) elaborate on the institutional divide between AMS and
AMI, and subsequent schisms leading to additional Montessori organizations such as the Montessori Foundation,
44
The Montessori split of traditionalists and reformers is not unlike other institutional
schisms divided over ideology and practice: the Protestants and the Catholics, the Freudians and
Jungians, and the Marxists and the Trotskyists. To an outside observer, the differences between
AMI, AMS and other Montessori organizations may seem minor in comparison to how much
they have in common (Cossentino 2005). But for Montessorians, the boundary lines by training
affiliation, or by “classical” or “adapted” Montessori can still be stark and generate further
disagreement (Schapiro 1989a).9 The length and intensity of one’s training (AMI is longer and
AMI teachers claim it has deeper roots in Montessori’s philosophy), whether the morning work
cycle is a full three hours or slightly shorter, whether students are always in three-year-age
groupings or two-year groupings, whether students learn to read cursive (AMI) or script (AMS)
letters are all lines of demarcation between the multiple groups. Each Montessori organization
has its own membership procedures and hosts its own national conference. AMS’s ecumenical
approach as a broad umbrella organization leads it to be accepting of Montessorians of all
training backgrounds. In contrast, some schools affiliate with a particular organization and only
hire teachers with a particular training background. I’ve heard AMI educators speak
disparagingly of other Montessori training programs, or state that they wouldn’t be able to teach
alongside an AMS-trained Montessorian. While these practices may appear exclusionary, such
orthodoxy has also enabled them to act as standard-bearers, preserving Montessori’s distinct
tradition (Whitescarver and Cossentino 2008).
AMI and AMS went to court in the 1960s over who had the right to the Montessori name,
with the judge eventually deciding that Montessori’s philosophy could not be copyrighted. In
Montessori Educational Partnerships (MEPI), and Montessori Accreditation Council for Teacher Education
(MACTE), to name only a few.
9
See in particular the “Letters to the Editor” in the 1989 Public School Montessorian, Volume 1, issue 3.
45
1989, Tim Seldin, head of the Montessori Foundation, a separate Montessori group, quipped to
Education Week, “One of the reasons Montessori hasn’t taken the world by storm is that
Montessorians love kids and hate each other” (Cohen 1989). Though the two groups (and other
subsequent Montessori splinter groups) have made efforts to build bridges starting in the 1990s,10
and statewide alliances have united Montessori practitioners in local organizing (Schapiro
1989b), at the national level for much of the past 50 years, an iron curtain has separated the
multiple groups and their organizing energies.
Just as Montessori organizations have doubted the fidelity of other Montessori groups,
they have been particularly skeptical of public Montessori for reasons of fidelity. In 1989,
Montessori educators openly debated in the AMI-USA newsletter whether public Montessori
schools could be considered “real” Montessori at all. Michael Berliner accused public
Montessori schools of “using bits and pieces of Montessori” (Cohen 1989). According to
Berliner, the public movement was “doomed to failure” and could “hasten the disappearance of
Montessori education” by putting private Montessori schools out of business (Schapiro
1990b:13). Public Montessori schools were engaged in false advertising, misleading parents.
Berliner asked, “Why should parents pay the thousands of dollars per year for private school
when they believe they’re getting the same thing in the neighborhood public school?” (Cohen
1989). Jean Miller responded in a follow-up piece that that few schools could claim the mantle of
Montessori authenticity. Even private Montessori schools could be “dilut[ed]” in their
Montessori implementation (Miller 1989). While this debate demonstrated contrasting opinions
to public Montessori within the AMI community, it shows that faithful Montessori
10
For example, in 1995, many Montessori organizations joined forces to create the Montessori Accreditation
Council for Teacher Education (MACTE), a unified accrediting body for teacher training. courses. In 2007, AMI
and AMS jointly participated in the Montessori centennial celebrations, and the Montessori Leadership
Collaborative, a working group representing all of the U.S. Montessori organizations, began meeting in 2012.
46
implementation remained the central standard by which all schools should be judged. One central
challenge that public Montessori educators in particular have faced is how to implement the
Montessori method faithfully when a student doesn’t immediately become a “Montessori child.”
Learning the Montessori ‘Habitus’
Through observation and experimentation, Maria Montessori discovered that children can
work and learn spontaneously and seemingly unregulated by the direction of an adult. Like
Montessori’s own story, many Montessori start-up narratives tell the story of several months of
chaos followed by remarkable adjustment and calm (Alston 2008; George 1912), a process
Montessori teachers call “normalization.” Eventually, this appearance of children working
independently and collaborating often looks effortless, even magical.
On the other hand, I learned firsthand how hard it was to recreate this calm classroom
environment from scratch. I was one of a group of seven parents and educators to start a public
Montessori school in New Haven in the fall of 2014. We had been inspired to create an
“intentionally diverse charter” (Wohlstetter 2016, Jabbar and Wilson 2016) in New Haven that
would recruit a population of students reflective of the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the
broader city. Before we even opened, we received an incredible 505 applications for 63 spots
(Bailey 2014). We started ambitiously with three classrooms of 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds, few of
whom had ever been in a Montessori environment. We hired young energetic teachers from
around the country, most of whom were in their first year of teaching. We staggered the entry of
the 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds over the course of a month in August so that each age group would
have a few weeks to acclimate to the classrooms.
47
Two months later, the classrooms were chaotic. A few students were physically violent
and making verbal threats to staff. Five staff members quit in the first two months, and two of the
three founding teachers, left after the first year. As we struggled to deal with the actions of our
most behaviorally challenged students, we addressed the gap between our ideal of helping all
children, and the reality that the disturbance caused by a handful of young children could be
enough to jeopardize our fledgling school. In the two years since, the school has hired veteran
teachers and developed a trauma-informed care and wellness program to support students, but we
still have many areas of improvement. Clearly, starting a Montessori program from scratch is not
only about creating an environment and adding students. This section will discuss some of the
hidden work by which children are oriented into the discipline of the Montessori classroom, and
the challenges of children who struggle to work well in that space.
The term habitus, developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1996), is used by
scholars to describe how people learn to belong in a particular setting. And indeed, children in a
Montessori environment have a Montessori habitus, undergoing a strict but largely hidden
behavioral training focused on order and quiet. This training starts at age 3 with walking quietly,
sitting down quietly, and picking up a chair quietly. Every action is broken down into a minute
number of steps that are demonstrated in silence. For example, as part of my month-long
Montessori assistant teacher training, our teacher asked us to explain how we sit on the floor.
Most of us struggled to respond. She demonstrated sitting to us, breaking it down into four or
five steps. We stood up and sat down, again and again, trying to break our movements down into
the discrete steps. We looked ungainly, nineteen adults trying to slowly stand up and sit down.
Then we practiced sitting down in a chair and carrying a chair the Montessori way: sideways,
48
one hand holding the backrest of the chair, the other hand holding the seat.11 We learned to set
the chair down delicately, first two legs, and then the other two legs. We practiced walking
across the room, walking across the room holding one object, and walking across the room
holding another object, just as the children would.12 We learned to roll and unroll our mats with
origami-like precision. We learned that taking out and putting away materials is the first and last
step of every lesson. Most traditional schools don’t explicitly teach children how to do these
things, but for children to operate in a Montessori classroom they are fundamental. Before
children are given the freedom to choose their workspace at will, they have learned the
parameters of how they must move around the space and how to respect the workspaces of other
children.
Like explicitly teaching children to move carefully and keep the classroom clean, another
component that creates the appearance of effortless control is that the older children in the
classroom help model this habitus, creating positive peer pressure for the younger children to
work correctly in the Montessori environment. In an established Montessori classroom, twothirds of the class remain in the space each year, meaning that only eight to ten new students
transition in the fall, creating a pre-existing classroom culture or habitus. Elm City Montessori
school made the decision to bring 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds in together, and as a result, the
classrooms struggled to develop that culture from scratch. At one of my research sites, Vine
Montessori in Hartford, the principal got permission from the district to create an under-enrolled
11
The practice becomes to ingrained in Montessori educators that I’ve actually been chastised in gatherings of
Montessori adults for forgetting to carry my chair properly.
12
One of my early childhood memories is from a Montessori preschool where we listened to Smetna’s Moldau
Variations and practiced walking around an oval line on the floor while holding a tray with a small glass pitcher.
“Walking the line” is a fundamental Montessori exercise to practice walking quietly, carefully and while holding
materials. Even now when I hear the Moldau, I get a visceral sense-memory of the concentration I needed to
balance, not spill the water and follow the line.
49
“start-up classroom” that included only twelve 3-year olds the first year, and added a cohort of
students by each age group as it grew. This slower growth preserved students’ gradual
acclimation in the classroom and ensured that the oldest students had enough experience to
model the classroom habitus. The downside was that the classroom was only at partial capacity
for two years when numerous students were on the waiting list.
This emphasis on acclimation to a Montessori classroom has left many public Montessori
educators to debate whether children who do not develop the Montessori habitus early on will be
able to adapt, particularly when children regularly move around in public school. One national
Montessori educator told me that to start children in Montessori at age 5 was “just too late. It’s
just too hard for them” (Field Notes, July 16, 2014). David Kahn, the head of the North
American Montessori Teachers Association, echoed this belief, alleging that the “most serious”
compromise made by public schools was that “children without Montessori background are
admitted at any age throughout the kindergarten and elementary years” (Kahn 2013). Others
draw the line in later grades. Mary Gudmundson, a public school educator in Minneapolis, spoke
out against her district’s policy of enrolling children from the outside to fill vacancies in the
upper elementary grades. These new students became “wandering child[ren],” unable to work in
the Montessori environment, suffering a loss of self-esteem and “causing problems for the other
students, the teacher and finally the Montessori school” (Gudmundson 1988:2). Debra Clark, a
public Montessori teacher in Gresham, Oregon, suggested new students be given a probationary
“transitional year” where they would be given extra support before receiving a “final evaluation”
and “recommendation for a permanent placement.” Clark proposed that “a child who is unable to
adapt would not be forced to adjust” (Clark 1989). In contrast, Paul Epstein, who served as
Montessori coordinator for the public Montessori program in Prince George’s County, Maryland,
50
called for Montessorians to be adaptive in turn. “Although we would like children to start at two
or three, we must not turn away children of seven, eight or nine who do not fit our trained
fancies” (Epstein 1991:17). To Epstein, public Montessori schools must adapt to the older
children, not vice versa.
Schools have developed a variety of responses to enrolling students in later years. In
Hartford, two of the public Montessori schools initially only allowed late entrants after age 3 if
they had “prior Montessori experience,” a policy eliminated in 2009 by the State Commissioner
on the grounds that it was most likely to bring in students who had been able to attend a private
Montessori preschool and therefore was inequitable. A 2008 survey of 88 public Montessori
leaders found that 24 percent incorporated prior Montessori experience, sibling preference or
neighborhood location into their admissions criteria (Murray and Peyton 2008). Numerous other
public Montessori schools I researched only admitted students at age 3, making an applicant in
upper grades unlikely to be admitted.13 While this policy worked to preserve the stability and
harmony of a Montessori classroom, it had the unintended consequence of excluding families
who learned about the program later on or families who frequently changed schools. School
choice research has shown that parents less likely to be informed and more likely to move are the
poorest families (Pérez 2011, Pattillo 2015).
In this carefully maintained classroom environment, how do Montessori teachers deal
with bad behavior when it occurs? One way that schools have asked children and families to
adapt is by limiting the classroom time of the youngest students to three or fewer hours a day.
Both Birch and Vine Montessori in Hartford followed a common Montessori practice, used even
13
Limiting enrollment to entry years is common in non-Montessori settings as well: many traditional charter
schools and several suburban districts in Hartford’s Open Choice program also restrict admittance to the entry level
grade on the grounds that they want students to experience (and the school to be accountable for) the complete
academic program.
51
in public Montessori schools, of offering only a three-hour preschool for 3 and 4 year olds,
sending them home before lunch, a schedule that screens out all but the most dedicated working
parents. I also learned that some children attended for an even shorter amount of time as they
transitioned to the school. One October morning, while observing a classroom at Birch, at 9:30, a
white male assistant ushered four black boys into their coats. He and I followed as he directed
them down the hall to be picked up by their parents. “Why are they leaving?” I asked him.
“This is as long as they are able to stay.”
The students who were leaving after an hour were most of the 3-year-old black boys in
the classroom. To stay in the program, their parents had to be willing to provide alternate
childcare for the first several months (Field Notes October 17, 2013). In this way, practices in
theory designed to adapt to the needs of the child maintain the stability of the Montessori
classroom and exclude students who could benefit the most from the time in school.
Others call for greater adaptability on the part of the teacher and the classroom.
Montessori educators often repeat Montessori’s statement that “[A child’s misbehaviors] are
merely his reactions to an environment that has become inadequate” (Montessori 1948/2008:4).
In other words, there are no badly behaving children, only environments that are not well
adapted to them. In theory, a Montessori classroom should be able to be adapted to the needs of
all children. But as Paul Epstein observed in the Public School Montessorian, “How often do we
argue not every child is a “Montessori” child? For these identified children, we often say their
needs lie outside the scope of our training and classroom experience. But what kind of rationale
is this, given the commitment of public schooling to educate all children?” (Epstein 1991:17).
Echoing Epstein, several public Montessori principals told me that they struggled with teachers
asking to remove or expel students with challenging behaviors, practices they felt went against
52
Montessori’s philosophy and their public school status. Public Montessorians have also
developed practical guidelines for “managing aggressive, hyperactive children” that they have
shared with their colleagues (Noble 1988), and called for more teacher training to support them
in classroom management (Somer 1988).
Who Becomes a Montessori Educator
Just as Montessori educators debate following the child or adapting the child to a
Montessori classroom, who becomes a Montessori teacher contains tensions between
inclusiveness and elitism. Montessori teachers are uniquely trained to individually differentiate
for all of their students, something the teacher preparation program I attended at Oxford
University talked about in theory but never really taught us in practice. Yet the greatest challenge
of this rich, syncretic world of Montessori teaching is that its autonomy from education schools
and government certification bureaus has perpetuated its elite enrollment, limiting the
availability, diversity and cultural competency of available teachers, particularly in the public
sector.
Ten minutes observing a Vine school primary classroom of 3- to 6-year-old students
gives a sense of some of the ways Montessori teachers observe and adapt to their students. As I
entered the room towards 10:30 am one spring morning, Ms. Donoghue, the teacher, a white
woman with gray hair, told me in a voice just above a whisper, “You’ve arrived at the most
exciting time of the year.” A group of nine children was observing a butterfly chrysalis that was
hatching in a glass container. In their excitement, they leaned in until they were almost on top of
the glass container, and the teacher and assistant gently guided them back to a distance so that
other children around them could see. The children watched and made observations to each
53
other, and Ms. Donoghue stood back watching the group, resting one hand across her stomach
and the other on her chin. As the students talked, Ms. Donoghue and her assistant wrote down
notes recording their comments. One child said he wanted to squash the butterfly. Ms. Donoghue
didn’t respond. Other students stepped in, talking about what to name the butterfly. The
children’s voices rose slightly. The assistant quietly bent down and put her finger over her lips.
The classroom quieted again. Later, Ms. Donoghue conversed with the students about the
butterfly. Across the room, the students’ voices were audible, but the teacher’s voice was not.
After ten minutes, Ms. Donoghue directed students to clean up. In the transition time, one
child began moving around the room imitating the movement of a butterfly, crawling on the
floor. Others imitated her. Then they shifted to being frogs. Instead of directly intervening, the
teacher and assistant came and sat quietly in a circle. The teacher directed one child to count and
turn off the lights. She narrated, preparing students for a story to be read aloud. “I see we have a
real butterfly listening to our story of the butterfly.” When students were slow to join the circle,
Ms. Donoghue took them gently by the hand and brought them into the circle, and then the
assistant began to read.
This episode lacks any of the hallmarks of a structured Montessori lesson, but what made
it memorable was the way a moment of excitement was shared in near silence. The teacher and
assistant stepped back, occasionally shaping or correcting, but otherwise let the children focus
their attention and share their observations of the transformation into a butterfly. In a short span
of ten minutes, though no explicit lessons were taught, Ms. Donoghue’s classroom demonstrated
several foundational components of a Montessori classroom.
First, Ms. Donoghue and her assistant spent much of the time observing what the students
were doing. In any Montessori classroom, at various points through the day, teachers sit still and
54
observe in a half-dozen observation chairs placed in strategic locations around the classroom,
striving to notice and respond to the needs of each student individually. As was explained during
my Montessori assistant teacher training, “When you walk into a traditional classroom, you see
the blackboard and you can’t miss the teacher. Walk into a Montessori classroom – most of the
time you have to look to find the teacher. Because it’s the children who are active in the
classroom” (Field Notes, May 13, 2013). Ms. Donoghue was both powerful and peripheral,
teaching children in individual and small group lessons using specific Montessori materials, and
then working to be unobtrusive in the progress of student learning.
When Ms. Donoghue and her assistant crouched down to speak softly to children at their
level, they were emphasizing the value of quiet, unobtrusive communication. As Cossentino
observed about Montessori instruction, “Teacher talk is minimal – teachers modeled less how to
talk than how to remain quiet.” (2006:78). This style of teaching was the polar opposite to
teacher’s “teaching like their hair’s on fire” (Esquith 2007), to use the title of a popular education
memoir where a star teacher holds the class’ attention through sheer power of personality and
performance. Instead, in a Montessori classroom, quiet and unobtrusiveness were key virtues. In
the Montessori world, it’s a great compliment to call someone’s class “very quiet” (Field Notes,
September 3, 2013).
Lastly, when the boy talked about wanting to squash the butterfly, Ms. Donoghue and the
assistant did not immediately intervene, waiting to see how the conversation played out as the
other students changed to a less violent topic of naming the butterfly. Ultimately, the assistant
only gave the students a visual cue to stay quiet. Intervening might have disrupted the flow of the
students’ observation and conversation, which naturally changed topic. This lack of intervention
underlies a broader Montessori practice of observing without judgment, working to support each
55
student without making conclusions about their ability to learn. In other cases, this practice
translates into teachers using observational language when they want students to do something.
For example, in another classroom, instead of chastising a child for spilling water, a Montessori
teacher remarked, “I see a lot of water. Sometimes a spill is a good thing – it means we can clean
it up. Where do we keep the towels?” The child went to get a cleaning towel from a large stack
in the room. “Do you see more water? Now is it nice and dry? Good. Let’s go on to the next
thing” (Field Notes June 4, 2013). Through this neutral observation, the teacher was explicitly
guiding the child in creating an independent correction, figuring out a strategy to respond to a
spill, measuring the impact of his cleanup and finishing the task.
Through observation, practiced unobtrusiveness and observation without judgment, a
Montessori teacher works to learn and adapt to all students. Laura Turner-Essel, a black
Montessori parent who has blogged about why black parents should choose Montessori
education, argues this emphasis on all students as individuals is particularly important for black
students: “The individualized, careful attention they provide indicates to children that they are
each seen, heard, and valued for who they are, and who they might become” (Turner-Essel
2015). In Turner-Essel’s perspective, Montessori teachers’ training to work with each child as an
individual holds particular power for educating students of color.
While it sounds like it might be easy enough to adopt these practices, training to become
a Montessori teacher is a demanding process, ranging from three months to a full academic year
as trainees master what educational anthropologist Jacqueline Cossentino has calls a “distinctive
set of cultural scripts” and “rituals” (2005:213). The exact cultural scripts and rituals that form
Montessori practices are disputed among the competing Montessori organizations, and who is
authorized to train Montessori teachers remains “the nuclear issue” between the groups, as one
56
Montessorian explained to me (Field Notes October 25 2014). Even so, Cossentino argues that
“even the most divergent Montessori training programs have more in common with one another
than either has to mainstream teacher education” (2009:521).
What makes Montessori training distinctive, Cossentino continues, is that it is organized
as a “craft tradition” like ballet, musical or culinary training. Montessori teachers first master a
complex series of skills (in the case of elementary training, a series of 2,000 individual lessons)
that they compile in an album and practice presenting to students (2009). These lessons are
highly ritualized, with color-coded materials laid out on each tray “like a surgeon’s or dentist’s
tools” (Chattin-McNichols 1992:15) and a precise sequence of steps that involve taking the tray
off the shelf, walking to a place to work, unrolling a mat, completing the work, and then cleaning
up afterward and re-rolling the mat. Cossentino explains, “From the way a child learns to roll and
unroll a mat or the intricate choreography of a lesson in hand washing to the larger ceremonies of
the Great Lessons, ritualized activity is among the most distinctive features of Montessori
education” (2005:213). Even basic lessons can have upwards of twenty discrete steps. While
some react negatively to the number of steps, others argue that the explicit breakdown works to
“increase the chances of success for the child” (Chattin-McNichols 1992:15). A teacher’s
insistence on the precision of these practices is part of what helps keep a Montessori classroom
orderly and give students independence.
And though such training may seem rote, once teachers have mastered the material and
delivery of lessons, then they are able to innovate, particularly in finding the best way to connect
children to all parts of the curriculum, particularly the work that children avoid. Cossentino
elaborates, “For the Montessori teacher, improvisation becomes the ability to direct large, mixed-
57
age classrooms in which children pursue individualized study using a large array of didactic
materials” (2009:524-525).
Yet if Montessori teachers hold particular promise in their craft training to offer students
individualized autonomy, a feature that could potentially benefit students of color in particular,
one challenge to this rich, syncretic world of Montessori teaching is that its autonomy from
education schools and government certification bureaus has perpetuated its elite enrollment,
limiting the availability and diversity of teachers, particularly in the public sector. As a result,
Montessori teachers are overwhelmingly white with limited exposure to culturally relevant
pedagogy (Ladson-Billings 1994) and classroom management, issues also facing public school
teachers as a group (Emdin 2016, Gay 2010, Ladson-Billings 1994).
Part of the challenge in increasing and diversifying the Montessori teaching profession
has been that the teacher training system functions largely outside the university system and
limits who can be trained and certified. Initially, Maria Montessori developed a teacher training
system structured around personal lectures and the reading of her books, and after her death, the
same lecture-book format was led by those she had personally trained. Training centers required
the direct approval of Maria Montessori and her son Mario and were established separate from
universities. As discussed earlier, control of teacher training was an underlying factor in
numerous American Montessori organizational splits. Through Nancy McCormick Rambusch’s
desire to modernize Montessori teacher training and her Catholic connections, a small number of
AMS-affiliated training centers around the country have relationships with education schools at
mostly Catholic universities offering academic degrees and a Montessori certificate. Still, 95 of
the 108 of American training centers are separate from any education school or college (Teach
Montessori 2016). This institutional separation has a direct impact on who can take Montessori
58
training. Without a university affiliation, students cannot take out federal loans to pay for the
$10,000 program, further limiting access.
The fact that the training is separate from colleges of education also limits the ability of
Montessori educators to get state certification for their training, a prerequisite for teaching in the
public schools. Though the Montessori Public Policy Initiative, a collaboration between AMS,
AMI and state-level Montessori alliances, began a concerted effort in 2014 to achieve state-bystate recognition of Montessori certification, only four states (Connecticut, South Carolina,
Wisconsin and Ohio) offer some recognition of the Montessori certification for teacher licensure.
At the other extreme, Montessori trained educators in Illinois need 126 additional credit hours in
order to become certified.
As a result, public Montessori schools have historically struggled and continue to
struggle to find teachers who are both Montessori trained and publicly certified (Bauserman
1988). In the 1990s, with magnet Montessori expansion in full force, some districts like Miami
and Dallas responded by setting up district Montessori training programs or partnerships with
local universities (Schapiro 1990a). Still, the cost of such trainings continued to challenge district
decisions. Octavio Visedio, superintendent of Miami public schools in the 1990s, viewed public
Montessori as a “critical strategy” that would “pay off in big dividends down the line” and
created a nine site public Montessori preschool program. But he reported, “Training of teachers
is extremely costly…It is an internal obstacle I face every time I talk with my school board and
my own staff about expanding the program” (Schapiro 1992:1). The shortage of teachers for
public Montessori schools continues today. In 2015, a total of 108 American Montessori training
centers graduated 2,850 trained teachers for an estimated 4,000 public and private Montessori
schools (Pelton 2016b). The National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector estimates that
59
public Montessori schools search for 1,000 teachers annually (Cossentino 2016). Even in South
Carolina, a state with a high level of state coordination through its 42 public Montessori
programs and public school certification for Montessori training, in 2013-14, only 69 percent of
public Montessori teachers had completed training for the level they were currently teaching
(although a further 28 percent were in the process of training) (Furman University 2015). Back in
Hartford, Birch’s principal routinely flew in teachers from other parts of the country, particularly
in the harder-to-staff upper elementary positions.
The cost and bureaucratic barriers to becoming a public Montessori teacher contribute to
both the shortage of public Montessori teachers and also the whiteness of the profession, which
like teaching more broadly, skews white and female. Principal Rae Rosen, of Buffalo’s Bennett
Park Public Montessori, explained the absence of teachers of color as primarily due to “the cost,
length and distance of training program requirements. The problem is further exacerbated when
school districts fail to absorb the training costs for prospective volunteers” (Rosen 1990). So far
there are limited efforts to even measure the extent of the pipeline problem. None of the three
Montessori organizations (AMI, AMS and MACTE) that oversee the majority of Montessori
teacher training programs collect data on the racial/ethnic diversity of their teacher trainees or
their broader membership (Beste 2015, Hofland 2015, Pelton 2016a). A National Center for
Montessori in the Public Sector (NCMPS) initial survey of 311 teacher trainees in 2016 found
that 69 percent of respondents were white and 90 percent were female (NCMPS 2016b), likely a
more diverse enrollment than previous years, but still majority white and female. Ginny Riga,
who was the South Carolina state coordinator for its system of 43 public Montessori schools and
a leading national Montessorian involved in public policy initiatives, told me, “The whole
Montessori movement is white, parents and teachers especially. It’s a big problem with the
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movement” (Field Notes, August 3, 2013). While, as Chapter 3 argues, Montessorians of color
have made integral contributions to the Montessori movement, both insiders and outsiders
perceive American Montessori as a majority white community.
This lack of diversity has consequences in the public school classroom, particularly when
coupled with the fact that few Montessori training programs include training on testing and
assessment, cultural responsiveness (Emdin 2016, Griner 2012, Ladson-Billings 1994), antibias/anti-racism (where educators learn to discuss race and social problems in the classroom)
(Pollock 2008), special education and families dealing with trauma.14 Without such training,
Montessori teachers lack even a lexicon to talk about these issues in their classrooms. At an
AMS conference session on Montessori public policy in 2015, Dale Mogaji, one of only a
handful of Montessori principals of color around the country, asked the panelists about plans to
teach cultural competency as part of Montessori training. According to Mogaji, “People may
have the [Montessori] credential, but it doesn’t mean they have the competency to serve the
children in that school. Is there a piece that can be put in place so that cultural literacy is
required?” (Field Notes March 13, 2015). During the course of my fieldwork, a dozen principals
echoed Mogaji’s sentiment that Montessori teachers were missing key training in working with
diverse students in the public sector.
On one instance, I observed directly how a veteran white Montessori educator could use
disparaging language with a room full of students of color, contrary to the fundamental
Montessori principles of using respectful language with students. A plaque in the principal’s
office told me this teacher had been named the school’s Teacher of the Year the previous year. In
her classroom, however, she spoke condescendingly to a group of primarily black and Latino
14
In 2016, AMS President Joyce Pickering, in an article titled “Montessori for All Children,” called for AMS to add
specific training for special needs students (Pickering 2016).
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students. To a black boy she said, “Come with me. I’m going to choose for you since you’ve
been unable to choose for yourself. And you’re not going to say, yes or no or I did it before.” To
the assistant, the teacher disparaged the student, “This is not even his work. It’s way too easy for
him.” Turning to the student, she said threateningly, “Now sit down and finish it!” Turning to the
rest of the students, she spoke loudly, “Do your work! Find something to do. Work work work!”
The children, commanded to choose work, instead quietly dawdled, turning aimlessly in circles
and drawing out tasks like resistant factory workers. The white teacher’s language to a group of
primarily students of color suggested a lack of respect and doubt that her students could work
independently.
Recent research on Montessori teachers suggest that, like this incident, Montessori
educators may suffer some of the same biases as traditional educators. Education researchers
have found that white teachers have lower expectations for black and Latino students compared
with teachers of color (Gershonen, Holt and Papageorge 2016). White teachers are more likely to
discipline students of color than their white peers and with harsher punishments (Ferguson 2000,
Lewis and Diamond 2015). Stansbury (2014) observed teachers in a Midwestern public
Montessori school and found they were more likely to identify students of color as
troublemakers, whereas white male students had actually caused the greatest disruption in their
classes. Brown and Steele’s statistical study (2016) reiterated these findings: while public
Montessori magnet schools in a Southern city had lower levels of racial discipline
disproportionality compared to their traditional counterparts, students of color were still
suspended at higher rates than white students.
The dominance of white Montessori educators can also create challenges for Montessori
teachers of color. Trondson (2016) found black Montessori educators could sometimes feel
62
isolated and marginalized in the profession, with few opportunities to have honest conversations
around race. When Darcell Butler, a 24-year-veteran black public Montessori educator, delivered
a keynote address to the 2016 Montessori for Social Justice conference,15 she shared how she had
prevailed as a teacher despite experiencing racial discrimination from her trainers and school
colleagues that had almost caused her to leave the profession (2016). These stories and studies
suggest the need for further research into the experience of students and teachers of color in
Montessori education, and for conversation and training in the Montessori profession about
racial bias and how to diversify the teacher pipeline.
Despite these challenges, a small but significant cohort of Montessori teachers of color
work in public and community Montessori schools, often syncretically combining Montessori
with cultural pride and social justice teaching (Trondson 2016). Linda Alston, a black
Montessori teacher recognized with several national prizes for her teaching, and former director
of the Montessori Child Development Centers in Denver, Colorado, writes about taking children
of all racial backgrounds to an African supply store to purchase kente cloth for a school
performance (Alston 2008). Koren Clark (2016), diversity coordinator at Golden Oak Montessori
School in Hayward, California, created a businesses, Know Thyself Inc., selling Montessori
materials to teach racial diversity. Trisha Moquino created Keres Children’s Learning Center, a
bilingual community Montessori program on the Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico teaching
cultural and linguistic preservation in a Montessori context.
To make Montessori teacher training more accessible at the national level, the National
Center for Montessori in the Public Sector (NCMPS), an organization formed in 2013 to support
public Montessori schools, has developed Teach Montessori, a web portal that acts as a
15
This conference and its relation to my research is discussed in Appendix B.
63
clearinghouse connecting interested candidates to relevant training centers. As of 2016, Teach
Montessori staff were attending job fairs for college graduates around the Northeast, representing
a first attempt to directly recruit Montessori trainees rather than relying on more passive
enrollment from those who already know about Montessori. In Hartford, Vine and Birch
Montessori leaders created an internship program to create a local staff pipeline and, in
particular, to recruit candidates of color. Interns are paid $10 an hour to work as support staff at
the school, train as assistants and may be hired as classroom assistants the following year.
Several such assistants then begin training as guides at the local AMI training center. Meanwhile,
Breakthrough Montessori, a charter Montessori set to open in Washington DC in the fall of 2016,
has an embedded teacher training program that gives trainees experience working with a racially
and socioeconomically diverse student population. These efforts are, at this point, modest, but
point towards steps to diversify the Montessori teacher pipeline and give trainee teachers
experience in urban Montessori schools.
Montessori Materials for All Children?
As we have seen with the challenge of finding culturally responsive teachers able to work
with diverse public school classrooms, and the challenge of having students adapt to the
Montessori habitus of working independently for a three-hour block of time, the use of
expensive and breakable Montessori materials emphasizes the purity of the Montessori tradition,
sometimes at the expense of greater accessibility. Montessori materials were first designed for
special needs children, so in theory, they should be highly adaptable for use with children of all
backgrounds. Montessori’s first classroom of children in the Roman slums in 1907 was allowed
to experiment while she observed them. She tried all types of materials including toys until she
64
arrived at her preferred set of materials. Montessori designed the materials to be self-corrective,
meaning that there is only one way to work with them.16 But as Montessori sought to limit others
from profiting off her method, she also restricted the approved suppliers of her materials. Today
Montessori teachers disagree over which Montessori supplier can be used and how much
Montessori equipment is necessary for a “full complement” of Montessori materials (NCMPS
2016a). As a result, this focus on the authenticity of the materials can make creating a
Montessori classroom seem prohibitively expensive, limiting districts that would open
Montessori schools and leading school staff to sometimes discipline children who damage
equipment.
To some extent, Montessori materials are the signature items that distinguish Montessori
from other progressive forms of education with similar practices like large classrooms and
student-led learning with hands-on materials. Montessori practitioners speak reverently of the
Montessori materials and teach the children to handle them with extreme care. Our trainer told us
when a classroom is working well, the tiniest pink cube (about the size of green pea) at the top of
the pink tower should be able to sit undisturbed by children moving around it. She criticized
teachers who resort to keeping their smallest pink tower cube in a small box so that it won’t get
lost, suggesting they were either not in control of their classrooms or didn’t have full confidence
in their students (Field Notes May 28 2014). Similarly, Cossentino explains the white floor mat
symbolizes order in its capacity to delineate the proper organization of the classroom.
The repetitive motions of rolling and unrolling, of carefully arranging materials on the
mat, and of protecting work as it is laid out on the mat ritualizes the act of concentration.
Independence is ritualized when, without adult prompt, the children manage the care and
arrangement of the classroom’s mats. And the precision with which the mats are treated,
the attention to how and where they are placed, also symbolizes respect for both the
environment and the objects that are placed in it. (2005:229)
16
Montessori teachers vary in their willingness to let teachers modify the materials. At both Birch and Vine,
students who improvised new uses for materials were quickly corrected. In other schools, students are sometimes
allowed to use modified materials if they are working with purpose (Chattin-McNichols 1992).
65
Like the rolling and unrolling of the mat, children are taught to protect the materials and preserve
the order in the classroom. But the importance of the materials goes further than that.
Montessori educators are eager to demonstrate that use of Montessori materials confers
particular benefits. Psychologist Angelene Lillard’s Montessori: the Science Behind the Genius
argues that Montessori materials and practices are remarkably similar to the best practices
developed out of cognitive science research (2005). She has also demonstrated greater learning
gains for children in a “fully-implemented” Montessori classroom as opposed to a “modified”
classroom where materials are supplemented with puzzles and games (2012, 2016). Another
researcher tried to find a link between children washing a table as a practical life exercise and
their ability to defer eating a marshmallow as a test of self-control (Blahut 2013). The results
were inconclusive, but the study itself demonstrates how much weight Montessorians put on the
power of working with the materials.
Montessori educators speak reverentially about the power and beauty of Montessori
materials. Educators buy pink tower pins, miniature bead chain earrings, and t-shirts with inside
jokes on mat rolling from vendors like Barbie Alderman of Mad about Montessori.
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Image 4: Mad about Montessori “This is how we roll” t-shirts.
Photo credit: Mira Debs
Lost or destroyed Montessori materials can evoke a dramatic response (Debs 2013). In one
conference session, the entire audience gasped when an educator reported that a nearby public
school district had ended its Montessori program throwing all the Montessori materials in the
dumpster (Field Notes August 2, 2013).
This love of Montessori materials doesn’t come cheaply. Maria Montessori’s
organization, AMI, recognizes only three manufacturers for Montessori materials, the Dutch
Nienhuis company, the Italian Gonzagarredi supplier and the Japanese Matsumoto company.
David Kahn’s 1990 handbook Implementing Montessori in the Public Sector, included a
classroom supply list of Nienhuis materials, implicitly recommending this supplier alone (Kahn
1990, Janke 1990), and many public Montessori schools opt to pay for the expensive Nienhuis
equipment and feel challenged by the cost of the materials (Murray and Peyton 2008). Other
Montessorians are more willing to use the numerous American suppliers as well as suppliers
67
around the world. Today, buying a classroom full of Nienhuis materials can cost up to $50,000,
while Indian or Chinese suppliers can provide a similar set for as little as $1,500. Moreover,
researcher Carolyn Daoust found that the quality of Montessori materials varied widely by
supplier, independent of their cost (2015). Others improvise, buying used Montessori materials
on Craigslist or the Facebook group Montessori Materials for Sale with 12,239 members. Myke
Gemkow, who opened a small community Montessori program, Columbia Community
Montessori that offered free tuition for half of the students, began the first year with no
Montessori materials aside from practical life materials found in his home. As the program
became established, he raised money to buy Montessori equipment (Field Notes June 21, 2014).
Others suggest Montessorians can overemphasize the importance of the materials. Franco
Albanesi, writing in the Public School Montessorian, argued many overzealous American
Montessorians trained in Europe placed a “halo” around the materials, failing “to notice the
difference between the Montessori method and Montessori materials” (1989). Instead, he argued
that Montessori had closely derived her elementary curriculum from early 20th-century Italian
school textbooks, constructing three-dimensional models from the textbook illustrations. Since
Montessori herself borrowed ideas, contemporary Montessorians should feel free to develop their
own materials, or he argued, with some self-interest, they could purchase them from his
company (1989). Similarly, Lakshmi Kripalani, who trained with Maria Montessori in India,
explained that “well-trained Montessori teachers utilize the materials as a means and not an end
in itself (Kripalani 1989).
To demonstrate how “the basics of the Montessori method work, even...without technical
Montessori materials,” Kripalani remembered how, shortly after her Montessori training, she
became a refugee upon the Partition of India and Pakistan. At the Bombay refugee camp, the
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children had nothing to do and were getting in trouble for stealing chapatis, similar to the
original Italian children in San Lorenzo. Kripalani organized 30 parents to clear space under a
shed, outlining six classrooms in the dirt using white and yellow lines of flour and turmeric.
There were no funds for purchasing supplies, so “the ground was our writing board. The large
branches were our writing instruments...we used flower buds as math units, small branches as
tens, half open buds as hundreds and flowers were our thousands” (Kripalani 1989). The children
“prospered and flourished,” and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of the British Viceroy of
India, came to visit and marveled, “I wish I were a child to have the honor of being part of this
privileged and delighted group” (Kripalani 1989.) Kripalani’s Montessori training allowed her to
take the principles of Montessori’s philosophy and adapt them to the circumstances of a refugee
camp. Today, similar work continues through AMI’s Educateurs Sans Frontières (Educators
without borders) (2016), inspired by Doctors without Borders, and includes Montessori
educators who provide early childcare in Haiti, for Australian indigenous and remote
communities, at a Kenyan refugee camp and in the public schools of Thailand.
Finally, another challenge of working with expensive Montessori materials is that
Montessori educators both expect children to break materials and are sometimes dismayed when
they do so intentionally. Montessorians differ from most educators in their willingness to let
even two and a half year olds handle breakable materials like glass cups, plates and pitchers. To
Montessorians, children work with fragile objects. If they break them, they clean them up and
learn for the following time. As my trainer argued, if a child is always given plastic, they think,
“If I am always giving things that are unbreakable, what is the need for me to be careful? (Field
Notes, May 28 2013).
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Yet the willingness to let things get broken also has its limits. During my research, I
heard from a number of leaders of newly opened public Montessori schools around the country
about how students uninitiated to Montessori were being particularly hard on the materials. One
described her classroom materials as being “just trashed by the end of the year” (June 25, 2015).
In one school, a preschool child ripped out a sink. Several public Montessori schools include
explicit penalties for students who destroy materials. Garfield Montessori Magnet School in
Decatur, Illinois has policies that explain “If a child damages or destroys materials, the
parent/guardian is responsible for the cost of replacement” (Garfield Montessori School 2016).
Philadelphia Montessori Charter School’s disciplinary policy notes that a student can be expelled
for “vandalism to school property” (2012). Despite an expectation that materials will get broken,
Montessori leaders sometimes give harsh penalties to students intentionally damaging materials.
Montessori educators value Montessori-specific materials, but debate their importance in
relation to the philosophy as well as the types of materials and suppliers needed. When children
work well with the materials, the result can be a preternaturally calm environment filled with
industrious children. But the high cost of many of the materials makes them prohibitively
expensive to purchase and replace, dissuading some who would like to open a public Montessori.
Montessorians can also respond punitively to children who do not yet share their love of the
materials.
Montessori’s Effectiveness for Students of Color: the Structure vs. Freedom Debate
Finally, alongside Montessori practices that limit the access of students in public
Montessori programs, Montessori has been criticized by some educators and parents for being
70
ineffective for children of color, a topic I analyze in more detail from the parent perspective in
Chapter 6.
A parent demonstration in 2014 in Memphis, Tennessee provides a vivid example of this
criticism. Ibinka Kelly was one of a group of 168 mostly black and Latino parents who turned
out to a Memphis school board meeting to protest plans to turn her child’s underperforming
elementary school into a charter Montessori school as part of a turnaround plan. She had earlier
tried a preschool Montessori program and hadn’t liked it. Referring to the other families in the
room, Kelly commented, “Our kids needs structure. The parents in Frayser [Elementary] aren’t
strong-minded and strong-willed enough to stay on top of their child’s education [as required at a
Montessori school]” (Burnette, 2014). This call for black students to have “structure” has a long
contentious history in education reform, and the lack of systematic evidence to the contrary
undermines the spread of Montessori in the public sector.
The call for black students to have structured education dates back to post-Emancipation
black schools that sought to educate black students for menial work (Anderson 1988, TreuhaftAli 2016). As part of the Civil Rights Movement, education leaders in the 1960s called for
progressive teaching to communities of color (Kohl 1998), but others were critical of their
methods for black students in the U.S. (Featherstone 1976) and working-class students in the
U.K. (Sharp and Green 1975). In one of most influential critiques, “Skills and Other Dilemmas
of a Progressive Black Educator” (1986), Delpit reflects on teaching in a multiracial classroom in
Philadelphia. Despite her progressive teaching techniques, she realized that her black students
were not advancing alongside their white classmates. She eventually concluded that the teachers
at her school using traditional, structured methods were more effective. Others joined the critique
that progressive education had not concentrated enough on helping low-income students develop
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skills and content (Hirsch 2010) and that poor students in particular needed strong “paternalistic”
schools to explicitly learn elements of middle-class culture (Whitman 2008).
In the last 20 years, education reformers have largely adopted the structure-skills
paradigm, creating highly structured “No Excuses” charter schools like KIPP, Achievement
First, and Harlem’s Village Academy, which combine high expectations with a strict disciplinary
policy (Carter 2000; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2004). According to this educational vision, to
argue that other factors like poverty are the central contributors is to make excuses and create
low expectations for students. For example, Carter critiques progressive educational approaches
for letting children work at their own pace, a central tenet of Montessori:
It is assumed that the child knows what is best for his personal growth and that he will
not learn well unless he first feels good about his learning. By this way of thinking, a
child grows into educational proficiency in a way that is “developmentally appropriate”
for him. This model lets everyone off the hook. Not only does the teacher not have to
teach, but also it is appropriate for certain children not to excel. (2000:29)
According to Carter, individualized learning allows teachers to lower their expectations for some
students and allows these students to underperform.
While scholars are beginning to point out limitations to the “No Excuses Model” (Golann
2015, Goodman 2013), Montessori and other progressive educators have inconsistent evidence
demonstrating that disadvantaged students systematically excel in Montessori. A 1990 article in
the Public School Montessorian suggested public Montessorians themselves “do not know with
certainty whether Montessori education does the right thing for children living in poverty”
(Rosen 1990:1). I experienced the challenge of this skepticism firsthand when the principal of a
Northeast public Montessori school called me in a panic. She had heard via a colleague I met at a
conference that I was studying public Montessori and her superintendent wanted data showing
72
Montessori’s effectiveness for black boys. Could I help her? No definitive study or compilation
of the literature existed that I could hand to her for proof.
This limited proof of Montessori’s effectiveness is due to several factors. First, because
Montessori developed independently from most American colleges of education, academic
research has been limited in both size and scope. Many studies use a small sample size, and are
often unpublished theses. A particular challenge in studying public Montessori schools has been
controlling for the choice effect, a challenge for many education studies. While the randomized
control trial using lottery winners and lottery losers has been the best way to control for choice,
only Lillard and Else-Quest (2006) have been able to use this methodology to study public
Montessori. Other studies use a variety of techniques to develop a demographically similar
control group of students.17
With these limitations, a number of studies have demonstrated that public Montessori
programs can be beneficial for Latino and black students.18 Matching black public Montessori
third grade students to a similar cohort in a traditional school and a magnet school in the same
city, Brown (2016) found that the black Montessori students outperformed their black traditional
school counterparts in both reading and math, and were better in reading and at equal levels in
math to the other black magnet school students. Dohrmann, Nishida, Gartner, Lipsky and Grimm
(2007) found that a racially diverse group of 201 students who attended a high-fidelity public
Montessori program from pre-K to fifth grade had a pronounced advantage in high school math
and science, even seven years after leaving the Montessori program. However, their finding of
academic success was inflated by their exclusion of 51 public Montessori students who had
17
In addition, the level of Montessori fidelity varies widely in the public sector (Murray and Peyton 2008), which
creates further complications for research, particularly since variations in program fidelity have been shown to
impact student outcomes (Lillard 2012).
18
An expanded discussion of this literature can be found in Debs and Brown (forthcoming).
73
either dropped out, obtained alternative GEDs or had not yet graduated. Ansari and Winsler
(2014) led the largest cohort study to date, examining 709 low-income black and Latino 4-yearolds following only one year of Montessori pre-K in the Miami Public Schools. They found
strong developmental gains for Latino students with more modest gains for black students,
though the Montessori programs were limited by not being multi-age, and the study only
evaluated one year of implementation. Another study of a bilingual Montessori preschool
program (Rodriguez et al., 2005) echoed the benefits of Montessori to English language learners,
finding Latino Montessori students outmatched their traditional preschool peers, making greater
gains in both English and Spanish language acquisition. Not all findings have been positive,
however. Using a sample of predominantly students of color, Lopata, Wallace, and Finn (2005)
found no clear advantage for fourth and eighth grade Montessori students as compared to their
peers in traditional and magnet schools.
Although a number of public Montessori school studies have featured racially and
socioeconomically diverse student samples, results are often not disaggregated by race
(Dohrmann et al., 2007; Lillard and Else-Quest, 2006; Lopata, Wallace, and Finn, 2005; Mallett
and Schroeder, 2015). When achievement is disaggregated by race, the racial achievement gaps
that characterize most racially diverse schools and districts are found in public Montessori
schools as well (Reardon 2016, Mallett 2014). National-level randomized control trials
examining student achievement at public Montessori schools and Montessori’s impact on the
racial and social class achievement gap await further study.
Third, Montessori educators are limited in their ability to reply directly to the critiques of
education reformers because they have traditionally valued holistic learning over test results.
While public school educators and education scholars alike complain about the burden of
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standardized testing, I have heard charter Montessori leaders describe their attempts to argue for
state exemptions from testing. Researchers studying Montessori have also frequently avoided
studying traditional achievement tests by working to enlarge the conversation around the
educational benefits of Montessori. Their research focuses on the gains in non-cognitive skills
like self-discipline, critical reasoning and problem solving (Diamond and Lee 2011; Lillard and
Else-Quest 2006, Lillard 2005, 2012, Rathunde and Csikszentmihalyi 2005). While this
emerging research has offered compelling evidence of potential benefits to public Montessori
students, for Montessori to be implemented by education reformers, large-scale and systematic
studies are needed to demonstrate its educational benefits to students of color.
Conclusion
Montessori’s theory spoke of creating a schooling environment that would follow the
needs of all children and gradually give them the skills to become independent. Yet Montessori’s
potential to impact the broadest reach of students was hampered in her lifetime by her emphasis
on pedagogical purity. This tension between Montessori purity and access continues today. First,
internal debates between Montessori educators around purity consumed much organizing energy
in the 20th century and left many skeptical of the Montessori expansion into public schools.
Second, there is sometimes a disconnect between the professed belief that Montessori education
can adapt to the needs of each individual child and school practices that emphasize the child’s
adaptation to the Montessori classroom, sometimes excluding behaviorally challenging students.
Third, a successful Montessori classroom is a delicately functioning ecosystem that relies on a
pipeline of talented teachers who can teach Montessori to a diverse population of children.
Institutional structures have placed Montessori training outside American universities, making
75
courses expensive and resulting in a predominantly white and female teaching profession.
Fourth, the expense of Montessori materials often limits the decision to open a public Montessori
program or results in punishments for students who break materials. Finally, public
Montessorians have been limited in providing responses to charges that Montessori is not
beneficial to low-income students and students of color.
This chapter has examined the way in which Montessori educators debate fidelity
alongside questions of broad public access, but another defining aspect of the Montessori
movement is how much it has been propelled by parents. The next chapter examines public
Montessori history as a “parent movement” (Varga 2016) of racially and socioeconomically
diverse parents, a movement whose very diversity has been challenged by Montessori’s appeal to
middle-class white families.
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Chapter 3
Public Montessori: Between Social Reform and Elite Schooling
Introduction
City Garden Montessori School, a public charter school in one of the few racially mixed
neighborhoods in St. Louis, reveals the tensions between equity and elitism within the public
Montessori movement. In 2008, Reine Bayoc and Christie Huck, a black mother and a white
mother of preschoolers, brought together a group of parents to found City Garden Montessori
School in St. Louis’ Shaw neighborhood. Bayoc and Huck realized that though their
neighborhood was multi-racial, white and black children attended entirely different schools, and
they hoped that creating a Montessori school would be a way to create a racially integrated
neighborhood school, bringing the two communities together. Initially, the charter school opened
with an equal number of minority and white students, and 54 percent of students were eligible
for free and reduced lunch, which was representative of the broader neighborhood population
(Huck 2014, 2015, NCES 2008).
But despite their careful planning and connections to black and white parents in the
community, City Garden Montessori school’s surrounding area, considered one of St. Louis’
most dangerous neighborhoods a decade earlier, began changing noticeably several years after
the school opened. Many of the black families that the school founders had hoped would become
part of this integrated Montessori school were leaving due to increasing housing prices. A City
Garden Montessori parent displaced from her rental apartment when her landlord sold the
building described the experience of being priced out of the neighborhood. “We call on every
rent sign we see, but they’re all too much...When we moved in there were a lot of lower income
families like us – now they are almost all gone. The biggest change since we moved here has
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been in property prices” (Bologna et al. 2015). Between 2000 and 2010, the three neighborhoods
making up City Garden’s attendance zone lost an average of 39 percent of their black residents,
43 percent of families earning under $50,000 a year, and 39 percent of Section 8 renters.
Meanwhile these same neighborhoods experienced a 42 percent increase of non-black residents
(Bologna et al. 2015). The attraction of a neighborhood public Montessori school quickened the
pace. When I visited in 2013, the school, now located in a 29,000 square foot converted factory,
sat between boarded up houses, brand new modern townhouses and Olio, an art-deco gas station
converted into a wine bar. Developers were increasingly offering to buy rental properties to
convert into single-family homes.
Huck, Bayoc and other Montessori board members noticed that more and more white
parents were participating in the school lottery, and white parents were dominating the school
leadership, at the same time that the school was losing black families. Huck, now the school’s
Executive Director, described the situation in a national newsletter on housing and school equity.
As a school, they were “victims of our own success…Every week, we [heard] from young
couples that have bought a home nearby—some moving from other parts of the city, some from
the suburbs, and some who relocated to St. Louis from other states or even other countries and
specifically chose our neighborhood because they want to send their children to City Garden”
(Huck 2015). Critics now labeled the school a “gentrification charter” (Zucarello 2014), casting
it as part of the problem, rather than a solution. Although the change in the overall school
demographics seemed relatively minor—roughly a 10 percent drop in free and reduced lunch and
minority students—much of the change was concentrated in younger grades, suggesting the
school would become increasingly white and middle class with time.
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As a result, City Garden administrators decided to address the broader forces of
gentrification that were leading to the displacement of the families of color alongside developing
proactive strategies to recruit more low-income students and families of color (Evans 2014;
Huck 2014). They began including the school’s demographic data on a monthly report to faculty
and their Board and raised funds for sliding-scale tuition spots in their private preschool
program. In 2014 they convened a coalition of neighborhood non-profit organizations and local
universities to establish an Affordable Housing Task Force and developed a series of
recommendations to retain affordable housing for neighborhood families in their community
(Bologna et al. 2015, Crouch 2016). They also began examining new charter guidelines that
would enable them to set aside a portion of their seats to low income students (Prothero 2016). In
2015, Huck and Bayoc’s children graduated together from City Garden’s eighth grade, realizing
their vision of an integrated neighborhood school for their children. But the victory remained
fragile as the neighborhood continued to add wealthy residents and the school faced the
continuing challenge of attracting and retaining students of color.
City Garden Montessori was unusual for delving into housing policy in order to try and
maintain its diversity, but more broadly, its story demonstrates the persistent tension between
equity and exclusivity within the public Montessori choice movement, which currently numbers
over 500 schools and programs across the nation. While Maria Montessori began her schools for
poor children, the American Montessori movement has developed in ways that have both
sustained and challenged Montessori’s initial vision.
In this chapter, I make several arguments. First, from 1912 to 2016, a racially and
economically diverse group of parents has embraced Montessori, sometimes for very different
reasons. Second, from the 1960s onward, there is an untold and important history of
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Montessorians of color leading the struggle to bring Montessori to their communities. Third,
parents have been both central to the growth of public Montessori schools and have led to a
repeated diversion of programs started for poor children serving primarily middle and uppermiddle class children. The fact that public Montessori schools are almost entirely schools of
choice that families must select rather than schools to which they are assigned has allowed
structural forces and parental privilege to combine to frequently divert public Montessori toward
more resourced students. Researchers have shown that the school choice process can exclude
poor and minority families if not implemented with care (Beal and Hendry, 2012; Pattillo,
Delale-O’Connor & Butts 2014; Renzulli & Evans 2005). The limitations of school choice and
desegregation initiatives both play into the history of public Montessori. Given the continued
expansion of choice as an education model, the public Montessori story demonstrates both the
opportunity and limitations of school choice in magnet and charters alike.
Over fifty years of public Montessori schools, central tenets of Montessori have remained
constant: the strong focus on building children’s independence, free movement and autonomy. In
a Montessori classroom, instead of desks, children choose to work at tables or on the floor.
Instead of being led in unison by the teacher at the front of the classroom, children choose their
own work, using hands-on materials. They work at their own pace in long blocks of time.
Children attend school in the same classroom for three years with children of multiple ages.
While all of these features have stayed constant, the reasons Americans have embraced
Montessori have varied radically. All together, the public Montessori expansion over the last
century has been led by different constituents who discovered Montessori as an alternative to
whatever they disliked about their existing school systems.
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While Povell (2009) and Whitescarver and Cossentino (2008) examine the history of
Montessori growth in America with an emphasis on the movement, its leaders, and its impact on
the broader education landscape, this account emphasizes the growth of public Montessori with a
particular emphasis on the forgotten efforts of Montessori educators of color and programs
serving minority and low-income students. Montessori readers may be surprised to find that, as a
result, this sometimes means focusing on moments of struggle and sometimes failure. In any
school reform movement, Montessori and otherwise, institutions tend to more widely document
their successes than their failures, resulting in a triumphalist narrative. Using a sociological lens
to view the racial and class dynamics surrounding Montessori education brings into view an
entirely different narrative. Viewed in this way, the history of the public Montessori movement is
more diverse than many readers may realize and documents the struggle to maintain that
diversity in the face of school structures that privilege middle-class students and parents.
In this chapter, I tell this story through archival documents including over 2,000 articles
from the Proquest Historical newspapers archive, observations at national Montessori
conferences, interviews with educators and activists, and a unique historical dataset of public
Montessori schools.
Montessori’s Wealthy American Friends
As I discussed in the last chapter, Maria Montessori developed her education method in
the early 1900s, working first with learning-disabled children, and then in 1907, with children
living in a newly constructed tenement building in Rome’s San Lorenzo neighborhood. As
Whitescarver and Cossentino (2008) document, when Montessori burst into the American
mainstream in 1911, her educational success was quickly adopted by those from privileged
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backgrounds. These wealthy Americans were compelled by many of the same qualities that
attract upper-middle-class parents to Montessori today: images of children learning selfdiscipline and hard work independent of a teacher’s orders, and becoming all-American
individuals “strik[ing] out for themselves” (George 1912:184). These parents could easily
imagine how these confident children would eventually become the next leaders of the industrial
economy. Through a series of lavish photo-illustrated spreads in McClure’s Magazine, one of the
leading weekly magazines in America’s rapidly expanding print society, Ann George, the teacher
at the first American Montessori school, reported that her school was founded in a “beautiful
house overlooking the Hudson” in Tarrytown, New York, and enrolled “children [who] all came
from cultured families whose greatest ambition it was to give their children everything possible
in the way of education and rational enjoyment” (George 1912:178).
Montessori’s early American supporters were some of the wealthiest and influential
figures in the country. The Tarrytown school was funded by the president of the National Bank
of New York, known today as Citicorp (Coleman 2011). The Montessori Education Association
included the U.S. Commissioner for Education, Philander Claxton; Thomas Edison; and
President Woodrow Wilson’s daughter, Margaret Wilson. John D. Rockefeller funded several
New York teachers to take an Italian Montessori training course (Coleman 2011). Of the 104
American Montessori schools established by 1917, only a handful were public schools or for
children as poor as those in the original San Lorenzo school (Coleman 2011).
Early Public Sector Beginnings 1912-1920s
Still a number of Americans were inspired by Montessori’s work with poor children and
created public school Montessori classrooms, some serving immigrant students. One year after
the Tarrytown Montessori school opened, publicly funded Montessori classrooms in Institutes
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for the Deaf opened in Torresdale House in Philadelphia and the New York Institute of the Deaf,
likely inspired by Alexander Graham Bell’s connection to the deaf community (Kramer
1976/1988). In 1913, a third Montessori classroom opened at the Rhode Island Institute of the
Deaf (Commissioner of Education 1914).
The first public Montessori classrooms in traditional elementary schools were established
in 1913 in Los Angeles, California, and Providence, Rhode Island (Whitescarver and Cossentino
2007). Katherine Moore, who trained with Maria Montessori in Rome, established two
classrooms at two separate Los Angeles elementary schools, one entirely outdoors for “foreignborn” students, and one for American-born students (Los Angeles Times 1913). In Rhode Island,
Clara Craig, who had been funded by the Rhode Island State Board of Education to take the
Montessori training course in Rome, established a Montessori demonstration classroom in 1913
at the State Normal School, a teacher’s college in Providence (Rhode Island Board of Education
1918). Four years into the experiment, Craig reported to the State Board of Education:
These children, even now, excel, by far, the prescribed attainment of children who have
progressed beyond regular first grade work. They are attracting the curious interest of
expert educators. It is to be deplored that our American adaptation of the Montessori
method of child culture cannot be extended on account of our present condition of space
limitations. It is the opinion of scrutinizers that an enlargement of this particular work
would carry a benefit beyond the schools of our own state. (Craig 1918:A25-26)
Quite astonishingly, the State Board of Education agreed, and from 1913 until 1921, the
Montessori Method was theoretically the official educational pedagogy of the Rhode Island
public schools, although it is hard to imagine that Rhode Island had the capacity to train many of
its teachers and provide materials in any substantial way. The experiment, at any level, was
short-lived. After 1921, Montessori disappeared from the Rhode Island Board of Education
reports, and presumably from the classrooms (Coleman 2011).
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Other early American experiments created privately funded Montessori classrooms for
poor students. In New York City, Montessori classrooms were set up in the Vanderbilt-funded
John Jay Dwellings on New York’s then-unglamorous Upper East Side (Whitescarver and
Cossentino 2007; New York Times 1915a). Wealthy New Yorkers threw in their support for
Montessori as they funded other progressive urban causes like Settlement Houses. Newspapers
reported in 1915 that elite New Yorkers held a Ma-Careme Ball at the Plaza Hotel to raise funds
for the Montessori Tenement Schools of New York where “moving pictures” of the children
were shown alongside booths selling carnival favors including “grotesque noses, paper
headgear…toy balloons” (New York Times 1915a; New York Times 1915b).
Another early Montessori experiment enrolled an economically diverse group of students
in the famous “glass classroom” set up at the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific International
Exposition (Kramer 1976/1988). Watching the industrious children working and eating lunch
together on miniature china plates became, like the Exposition’s operational Model-T assembly
line that could produce a car in 10 minutes, one of the most popular exhibitions at the fair. But
unlike San Lorenzo, which had been a full-day program providing childcare for working
families, the glass classroom and Tarrytown’s private Montessori school both ran three-hour
preschool programs, counting on mothers and nannies to pick up the children for the afternoon.
This model of a partial-day preschool continues today in many public Montessori programs,
despite its challenges for working families.
Tracing the history of these early schools is a tantalizing exercise in frustration for the
researcher. School openings were often trumpeted in the press, but school closings were not,
except in the rare case that they resulted in public opposition. A small single Montessori
classroom could disappear without a trace, and most did, due to the larger collapse of
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Montessori’s American movement. This was due to Maria Montessori’s unwillingness to
delegate responsibility to her followers (Povell 2009) and her own financial struggles that led her
to tighten, rather than loosen, the spread of the movement in order maintain fiscal control
(Kramer 1976/1988). In 1917, she dissolved the American Montessori Education Association
and suspended all American training courses and a year later made her final trip to America. In
her absence, and amid criticisms from established educators, the U.S. Montessori movement
withered and died out in the 1920s. However, at least one program, the Rhode Island Institute of
the Deaf’s Montessori classroom, led by Mrs. Edwin Hurd, was still operating in the 1940s
(Coleman 2011).
Back in Europe and closer to Maria Montessori’s creative control, Montessori education
continued to expand in the 1920s and 1930s, and frequently at the initiative of parents. In 1930, a
group of Dutch parents petitioned her to create the first public Montessori high school, the
Montessori Lyceum Amsterdam, a school that remains open today and is part of a robust system
of public Montessori in the Netherlands (Montessori Lyceum Amsterdam).
“Rocket-Propelled Education” 1950-1960s
Similarly, middle- and upper-middle-class parents led the Montessori revival in the
United States in the 1950s as an academic alternative to the play-based preschools in vogue at
the time. As Virginia Varga, an early American Montessori educator, explained, “the Montessori
movement is a parent movement” (2016b). Its leader was Nancy McCormick Rambusch, founder
of the American Montessori Society, who led a self-described “small but pithy band of sassy,
critical, and articulate middle-class parents” (Povell 2009:70). After learning about Montessori,
Rambusch uprooted her young family from Greenwich Village to London to train as a
Montessori teacher. The wealthy Catholic industrialist family, the Skakels then asked her to
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establish the first of these “second-wave” (Whitescarver and Cossentino 2008) private
Montessori schools in an old barn on their property (Blessington 2016, Povell 2009).
After Whitby opened, the movement began spreading like wildfire. Rambusch was an
excellent promoter, publishing articles in the Catholic Jubilee magazine targeting a group of
middle-class Catholic parents who were already planning to pay for private school but were
dissatisfied with traditional Catholic parochial education (Meyer 1975, Povell 2009). As soon as
the first American training session was announced, Varga remembers, “I quit my job, my
husband quit his job, we loaded the baby in a van and moved to Greenwich” (Varga 2016b).
Almost from the beginning, demand outmatched supply. “The letters were coming in, and
there was no one in the office to read them,” Varga recounted, and trainees answered letters
during their lunch break. “These letters were crying, because they [wrote how]... it was vital that
their child have this for his life. And there weren’t enough schools” (Varga 2016a). Around 100
parents attended the first American Montessori Society conference at a motel in Greenwich.
Parents were so desperate to acquire Montessori knowledge that when one of Varga’s classmates
put out his training album and some Montessori materials on a display table, the items were
stolen by the next morning. Reluctantly, they hired a security guard to lock up the remaining
materials the following night (Varga 2016a).
The “new” Montessori education flourished in private schools during the Cold War
among middle and upper-middle-class parents who were anxious that their American children
were academically behind Russian children, wasting their time in play-based nursery schools.
Rambusch decried the “many a child eager to begin reading at age three or four…being rerouted
into bead-stringing and block play by teachers completely convinced that the child is not ready to
learn” (Rambusch 1962:3).
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Public discussion following the launch of the Russian Sputnik satellite in 1957 laid blame
on the American education system. Helping American children master math, science, and foreign
language was considered an issue of national security (U.S. Congress 1958). Mass media
portrayals of Montessori in the Sputnik era drew attention to how younger students learned
advanced mathematics and foreign languages. The Washington Post linked it explicitly to
Sputnik, describing Montessori as “rocket-propelled” education (Cheshire 1962). The Hartford
Courant’s 1963 profile featured Tommy, a white five-year-old boy, who was “logically
progressing through addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division. Soon he’ll be skip
counting through square roots. At age 6, he’ll be handling the binomial theorem with ease”
(Massaro 1963). Los Angeles Times enthused, “The results can be spectacular: 3-year-olds
mastering four languages simultaneously, 5-year-olds doing algebra as if it were a new game
invented to entertain them.” Montessori was not only for the gifted, but “regular boys and girls.”
(Seidenbaum 1963). Even if these news accounts selectively highlighted intellectually
precocious children from upper-class homes, their stories served to propel the Montessori
movement further.
This publicity also highlighted Montessori as desirable education for an audience of elite
parents. The Washington Post reported that Jackie Kennedy expressed interest in Montessori for
her own preschool age children, requesting literature delivered to the White House (Cheshire
1962). The New York Times described Montessori as “a consumer’s rebellion on the part of
middle-class parents against the conventional [creative-play] nursery schools” (Pines 1967).
According to the Hartford Courant, Montessori was the “new cocktail party conversation piece,”
which was “so old, it’s new” (Schereschewsky 1967). The Chicago Tribune’s advice columnist,
Joan Beck, stressed that children in a Montessori program were individuals, not conformists: “A
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first-grade teacher who isn’t able to cope with a Montessori child probably isn’t able to cope
with any child that doesn’t fit the Dick and Jane model” (Beck 1970). By 1965, during a period
of five years, over 100 private Montessori schools were established around the country (Gross
and Gross 1965). Montessori’s growth at this time was in the private sector, and its attraction to
upper-middle-class parents was as a rigorous, disciplined and academic program that would
develop children as individuals.
Montessori and the “Culturally Deprived”
Still there were others who pushed Rambusch and others to do more than just accede
Montessori to the cognoscenti who were demanding it for their young geniuses-in-training. City
College Education Professor John McDermott warned in Newsweek that without work to create
public Montessori schools, “this movement may soon have the dubious distinction of having
suffocated itself twice in a half-century” (McDermott 1963).
As McDermott was issuing his warning, other educational policymakers began
wondering whether Montessori could be adapted for the so-called "culturally deprived" lowerincome children who were falling behind in the public education system. A 1964 Washington
Post story, “Montessori Plan Encouraged for Slums,” quoted University of Illinois education
psychologist, J. McV. Hunt, who suggested public Montessori programs could work as an
“antidote” for slum children (Washington Post 1964). Los Angeles based psychiatrist Ronald
Koegler collaborated with the Central City Community Mental Health Center to set up a
Montessori preschool for black children in a poor neighborhood. Koegler believed Montessori
would not only catch children earlier than kindergarten, but also intellectually resuscitate them.
As he explained to the Christian Science Monitor, “The culturally deprived have already been
deadened by their environment and are already so far behind the middle-class child that all the
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best elementary education will not be sufficient for them to catch up” (Hendrick 1965). These
practitioners believed Montessori had medicinal properties as an “antidote” to reanimate
children. Others wrote how-to guides. Richard Orem’s Montessori for the Disadvantaged (1967)
combined policy proposals with a detailed guide for how to implement Montessori in lowincome preschools. And finally, policy makers called for Montessori expansion. In 1966, the
California House of Representatives passed a resolution stressing the importance of early
childhood education, heralding the research that had been done on Montessori’s success with
children of all backgrounds, and
Resolved by the Assembly of the State of California, that it be the express intent of the
State of California that the Montessori approach to education be duly evaluated as relates
to the public interest and the needs of all of our children; and be it Resolved, that the
“model” Montessori , as well as more traditional classes, be established in the public
schools to demonstrate comparatively their respective benefits to our children and
community (Orem 1967:191)
Though there is no evidence to suggest that this resolution resulted in any immediate creation of
public Montessori programs in California, it demonstrates the tremendous optimism that greeted
Montessori education as a solution to urban poverty.
In contrast to Montessori being placed in opposition to structured education as we saw in
Chapter 2, in the 1960s, Montessori was actually seen as the more structured approach, at least
for early childhood education, which is often surprising to contemporary readers who see
Montessori as a free-flowing alternative to traditional education. As in the 1920s, Montessori
programs were viewed as being at odds with the “early childhood establishment” led by
educational progressives who supported play-based non-academic programs. In the 1960s,
Montessori’s structure was seen as a particular advantage in working with poor children. For
example, The New York Times critiqued the play-based nursery school programs because the lack
of structure was unsuitable for poor children. Even cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, who
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normally favored free expression in all forms, also demanded more structure for poor children,
warning against “such fiascoes as the application of nursery-school techniques, designed to free
the over neat children of middle-class urban homes by letting them mess around with finger
paints, to the deprived children from the disorderly, patternless homes of migrant workers.”
Montessori, in contrast had trained the Italian poor. Mead argued that “Montessori’s
greatest achievement, half a century ago, was her extraordinary success with children from the
slums. In a section of Rome where nobody dared go out unarmed at night, she showed how
youngsters who had previously run wild while their parents were out at work could learn to read,
write, count and develop what she called ‘the power of spontaneous reasoning’” (Pines 1967). In
contrast to Montessori’s portrayal today as open-ended and unstructured, 1960s proponents
favored Montessori for “slum” children because of its highly structured, academic approach.
Head Start and Early Public Montessori Schools
This theoretical pairing of Montessori with poverty eradication took practical form in
Lyndon Johnson’s Head Start initiative to support the “five- and six-year-old children [who] are
inheritors of poverty’s curse and not its creators” (Johnson 1965). Rather than endorsing a
particular preschool approach, Head Start was implemented as series of grants from the federal
government to community agencies, which led to a wide diversity of programs, including
Montessori (Rose 2010). The first Montessori Head Start, Clavis Montessori, in Fullerton and
Costa Mesa, California, provided two months of summer instruction in 1965 to 79
“underprivileged children” who were each reported to have achieved IQ gains of 17-21 points
(Los Angeles Times 1965). This early foray into public education attracted enough attention that
the Watts riot report, released later that year, called for the establishment of school choices
including Montessori in poor communities (Goff 1965). Other programs followed in
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Brookhaven, New York and Philadelphia (MPSC 1993a). At Ancona Montessori School on the
South Side of Chicago, racially integrated classrooms combined Head Start students with private
tuition-paying middle-class students, a program that continued throughout the 1960s (Stodolsky
and Jensen 1969).
Studies of the effectiveness of these Head Start Montessori programs yielded mixed
results, though many studies only examined eight weeks to one year of Montessori
implementation (Murray 2008). Initial reports of a 17-point IQ gain at both Clovis and Ancona
were repeated in news around the country, and highlighted in Head Start director Sargent
Shriver’s report to the President (Shelton 1966; Pines 1967). Some researchers reported strong
results (Kohlberg 1968). Others found that Head Start gains at many programs, including
Montessori, were due to children’s adaptation to the school environment and familiarity with
taking a test, rather than to intellectual gains (Zigler et al. 2006) Overall, the Head Start
community focused its efforts on promoting the benefit of any and all preschool for low-income
children, rather than promoting one educational model over another (Rose 2010). Despite the
Montessori’s community’s own efforts to promote Head Start Montessori — including restaging
the glass classroom at a National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)
Convention in Atlanta in 1995— the largest obstacle to sustaining Head Start Montessori
programs was (and is) the start-up costs for teacher training, the higher salaries required to
compensate better educated staff and the high cost of materials given low levels of federal
funding (Lillard 1996). Still, several Montessori programs such as the Southern Ute Montessori
Head Start in Ignacio, Colorado, a program that opened in 1965 and celebrated its 50th
anniversary in 2015, have had longstanding success (Hixon 2002; Durango Herald 2015).
Black Montessori Pioneers
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At the same time that policy makers were considering Montessori as an “antidote” for
poverty, a grassroots movement of parents and educators was reshaping Montessori education
according to the needs of their children. Black educators embraced the Montessori method for its
self-discipline and culture of respect when creating urban preschools during the late 1960s. They
recognized that quality early education and childcare for working parents were an extension of
the Civil Rights movement, and they wanted an education that would give their children “a
positive self image,” in the words of black Montessori educator Mae Arlene Gadpaille (Kay
1969), in contrast to school systems they viewed as racist.
These Montessori educators of color have been almost entirely omitted from Montessori
history and are unknown to most Montessorians. This is in part due to their disparate success in
stabilizing and expanding Montessori programs. While black, white, Latino and Native
American Montessori pioneers were all starting schools in the 1960s, white Montessorians were
able to access capital to build facilities, creating established programs, some of which are now
celebrating their fiftieth anniversaries. In contrast, many of the start-up schools led by
Montessorians of color had limited funding and were short-lived as a result.
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Image 5: Mae-Arlene Gadpaille of the Montessori Family Center
gives a lesson to three students. Source: Boston Globe 1968
In Massachusetts in 1968, Mae Arlene Gadpaille, a Howard University graduate who
studied Montessori with Nancy McCormick Rambusch used a $20,000 start-up grant from the
Ford Foundation to create the Roxbury Montessori Family Center in a former parochial school.
The Boston Globe described the school as a “scrubbed oasis” surrounded by “vacant lots” and
“dilapidated buildings” overseen by Gadpaille, “an angel priestess in red oxfords and a blue
smock” (Kay 1969). Her school offered childcare from 7:30-4:30, five days a week, 12 months a
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year. Gadpaille was tough and practiced “stringent if somewhat authoritarian Catholic moralvalues.” (Kay 1969). Parents were required to attend night meetings, and help to fundraise to
support the $1000 annual tuition or have their children expelled. Gadpaille viewed her task in
Roxbury as national in scope, speaking out for the need for quality childcare in the poorest
communities. As she explained the previous year, “My job is to wake up America, and we can, if
we wake up every child under six” (Taylor 1968).
By 1969, Gadpaille’s plans had become even more ambitious. She was working on a
three million dollar design for a community of 150 black owned-homes centered around
Montessori facilities for children from birth to 18. She had engaged the space age architect, R.
Buckminster Fuller, famous for designing futuristic geodesic domes, who was donating his
services for free. The Boston Globe compared their vision to a modern day black Brook Farm,
the eighteenth century Transcendentalist utopian community based in West Roxbury. Fuller was
drawn to Gadpaille’s social vision alongside Montessori’s appreciation of the power of the
environment on learning. He commented, “Sixty years ago, Dr. Maria Montessori, the first
woman doctor in Italy, banished a slum by utilizing the concept that early education and
environment are inseparable. One cannot work without the other” (Kay 1969). Fuller commented
of Gadpaille, “She is one of the people who should be backed in every way...I only hope the
world catches on to her” (Kay 1969). The planned black utopian Montessori community never
came to fruition, but Gadpaille’s Montessori Family Center stayed open from the late 1960s until
her retirement in 1990 (Bay State Banner 1998). Gadpaille, like other Montessori pioneers of the
era, was an energetic visionary, inspired by the way in which Montessori education could
transform the lives of black children living in poverty. While white Montessori pioneers took
fledgling programs and transformed them into large schools, Gadpaille, despite Ford Foundation
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grants, “starchitects” and national media attention, wasn’t able to access enough capital to make
her vision a reality.
Gadpaille’s project was one of a series of black run Montessori schools in the late 1960s.
In Fayette, Mississippi, a foundation set up in honor of slain Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers
donated $317,000 to build a community center including a Head Start Montessori nursery
(Baltimore Afro-American 1971). In Philadelphia, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, a group of
eight black nuns established the Bambino Gesu Day Nursery, a Montessori nursery, for 15
children in North Philadelphia’s black neighborhood (Cross 1969).
A particularly vivid example of these black-centered community Montessori schools was
Malcolm X Montessori, as part of a black nationalist community center created by Hakim Jamal,
Malcolm X’s cousin, in the Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles. Teacher Medhu Trivedi,
who came from Bombay, taught classes wearing a full traditional sari under the watchful eye of a
Malcolm X photograph. Jamal attested to the transformational power of the school: “When [the
children] first came, they were fighting, spitting and kicking. They hated each other and they
hated themselves. Look at them now. Now they’re acting like real children” (Jones 1968). On
charges that his Montessori school promoted racial hatred, Jamal commented, “Miss Trivedi and
I have had many conferences on hatred, and she thinks I am loaded with hatred. She may be
right. That’s why I don’t teach here” (Fein 1968).
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Image 6: Medhu Trivedi and Hakim Jamal of Los Angeles’ Malcolm X Montessori. Source:
Los Angeles Times 1968
Seeking funding from a group of UC Irvine students who had set up a committee for the
Malcolm X Montessori School as part of a class project, Jamal argued to the audience that the
school could educate the next generation to have a different viewpoint, “if white people who
always say they want to do something would raise some money for Montessori education aimed
at eliminating racism, then ‘America could really begin to move in a human family way’” (Fein
1968).
Despite his noble intentions, Jamal led a troubled and peripatetic life. His affair with the
Hollywood actress Jean Seberg, who enthusiastically funded the Montessori school, led to a rift
with his foundation. He soon left Los Angeles, moving first to a commune on the island of
Tobago and finally to Boston where he was murdered by a rival black nationalist group. His
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wife, Dorothy Jamal kept the Montessori preschool open until 1970. She commented later, “It
was the only good thing Compton ever had” (McGee and Larson 2015).
A number of these black educators and parents also led the move to create integrated
Montessori classrooms some of which formed the seeds for public school programs. The Central
Harlem Association of Montessori Parents (CHAMP) ran an integrated Montessori preschool
(New York Amsterdam News 1969). CHAMP Executive Director Roslyn Williams, writing in the
New York Amsterdam News, argued for an expansion of Montessori into the public sector: “It is
our belief that the Montessori method of education, which has become the rich child’s right,
should become the poor child’s opportunity – in New York as it has become so for the poor in
Detroit, Columbus, Cincinnati and parts of Pennsylvania” (Williams 1976). Black Milwaukee
school activist Maxine Jeter was part of an integrated group of parents that created Cosmic
Montessori, a racially integrated community preschool run on a “shoestring” that opened in a
church basement in 1973. Tuition for parents was $25 a year (Jacques 1973). Jeter and others
later lobbied Milwaukee public schools to open a public Montessori program at MacDowell
elementary, Milwaukee’s first racially desegregated public school (Jeter 1995). Williams and
Jeter were joined by white civil rights compatriots like Mike Williams who helped found
Highland Community School, another racially integrated shoestring Montessori founded in one
of Milwaukee's poorest neighborhoods in 1969, that charged tuition on a sliding scale.
Some of these parent-led racially integrated Montessori programs continue to today,
while others have been pushed in a more exclusive direction. Today, Highland is a racially
diverse charter school with a 65 percent minority enrollment and with MacDowell Montessori,
they form two of Milwaukee’s ten public Montessori schools. CHAMP also has survived, but in
a more elite form, as the Teacher Education program of Westside Montessori School, a private
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school in New York City’s upper west side, which offers financial aid (off the $23,152 a year
tuition) to 20 percent of its students. In 2016, New York City has only one public Montessori
program, the New York City Montessori Charter School, in the Bronx.
Integrated public Montessori schools
In the late ’60s, Montessori educators who wanted to bring Montessori to poor students
realized that their best avenue, paradoxically, was through retaining middle-class white students.
The second wave of these public Montessori programs began in 1967 with Hilltop Elementary in
the greater Cincinnati area, a program that remained open until at least 2005 when it was profiled
in the Public School Montessorian newspaper (Gordon 2005). A year later, two Montessori
programs opened in classrooms in Philadelphia and Hartford. Public interest in these programs
was high. The Philadelphia classroom got 200 phone calls for 15 slots in the first year. Teacher
Patricia McGrath reported, “I was observed constantly.” Even Mario Montessori visited the
classroom (Gordon 2005).
A brief examination of Hartford’s public Montessori program in the late 1960s and 70s
exemplifies how Montessori expansion was intricately tied to combatting residential segregation
and federal funding for urban poverty. Hartford’s public Montessori program opened in Rawson
Elementary and was designed in part to reverse white flight from the city. The Blue Hills
neighborhood that surrounded the school had been a Jewish and Irish middle-class enclave in the
city in the early 1900s. By the 1970s, it had an equal population of whites and blacks and the
neighborhood was on the verge of tipping to be majority black (Jones 1993). Rawson’s
Montessori program combined 25 students from the private Montessori School of Greater
Hartford and 25 Hartford students attending for free. As early as 1971, the program was so
successful that housing developers in the neighborhood were advertising the Montessori program
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to lure suburbanites back to the city (Hartford Courant 1971a), demonstrating an early example
of Montessori’s link to urban revitalization and gentrification.
Image 7: Hartford Courant Housing Advertisement 1971
For several years, Hartford actually led the country in public Montessori enrollment, due in part
to the leadership of Joseph Randazzo, who had paid for his Montessori training in London in the
1960s by working as a nanny to Vanessa Redgrave’s children (Hartford Courant 1966) and
served in a number of Hartford school positions including Assistant Superintendent for
Elementary Education and the Director of Early Childhood Programs. For a city with roughly
equal numbers of white, black and Puerto Rican students, Montessori was appealing because the
emphasis on individualized learning allowed everyone to work at their own pace and reassured
parents that their children wouldn’t be held back if other students were behind. By 1971,
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Hartford Public Schools reported that there were 200 Hartford public pre-K to first-grade
Montessori classrooms serving 4,500 students through the Follow-Through program, an
extension of the federal Head Start program (Richman 1971).
Just as public Montessori in Hartford thrived under the leadership of Joseph Randazzo,
the best method to start a Montessori program was to have a powerful advocate already within
the school system. The Ohio school superintendent, Robert Pickering, who opened the classroom
at Hilltop Elementary was later a board member of the American Montessori Society. Sandra
Klebanoff, a Hartford school board member in the 1960s was also on the board of the Greater
Hartford Montessori Society (Hartford Courant 1971b). But reliance on these leaders could also
come with a cost. In 1972, Hartford’s Joseph Randazzo sought permission to take a year’s leave
of absence for graduate study in Florida, and the weather must have agreed with him because he
stayed there permanently (Hartford Courant 1972; Randazzo 2007). Despite significant private
Montessori organizations in the city, Hartford’s investment in public Montessori dried up until
the 1990s.
“A Place Where Learning is Fun”: Montessori and the Counterculture
Montessori’s appeal also was undergoing an additional permutation during the 1970s.
Parents who embraced the counterculture sought a similar freedom to educate of their children
through progressive education including open classrooms, Waldorf and Montessori schools. A
new audience of parents began Montessori cooperatives and start-up classrooms. They were not
necessarily looking for rigorous academics, but rather the support of a free-spirited childhood. A
1974 Atlanta Constitution article titled "Montessori: Structure for Children to be Free"
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emphasized educational freedom when it profiled a long-haired, bearded 38-year-old Montessori
graduate, Dante Stephenson, who attributed his “happy, fulfilled state” and “feeling of
wholeness, independence and self-confidence” to attending Montessori schools (Smith 1974).
The Hartford Courant wrote about a small private Montessori set up by parents —“a place
where learning is fun,” where the teacher, Mrs. Paul Richmond, taught in a tie-dye shirt and
“dungarees.” She emphasized that her students were getting an alternative to the conformity and
order of the public schools, which would better prepare them for adulthood. “Where do you see
adults line up single file and march? Nowhere but the Army” (Kaukus 1970). Some of these
parents were content to keep their children in small parent-run private Montessori programs,
though starting in the 1970s, a new group, desegregation court judges, hoped to attract these
parents to the public sector.
Desegregation Court Orders and Dynamic Montessori Growth 1970s-80s
The rapid expansion of Montessori in public schools in the 1970s and ’80s occurred
because of a coincidental synchronicity — the rise of alternative/progressive education alongside
court-ordered school desegregation (Kahn, 1990:11), and the fact that progressive models like
Montessori could attract whites to schools with a majority of students of color.
After Boston’s contentious experiment with forced busing started in 1974, cities were
eager for an alternative and turned to a new model of themed “magnets,” developed first in
Tacoma, Washington. This model spread rapidly around the country beginning in the 1970s and
1980s. According to the Public Montessori Historical Dataset, 83 public Montessori programs
opened during these two decades. Because these desegregated magnet schools could consider
race in their admissions criteria, the schools generally maintained high levels of racial diversity.
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The Carnegie Foundation funded a Head Start Montessori classroom at Sands Elementary
for several years starting in 1967 in one of Cincinnati’s poorest black neighborhoods
(Westheimer 1975). Bringing in white students provided the impetus to sustain Montessori in
Cincinnati public schools in 1975 resulting in the first school-wide public Montessori, called
“Children’s House.” Children’s House, which opened with 200 students, was one of eight
“alternative programs” created in response to the 1974 desegregation lawsuit by Mona Bronson
and the NAACP. It was designed by AMS head Nancy McCormick Rambusch, and became
Sands Montessori when three separate programs consolidated in 1979. Children’s House was
also the first to include an elementary program continuing to third grade, which made it possible
to think of entire elementary schools with a Montessori focus. Other Montessori programs
opened following desegregation court orders in Milwaukee, Buffalo, Dallas, Denver and Kansas
City.
The quantity of funding for magnet desegregation programs, much of it coming from the
federal government, dwarfed any previous Montessori initiatives and helped keep the programs
both accessible and flourishing. Many programs offered free preschool and busing around the
city for students ages 3 and up. In Kansas City, busing to magnet programs meant that children
who might have changed schools every time they changed apartments could now stay at the
same school, significantly reducing student turnover (Vincent 2014). Frank Vincent, a
Montessori-trained principal, described the educational and financial freedom in setting up
Faxon Montessori, the city’s first public Montessori school in 1988, after a desegregation court
order converted the district into a magnet-only system that combined city and suburban students.
At the time, it was the most expensive desegregation program in the country (Armor 2002).
Initially, Vincent was only answerable to the desegregation judge, Russell Clark and he
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strategically “fl[ew] under the radar.” While everyone else was fighting over the court order, “as
long as I didn’t make press for some reason, I basically had a carte blanche. I could do whatever
I wanted to do...as long as I kept my budget in line. So it was probably more like starting a
private school than anything else because I had funds” (Vincent 2014). Other cities didn’t have
the same fiscal luxury of Kansas City at the time. Cincinnati’s Montessori program faced
program cuts only a year after opening (Amato 1976); parents, teachers and staff built the
playground themselves (Kaleina 1983); and school staff lobbied for the 1980 tax levy funding
schools by hanging a sign “Think of our children June 3rd, viewable from Interstate 75 (Zigli
1980). The tax-levy passed that year in Cincinnati.
For Martha Urioste, a Latino educator-activist in Denver, school desegregation was the
means for creating public Montessori schools to serve Latino students. Urioste was part of the
Congress of Hispanic Educators who joined the 1973 desegregation lawsuit against the Denver
Public schools for inequitable treatment of Latino and African American students, particularly
bilingual students. Urioste discovered Montessori education while looking for a solution to the
dropout crisis at the Latino majority school where she was an assistant principal. Convinced she
needed to start earlier, she attended a Montessori demonstration, an experience she found
personally transforming: “I thought to myself that if this Montessori lesson could give me such
an experience [of stillness and peace] in twenty minutes, imagine what it could do for young
Hispanic children in a Montessori classroom.” (Urioste 2014:70-71). She applied to become an
elementary principal, and was sent to Mitchell Elementary, an elementary school in northeast
Denver that had not been successful at meeting its 23 percent share of white students to be in
compliance with the desegregation court order. Urioste suggested the school become Montessori,
and in 1985 opened what became the first public Montessori school in Denver. As a bilingual
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principal, Urioste made a point of hiring staff that reflected the diversity of the student body. In
1990, the Black Education Advisory Council heralded Mitchell as a positive example for having
zero school suspensions compared with more negative data from the rest of the district (Bingham
1990). When the public housing apartment building across the street from the school closed and
became a crack house, Urioste and others raised funds, and even enlisted then Governor Roy
Romer, to come by and help them clear away the drug syringes and repaint the building
(Brimberg 1989). In 1991 the former crack house reopened as Family Star Montessori, a childcare program for newborns to 3-year-olds, which became one of 17 Early Head Start model
programs in 1997 (Urioste 2014). Under Urioste’s leadership, Denver’s Montessori program was
embraced by Latinos, blacks and whites in the city, and ultimately expanded to a total of nine
public Montessori programs, including the first bilingual Montessori, Valdez Montessori, started
by a group of Latina mothers (Kreck 2001).
As in Denver, Montessori magnet schools around the country were particularly successful
in meeting their racial desegregation quotas, attracting families of all backgrounds and especially
white families. In Kansas City, the public Montessori schools had the longest waiting lists of any
of the desegregation magnet schools, and eventually three Montessori magnets were created
around the city to meet the demand (Vincent 2014). In 1992, Hotchkiss Montessori in Dallas had
3,318 children on the waiting list (Tasby v. Edwards 1992). In 1989, the Montessori Public
Schools Consortium school survey reported that almost half of the public Montessori schools
surveyed had waiting lists, and a quarter of the schools had waiting lists with over 200 children
(MSPC 1993b). Such desegregation success and high demand continues to today in public
Montessori programs around the country. In Florence, South Carolina, a small town where there
are now three racially diverse public Montessori programs in what were formerly all-black
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schools, Floyd Creech, a local Montessori administrator told me, “We have a joke in Florence
that the justice department couldn’t integrate North Vista elementary school, but Montessori
could, and she’s a dead white woman!” (Field Notes, November 2 2014).
Educators also noticed how students learned to talk about racial difference in their
classrooms. Former Kansas City public Montessori teacher Martha Vincent remembers:
There was a little white girl and a little black girl who were just inseparable but one day
they got [in an argument]. What came up at class meeting was that the little white girl,
Kaitlin…had been overheard by someone else to say ‘I don’t like black people.’ And so
this came up in class meeting, and as a new elementary teacher, I wasn’t really sure how I
was going to facilitate this. But I just sort of stood...back and let’s see what the kids are
gonna say. And a little boy who’s biracial raised his hand and said, “You know, this
doesn’t even make sense, Kaitlin. Because you and Charmay are best friends ever.” And
he said, “You do everything together, and how could you say you don’t like black
people?”…I didn’t need to say anymore. The kids handled it. They understood it…If they
came up together from age three, and became best friends and had their squabbles and
made up again and whatever, then they would maybe begin to chink away a little bit at
the lie that black people are inferior or white people are oppressive. I mean, of all those
things had to be broken down, but they could only be broken down really by the children
(Vincent 2014).
For Vincent, a racially diverse classroom of students who formed a strong community through
the Montessori environment became a safe space for students to talk about racism. This echoes
research showing the social benefits of desegregated schools (Wells et al. 2009).
The expansion of Montessori magnets also led to increased institutional support by
Montessori organizations. By 1993, 29 of the 100 largest U.S. school systems offered Montessori
programs (MSPC 1993b). During this time, David Kahn, leader of the North American
Montessori Teacher’s Association founded the Montessori Public Schools Consortium (MPSC),
which was funded by the Montessori materials supplier Nienhuis and based at Columbus State
University (Kahn 1990). During the 1990s, the MPSC produced a 600-page how-to volume on
creating a public Montessori school, sponsored research, a newsletter and hosted eight national
public Montessori gatherings. Dennis Schapiro, a Montessori parent, created a newspaper for the
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new community called The Public School Montessorian, which ran from 1988 until Schapiro’s
death in 2014.
Montessori publications also began to consciously represent a more diverse Montessori
public. The American Montessori Society began to use cover images of Montessori children on
their magazine, the Constructive Triangle in 1981, and featured the first black child on its cover
in 1983.
Image 8: A black student featured on the cover of the
AMS journal, The Constructive Triangle, 1983
In a seven-year sample from 1981-88, students of color were on the cover a quarter of the time,
reflecting the growing awareness of the increasing diversity of the Montessori student
population.
Magnets and the Limits of Diversity
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While Montessori magnets were opening quickly around the country and providing
access to a diverse cross-section of students, maintaining desegregation criteria meant that it was
frequently harder for students of color to gain admission than white students. David Paull, who
taught in public Montessori schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland, remembers black
opposition to the magnet programs whose racial admissions quotas he considered “racist.” He
encouraged neighborhood residents to come up with creative measures to get their children into
the school.
We are going to give all these white people free Montessori if they will drive their kids
into this black neighborhood, but the black people that live there have to get in line to get
in the school...And I used to go out on that line and I talk[ed] to some people, when I
sa[id], “If you really want to get in, here you can’t be black. You can be Latino, you can
be Chinese, you can be Korean you know, but there is a lot of black people in this line
you know…So if you got a political thing about ‘you are black, and you are proud’ and
all that, I totally get it, but if you can get yourself in the state of mind, then you can say
“Hey, my grandpa was a Cherokee. I’m a Cherokee.” And how does anybody prove that
you are not a Cherokee? (Paull 2015)
Paull’s greatest concern was that local residents could access the public Montessori school, and
he encouraged them to subvert the racial classification system in order to do so. A racially
diverse environment could also appear inequitable if it was housed in a broader school that was
overwhelmingly minority. In Milwaukee in 1976, Macdowell Elementary School’s Montessori
program enrolled only 30 percent black students while the remaining traditional classrooms were
100 percent black, and a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article noted “The Montessori teaching
staff is not integrated. All of the teachers are white, all of the assistants are black” (Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel 1976:4).
In addition to racial quotas, magnet school admissions requirements, screening
procedures and the choice process also could weed out the poorest families. In the 1980s, “nonselective magnet enrollment” was still a novel idea (Blank 1983), and the majority of magnets
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used screening criteria to admit students. Smrekar and Goldring (1999) talk about the “perverse
consequences” of magnets whereby racial segregation is replaced by economic segregation, a
finding that held true for some of the Montessori magnets. A 1988 NAMTA survey of an
unreported number of public Montessori schools indicated 25 percent used a screening process
with a teacher interview, 47 percent were first come first serve, and only 30 percent used lottery
system (Kahn 1990:332.) In addition, since many Montessori administrators believed that
children needed the foundational experience of a Montessori preschool classroom in order to
take advantage of the freedom offered in the elementary grades, many programs only admitted
children after preschool if they had prior Montessori experience, which generally gave
preference to children who had attended private Montessori programs. In addition, schools could
use a variety of criteria to determine family and student interest. Students applying to attend a
Kansas City magnet Montessori as part of the desegregation court order needed to have an initial
interview with the principal or teachers (Vincent 1990:335). In Cincinnati, at Sands and other
alternative school programs, parent and student interest could be used as an admissions criteria.
In 1976, the Cincinnati Enquirer noted that Sands enrolled 21 percent free and reduced lunch
students, one of the lowest among the seven alternative school programs (Klumpe 1976).
Today, most magnet schools now use random lottery rather than selective enrollment.
Still, certain enrollment barriers remain which limit the access of the poorest families. The
Montessori magnets in Hartford, CT offer free preschool to all families. Others, because of
limited state funding, charge tuition for the preschool program, albeit at a discounted rate than
private preschool. This tuition can still restrict access of the poorest families to these public
programs. Because the preschool program is the entry point, missing preschool limits their
ability to enroll in the Montessori elementary program. Cowles Montessori in Des Moines, Iowa,
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the only public Montessori in Iowa, enrolls students via a tuition-based preschool program. As of
2015-2016, enrolling a 3-year-old cost $167.50 a week, double the rate of the rest of Des
Moines’ public preschool program, and without the possibility of scholarships provided at other
schools in the district (DMPS 2016). Partially as a result, Cowles’ free and reduced lunch student
enrollment (18 percent) was 49 percent less than that of the district, while its percentage of
students of color was 29 percent below the rest of the district. And while Hartford’s public
Montessori programs are tuition free, the program is only half day for preschoolers and parents
must provide transportation for the preschool years, creating additional barriers for working
families and the 35 percent of Hartford families who do not own cars (US Census 2014).
Thus while the Montessori desegregation magnet schools remain racially diverse, like
other magnet schools, they initially used admissions criteria that that gave preferences to white
and middle class students. Weighted racial selection in magnets until 2007 allowed magnets to
ensure they enrolled enough white students to meet desegregation guidelines, admission
interviews favored middle-class students with committed parents and the preferences of
Montessori educators to admit only older students with prior Montessori experience combined to
give enrollment benefits to more advantaged students. Even after switching to open enrollment
lotteries, charging preschool tuition, limited transportation and the limited possibility of enrolling
in later grades limited the enrollment of the poorest families.
Challenges to Montessori Magnet Schools
Despite the rapid expansion of public Montessori around the country in the 1970s and
1980s and Montessori’s success in attracting white students to urban schools, districts around the
country responded to the rollback of court-ordered desegregation starting in 1974 by shifting
funding priorities away from racial integration. In many cases, they ended free transportation,
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preschool tuition and relocated Montessori programs to different school sites, which often further
tipped Montessori enrollment away from the poorest families who could not enroll in the schools
without transportation assistance, in contrast to middle-class largely white families who
continued to enroll. In Kansas City, court challenges steadily chipped away at funding for the
magnet schools (Dunn 2008). In Denver in 1995, a federal court lifted the 21-year-old
desegregation busing order. In response, the Denver Board of Education removed bus
transportation around the city, and simultaneously moved Mitchell Montessori out of an African
American community to a white middle-class neighborhood in the Southeast part of the city.
There was considerable community protest about the removal of “crown jewels” from their
neighborhood and mobilizing to “Save Mitchell” (Urioste 2014), but the move happened
anyway. As Mitchell parent Toni Robinson told the Denver Post in 1995 criticizing the Board’s
decision, “The message is 'Busing Caucasian children from all over the city validates having the
school here. But when you can't bring Caucasians into this poor community anymore, then take it
away’” (Cortez and Brimberg 1995). While the Montessori program transitioned to Denison
Elementary and Principal Martha Urioste was able to secure busing for enrolled students,
Mitchell Elementary minus its Montessori program soon resegregated and became an
academically failing school (Hubler 2002).
Just as Mitchell Montessori in Denver was moved across town, magnet Montessori
schools around the country were vulnerable to relocation or consolidation. Though these changes
could potentially strengthen programs through having better facilities, a unified teaching
community and possibly a Montessori trained principal, they also frequently separated
Montessori schools from the original school neighborhood families who often lacked
transportation and struggled to make the journey to the new school. District schools in Prince
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George’s County, Maryland, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Lorain, Ohio that began public
Montessori programs in multiple neighborhood schools in the 1980s and 1990s consolidated into
magnet schools in the 1990s.
Parents of color often went to heroic lengths to try and retain their public Montessori
programs. In Dallas, Samuel Tasby, a World War II veteran, NAACP member and Montessori
parent, unsuccessfully went to court to prevent the relocation of his children’s Montessori
program at Hotchkiss Elementary which moved three times from 1979-1994 (Tasby v. Edwards
1992, Hobbs 2010).
In Washington DC, parents of color led a concerted effort to keep public Montessori open
and accessible to students of color. The DC public program first opened in 1970 at John
Burroughs Elementary with an enrollment of 99 percent black students. In 1989, it became the
first AMI certified public Montessori in 1980 (Jones 1989). When its funding through federal
Title III grants ended in 1973, black parents who formed the Montessori Parents Association
organized to convince DC public schools to incorporate the program (Jones 1989:4). Still the
program continued to be moved by the district, moving two more times until it ended up at
Langdon Elementary, uprooting its community each time. In 2012, Nakisha Washington,
President of the Langdon Home School Association, organized the fight against the closure of
her child’s public Montessori program. In an impassioned note to supporters, Washington
pointed out the irony of the DC Public Schools’ decision to expand Montessori in a gentrifying
neighborhood at Capitol Hill Montessori at the same time that her school’s program was being
closed.
DCPS didn't even offer to place any of our children [at Capitol Hill]...[Langdon is] the
highest performing school in Ward 5. They should be putting resources into a program
that works not destroying it. We are so determined to keep a Montessori program in our
neighborhood school that parents have pledged $2,200 (That's a big deal considering
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we're a Title I school where 71 percent of the kids can't afford the $1.35 for lunch).
(Layman 2012)
Ultimately, Washington was unsuccessful in preventing the move, and today, Langdon’s
Montessori program is gone, and the remaining school has the lowest classification as a failing
“priority” school (DC Public Schools 2015).
Other instances of parental activism had more long lasting results. In Hartford in 1992,
Luwannia Martin, the black PTA president of Building Blocks Interdistrict-Montessori, learned
that the outgoing school superintendent was planning to close her daughter’s program. Building
Blocks combined children from Hartford and the wealthy suburb of West Hartford, and the
superintendent was concerned that the school had not enrolled enough West Hartford students
(Hartford Courant 1992). Martin had gotten involved in the school, volunteering to create an
afterschool program to support working parents after she was laid off from her office job. As a
single mother, Martin felt that the Montessori school “did a good thing for me” as she observed
changes in her 4-year-old daughter:
when she started doing things differently at the house. You know, she started measuring
stuff – like I told you, she started measuring stuff and I’m like, ‘really?’ And then she
was cleaning. In her second year at Montessori she started playing her violin and this kid
was only five years old. And I was really, really over-impressed...Just the little things that
she did and I knew that it wasn’t coming from me because I was a working mom and I
didn’t have that time that I could have (Martin 2016)
Martin contacted the incoming superintendent who agreed that he would keep the program open
if she and other parents and teachers could find the money. Martin used her connections from an
evening bartending job to raise $50,000 from Hueblein, a local brewery, to keep her children’s
school open (Hartford Courant 1992, Martin 2015). The Building Blocks school eventually
became the district’s first interdistrict magnet school, and more public Montessori magnet
programs were added to meet parental demand.
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Sometimes, as Montessori programs hopscotched around city schools (often due to
broader district closures), removing public Montessori from communities of color could also
paradoxically make the programs vulnerable to charges of inequity, particularly if the new school
was relocated to a gentrifying neighborhood. If a Montessori program relied too heavily on the
enrollment of families who already knew about Montessori without doing additional outreach,
they could easily end up with a program dominated by middle-class white children.
Two cautionary tales are worth relating here. At Leschi Elementary in Seattle, the
Montessori program moved from serving a predominantly black population of students to
serving a group of predominantly white students in a gentrifying neighborhood, creating an
inequality that ultimately became grounds for “blending” the program. Seattle public schools’
Montessori program was first housed at Martin Luther King Elementary, then T. T. Minor after
King was closed, and then moved to Leschi in 2009 after T.T. Minor was closed. At the time,
Leschi Elementary— like the other two schools that had housed the Montessori program— was
predominantly black, but in a neighborhood beginning to be white gentrified. The school offered
two options: a Montessori track that required a special application and a traditional
“contemporary” track as the default option.
Leschi’s Montessori program could entice a wary prospective homeowner to consider the
neighborhood, showing the close link between residential decisions and parental perception of
school quality particularly for desirable schools like Montessori. This Seattle parent posted the
following query on the website City-Data :
What are your opinions about Leschi? There are some nice fixers in my price range, but
is the neighborhood safe? How would you describe it…transitional? Undervalued? Also,
how is the neighborhood cohesiveness? I want to live somewhere with some
neighborhood spirit. And do you think it's a good area for families?
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What is the real deal with Leschi Elementary? It has a terrible Greatschools.org score, a 3
out of 10, but the reviews are glowing. It is also a Montessori school?!? How does that
work? (City-Data.com 2014)
The presence of the Montessori program also created a buzz about the school as “the best kept
secret in Seattle” (GreatSchools.org 2014). But increasing white interest led to stark racial
divisions and charges of academic inequity within the school. As Superintendent Larry Nyland
observed in his 2015 report to the school board, “Students enrolled in the Contemporary program
are predominantly African American, low income and come into school with far fewer schoolreadiness skills...Students enrolled in the Montessori program are mostly white, middle or upper
middle-class, and score significantly higher on district and state tests.” The Montessori
program’s desirability had increased, “the discrepancies between the two programs have
increased. It has become clear to Leschi leadership that in order to achieve academic success for
every child, the classrooms must be racially and economically integrated. Right now, they are
not…The District would like to create one program at Leschi that is equitable and accessible to
all.” (Nyland 2015) As of 2015, teachers and a group of parents at Leschi elementary worked to
develop a model that combined Montessori and the Contemporary program into one “blended”
track where all students spent part of the day in each classroom setting. Although the result has
been all students receive the same education, Montessorians might see this transition as part of a
long pattern of public school dilution to the point that the program will eventually disappear
entirely. As this example demonstrates, moving the Montessori program several times weakened
its support in surrounding communities of color. As a choice program with an application,
middle and upper middle-class white families who knew about Montessori sought out the
program, creating a racially disparate enrollment that ultimately became grounds to merge the
program.
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A public Montessori programs also became controversial in San Francisco due to the
perceived elitism of its enrollment alongside the residential gentrification of the city. San
Francisco followed one of the most common ways to create a school-wide Montessori program,
expanding out from a partial school program, requiring students and teachers in the traditional
program to move elsewhere (Kahn 1990). As Kamine and McKenzie (2001) and Van Acker
(2013) document in Ohio and North Carolina, this process can be done successfully when the
community is engaged and teachers are well-trained as they transition. But in 2005, controversy
ensued when the San Francisco Unified School District attempted to place a Montessori program
at Cobb Elementary, an under-enrolled elementary school in a low-income neighborhood. The
program began as a small tuition-based preschool program that grew to four classrooms with
waiting lists from around the city, but not from the predominantly black surrounding
neighborhood (Benham 2010). When the school board proposed transforming the entire school
to a Montessori school, Cobb parents of children in traditional classrooms organized to oppose
the takeover. A San Francisco Chronicle article about the controversy quoted a Cobb general
education teacher who complained that the Montessori program was implemented with limited
outreach to neighborhood parents, "Nobody came and talked to the families about Montessori. If
they wanted the parents to have a choice, did they ask them if they wanted the choice?" (Tucker
2010). A post-mortem in Montessori Life also suggested the school could have done a better job
of community outreach (Benham 2010). A Cobb traditional program parent interviewed on the
San Francisco radio show, The Forum likened Montessori to an invasive disease, explaining it
felt like Montessori was
taking over. They’re phasing me out. They’re like cancer. When you have cancer it
spreads throughout your whole body and you die. [ . . . ] Our kids need structure. We
cannot be with this free flow, do what you want to do, kind of thing happening.[...] Don’t
put it to the African Americans, it’s not for us. (Krasny 2009)
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As the Cobb parent whose child attended the traditional program criticized Montessori as “taking
over” and “phasing me out,” one also hears echoes of broader residential gentrification pervasive
in San Francisco, and the pairing of residential and school displacement. Like the discussion in
Chapter 2, the black Cobb parent is skeptical that Montessori is compatible with “[her] kids.”
Due to the controversy, the San Francisco School Board reversed its decision to create a
Montessori program at Cobb and instead moved it to another school in the middle of San
Francisco’s tony Pacific Heights neighborhood. In 2013, the relocated San Francisco public
Montessori school enrolled 72 percent minority students, but only 27 percent free and reduced
lunch eligible students, significantly lower than the 55 percent free and reduced lunch district
average.
“Mission Erosion” and Loss of Faith Among Montessori Leaders
As public Montessori programs were weakened by district moves and consolidations, the
rising accountability movement provided an added challenge. With the testing requirements of
No Child Left Behind in 2001, superintendents sought to standardize approaches across a district
to develop a uniform testing strategy, often limiting the curricular autonomy of Montessori
programs. Sands Montessori in Cincinnati, Ohio, under pressure from Superintendent Alton
Fraley, ended its fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade multi-age grouping shortly after No Child Left
Behind was introduced (Zimmerman 2004). A 1989 study by Cleveland State University and the
North American Montessori Teachers Association found that 72 percent of public Montessori
schools had limited curricular autonomy from their districts, over half had a leader or coordinator
with no Montessori background, and 68 percent started children older than three (MPSC 1993b).
A Montessori parent whose children attended a magnet in Albany, New York, told me how her
children’s school had gradually lost its Montessori curriculum: “First they lost their assistants,
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then their Montessori materials were more in the storeroom than in the classroom. All that was
left was children getting a choice of doing workbooks on the table or on the floor” (Field Notes
September 24, 2014). According to the National Public Montessori Historical dataset, at least 55
public Montessori programs closed completely in the 1990s.
Observing these failures and curricular compromises at the surviving public Montessori
schools, some of the strongest supporters of public Montessori in the 1980s began to express
their skepticism or abandon their efforts. I was told repeatedly during my research by
Montessorians that many of these public Montessori programs were “Montessori schools in
name only.” By 1990, Nancy McCormick Rambusch, who had founded AMS and helped to start
Sands Montessori in Cincinnati, now characterized public schools as “impermeable [like] sea
anemones.” In her address to the AMS annual conference, she painted a picture of the
Montessori sector used by public education: “They chew you up and spit you out” (Schapiro
1990b:13). Rambusch suggested that Montessorians would be better focusing their efforts on
expanding quality early childhood education than focusing on public Montessori.
David Kahn, who had been one of the public Montessori movement’s greatest champions
and organizers in the 1980s and early 1990s, observed a process of “mission erosion.” He argued
this happened when “well-trained pioneer teachers” were replaced by teachers with “insufficient
training, having non-Montessori principals setting curriculum policy, replacing Montessori
materials with textbooks, admitting children at later ages who hadn’t been oriented by the critical
first years of Montessori preschool and ending the multiple year groupings” (Kahn 2013b).
According to Kahn, such compromises confirmed the “pernicious belief that public-sector
Montessori is different from private-sector Montessori and that the urban poor get a watered
down ‘Monte-something’” (Kahn 2013b). Kahn was so disheartened by the public sector that he
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abruptly ended the Public Montessori Consortium and turned his efforts toward implementing
Montessori’s template for a farm-based residential middle school. As of 2013, Kahn announced
he was ready to rejoin the public sector in a new form, the charter school.
Rise of Montessori Charter Schools 1992-2015
In 1991, Michael Dorer, the principal of a small private Montessori school in Winona,
Minnesota wanted to make his school more accessible to residents in this largely working-class
town. He initially offered to merge his school with the local school district, a motion that the
district rejected. At another time or in another state, that would have been the end of his idea, but
Dorer’s proposal occurred just as Minnesota was rolling out legislation to create charter schools,
a new educational model of free tuition publicly-funded schools run by private organizations that
admit students either first-come-first-serve, or by lottery. Albert Shanker, the teacher’s union
leader, originally proposed the idea of charter schools as a better way to reach failing students.
His initial vision could easily have described a Montessori classroom where students work
independently and move freely around the classroom. Shanker asked his audience at a 1988
Washington Press Club speech, “Can we come up with a plan for a school that doesn’t require
kids to do something that most adults can’t do, which is to sit still for 5 or 6 hours a day listening
to somebody talk?” (Shanker 1988:14). Dorer’s school, Bluffview Montessori school, was the
first in the nation to receive an initial charter from the local school board in November
1991(Dorer 2002; Rochester Post Bulletin 1991) and among the first charter schools to open in
Minnesota.
Since 1992, when the first charter school opened in Minnesota, Montessori enthusiasts
were quick to seize on this new educational platform, particularly groups of parents and
educators in small towns whose districts would not have had the resources to create a Montessori
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program. Instead of trying to fit a Montessori school into the dictates and controls of a larger
district, any group of parents, educators or community activists could come together and open a
school. Similarly, in urban areas where Montessori district schools had been subject to the whims
of changing district policy, charter schools were also a promising Montessori model because of
the possibility of autonomy over the curriculum. Indeed, Daoust and Suzuki (2013; 2014) have
found charters are able to implement higher-fidelity Montessori than district programs.
Nationwide, in 2013, charter schools made up only six percent of the nation’s public
schools (NCES 2015). In comparison, by 2015, 41 percent of public Montessori programs were
charter schools. Since 1993, 238 charter Montessori schools have opened, only slightly less than
the 314 new district magnet schools. In the last five years, new Montessori charters have
overtaken new district and magnet programs as the public Montessori sector continues to grow at
a rapid pace.
Figure 2: New Charter and Magnet/District Montessori Schools Opened 1990-2015
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Part of the appeal of charter schools, and Montessori charter schools in particular, was
that experimental and autonomous public schools brought together many odd bedfellows
(Orfield and Frankenberg 2012). Once again, parents found Montessori as a solution to a wide
range of educational values. As Oberle and Vinson wrote in 2004, Montessori could be appealing
to both left wing and right wing critiques of education because “it emphasizes, for example,
freedom, mastery, diversity, scientific research and methodologies, formal curriculum,
individuality, fairness, planning and hard work (among others) each of which, to some extent,
can meet the demands of both conservatives and liberals” (101). In Cortez, Colorado, Anna Cole,
the leader of the Children's Kiva Charter Montessori explained to the local newspaper, the skills
taught in a Montessori school were “fundamental American values, including self-reliance,
respect of individual rights, hard work, and self-discipline.” Supporters of her charter school
included “hippies...Republicans, ranchers, farmers, Mormons, and everyone in-between”
(Hudson 2014). To some extent, these parent-initiated Montessori charters were a continuation of
the American Montessori renaissance under Nancy McCormick Rambusch and the alternative
parent coop Montessori schools in the 1970s.
Montessori Charters with Diversity Missions vs. “White Flight” Montessori Charters
A small number of urban Montessori charters were established with explicit missions of
enrolling a racially and economically diverse student population. These include City Garden
Montessori in St. Louis, Missouri; Baltimore Montessori Charter School, in Baltimore,
Maryland; Elm City Montessori in New Haven, Connecticut; Lee Montessori Charter in
Washington, DC; Magnolia Montessori for All in Austin, Texas; Montessori del Mundo in
Aurora, Colorado; Philadelphia Montessori Charter School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;
Stonebrook Montessori in Cleveland, Ohio; and Urban Montessori in Oakland, California.
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Several community Montessori programs working with poor families also used charters as a way
to move into the public sector. Terry Ford’s Lumin Education in Dallas began in 1978 and now
provides Montessori-based home visits, a childcare program and two charter schools in some of
the poorest neighborhoods in Dallas.
But without controlled choice structures selecting for diversity like those used by magnet
schools, a large number of charter schools had no incentive to make their school reflective of the
broader school district. Many of these were opened by middle- and upper-middle-class parents
who wanted a public school for their children. For example, Caitlin O’Halloran, who started
Dixon Montessori Charter School in Dixon, California in 2005, explained in the Public School
Montessorian, “My son was thriving in a traditional Montessori preschool as I considered his
elementary school education...I value public education and am enamored with Montessori and
wanted it both ways. Opening a Montessori charter school seemed to be the solution”
(O’Halloran 2005). Naomi Wheatly taught for a year at a small charter Montessori in Arizona
started by a group of parents who lived in a gated community on a golf course. The parents had
no Montessori experience, but served on the school’s board of trustees and hired each other as
staff and administrators at the school. The school also enrolled children of Mexican farm
laborers who were attracted to the program’s bilingual curriculum, but ultimately Wheatly
questioned how well the school integrated them, “I wonder how many migrant families felt
welcomed? I mean, yes, they went there, but did they really feel welcomed, and that they were
part of the community too?” (Wheatly 2015).
Despite the appeal of Montessori to a broad group of parents, Montessori charters have
not been as successful at attracting the same levels of racial and economic diversity, particularly
in comparison to district and magnet schools. Nationally, there are concerns that charter schools
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under-enroll students who have special needs and are English language learners (Frankenberg,
Siegel-Hawley and Wang 2010), and that is a particular concern at Montessori charter schools.
Natalie Danner, a Special Education researcher and Montessori educator who consults with
schools regarding special education compliance, reports that charter schools frequently tell her,
“We didn’t know we had to serve kids with these types of needs” (Danner 2015).
As a group, Montessori charter schools enroll a higher percentage of white students and a
smaller number of black, Latino, Asian and free- and reduced-lunch-eligible students. The figure
below shows a stark difference in the enrollment of students of color among charter and
district/magnet schools. While two thirds of charter Montessori schools enroll 40 percent or
fewer students of color, more than three quarters of district and magnet Montessori schools are
on the other end of the spectrum, enrolling 60 percent to 100 percent students of color.
Figure 3: 2013 Proportion of Student of Color Enrollment at Schoolwide Charter and
Magnet Schools (N=300)
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Considering the level of student poverty, an even greater number, two thirds of Montessori
charters, enroll 40 percent or fewer free and reduced lunch eligible students compared to only a
third of district and magnet schools.
Figure 4: 2013 Proportion of Free and Reduced Lunch Student Enrollment at Schoolwide
Montessori Charter and Magnet schools (N=300)
Wealthier and whiter Montessori charters fit a pattern identified by Renzulli and Evans
(2006) who were some of the first researchers to show that charter schools were leading to
greater racial segregation, and that many non-urban charters were part of white flight from the
traditional public schools. This lack of diversity has led Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley and Wang
(2010) to call charter schools a “civil rights disaster” that have contributed to the resegregation
of American schools.
Why do charter Montessori schools enroll minority students and low-income students in
such fewer numbers than district and magnet schools? Unlike magnet schools that have federal
mandate and often accountability standards to enroll a diverse student body, charter schools have
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no mandate or accountability for the diversity of their enrollment. Since their success in
remaining open is largely based on academic results, charters have a disincentive to enroll lowincome and special needs students who are both more expensive to educate and lower a school’s
overall test scores. Welner (2013) explains “dirty dozen” tactics that charter schools use to enroll
a select audience by printing English-only recruitment materials, requiring a complicated
application process, offering admission via a private preschool program, refusing to admit
students after the initial grade, not providing free lunch or transportation, and not hiring special
needs staff. Many charter Montessori schools (and some magnet Montessori schools) have one or
more of these practices. Many charters lack a school cafeteria and consequently do not provide a
school meal program. Most are not given state funding to provide transportation. In the absence
of state funding for three and four year olds, many charter and magnet Montessori schools offer a
private preschool program. Depending on state charter law, in some cases, this guarantees
admission to the free elementary school program; in other cases, children participate in a lottery
at age five. Many magnet and charters do not admit students in higher grades, unless they have
prior Montessori experience. All of these factors make it challenging for families with fewer
resources to access a public Montessori school.
Charges of Elitism
This perception of enrollment “creaming” (Lacireno-Paquet et al. 2002) to enroll a more
privileged population of students can actually work against those who want to establish
Montessori schools in a poor community. Jill Stansbury encountered opposition in helping to
open the Montessori School of Englewood, a charter school on Chicago’s South Side that in
2013 enrolled a 100 percent students of color, almost all of whom qualified for free lunch. Their
charter school application kept getting denied “We finally were informed from unofficial
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channels that this was because of the public school perspective that Montessori was not for black
boys” (Stansbury 2014). Across the country, a 2012 Montessori charter application in Santa Cruz
led to a clash between Latino and white parents. The Latino parents were concerned that the
charter would take money away from the district and criticized the 30 predominantly white
founding parents whose children would have received guaranteed spots. After the Santa Cruz bid
failed, Public School Montessorian editor Denny Schapiro reflected that “advocates of
Montessori charters should be prepared for charges of elitism and privilege” (Schapiro 2013).
Expanding Montessori Access in the Private Sector
Alongside the rise of Montessori charters, a growing group of parents and educators
continue to open “shoestring” private or non-profit Montessori programs in a wide range of
communities. A number of small non-profit Montessori schools offer low- or no-tuition
Montessori in low-income communities. Myke Gemkow started Community Preschool in
Columbia, Missouri with $6,000 and located it in the city’s poorest neighborhood. Half the
students pay full tuition and subsidize the enrollment of the other half. Kathleen Guinan’s
Crossway Community Montessori in Kensington, Maryland provides three years of housing to
vulnerable single mothers, Montessori preschool for their children and Montessori parenting
instruction. South Bend, Indiana has a Montessori program as part of the Center for the
Homeless.
Just as Jamal Hakim founded Malcolm X Montessori as a form of cultural affirmation for
the black community, the Keres Children’s Learning Center on the Cochiti Pueblo Indian
reservation in New Mexico uses the Montessori curriculum as a way of preserving the tribe’s
indigenous language. In Hawaii, indigenous Hawaiians have developed their own culturallyfocused Montessori curriculum (Schonleber 2006; 2014). In Puerto Rico, a group of parents and
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educators resisted the closure of their neighborhood school in the Guaynabo barrio in Puerto
Rico and turned it into a public Montessori school, the Juan Ponce de Leon community school in
1990. In 2008, they founded Instituto Nueva Escuela (INE), which has now helped train and
certify Montessori teachers for 49 public schools across Puerto Rico (Garcia 2016).
My Montessori, myself
Montessori also brings together a “diverse coalition” of families across the political and
cultural spectrum as a homeschooling curriculum, demonstrating Montessori’s continuing
adaptability to a wide range of cultural meanings. Unlike divisions in the broader homeschooling
community (Stevens 2001), both progressive and Christian Montessori homeschoolers come
together via blogs and Facebook groups like Montessori on a Budget (13,486 members as of Oct.
2016) and Montessori Homeschooling (15,710 members as of Oct. 2016) to discuss curriculum,
materials and adapting the Montessori “Great Lessons” that begin with the Big Bang and the
creation of the universe to fit creationist beliefs.
Still others are highlighting Montessori as “entrepreneurship education” for the
technology generation, highlighting online entrepreneurs who either attended Montessori schools
(the founders of Google, Amazon and Wikipedia) or are sending their children to a Montessori
school (the founders of Kickstarter and Threadless) (Sims 2011; Hustad 2015). Robyn McCloudSpringer, the head of a private Montessori school in Evanston, Illinois attracted entrepreneurs by
explaining that Montessori “simulates what it will be like in a startup company. You have the
ability to work by yourself, or you're going to be working with peers and you're going to have to
be a leader, you're going to have to be a follower" (Hustad 2015). Montessori’s adaptability
across these different constituencies demonstrate a critical reason for its endurance as an
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educational model—parents continue to adopt Montessori education for a wide variety of
educational goals and create fluid interpretations around it.
Conclusion
This chapter presented three central ideas about the historical evolution of public
Montessori schools. First, Montessori’s enduring growth in America has been due to the diverse
coalition of parents that have embraced it for many different reasons. In the 1910s, American
educators brought the method to children in public schools and Institutes of the Deaf in Rhode
Island, New York, Pennsylvania and California, though these classrooms were short-lived
following the broader institutional decline of Montessori education in the US after 1917. In the
1950s, middle- and upper-middle-class parents embraced Montessori as an academically serious
and structured alternative to play-based preschools. In the 1960s, black nationalists embraced it
as a vehicle for cultural affirmation in contrast to public schools they considered racist. In the
1970s, countercultural parents were attracted to Montessori for the freedom and independence it
offered in contrast to the uniformity of the public school classroom. At the same time,
desegregation judges and school districts embraced Montessori magnets as an alternative to
mandatory pupil assignments. In the 1990s and 2000s, parents who were frustrated with the
increased emphasis on testing in their districts could use a new form of choice, the charter
school, to create a Montessori alternative focused on the “whole child.” With the rise of religious
homeschooling, many parents use Montessori as a structured homeschooling curriculum and
modify the evolutionary “Great Lessons” to suit their needs. Today, all of those visions continue
to be embraced by a diverse group of families in many kinds of schools and homes.
Second, Montessori educators and parents of color led many of these struggles to expand
access to Montessori. As South Carolina public Montessori educator Ginny Riga told me, “For a
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Montessori program to start...you just need one person on fire. It can be a principal, a school
board member, a teacher, parents…” (Riga 2013). Throughout Montessori history, there have
been an important number of black and Latino educators and parents “on fire.” Mae Arlene
Gadpaille, Jamal Hakim, Martha Urioste, Roslyn Williams, Luwannia Martin and Samuel Tasby
made critical contributions to the expansion of public Montessori in their communities and went
to court when school districts tried to move their schools. Their stories are the tip of the iceberg,
a broader history of Montessorians of color that remains to be collected.
In addition, public Montessori advocates have continuously returned to Maria
Montessori’s original work serving poor children, but these initiatives have frequently been
subsumed by choice school structures like magnets and charters which privilege middle-class
parents who have heard of Montessori and know its cost in the private sector. When the
Montessori movement was reintroduced in United States in the 1950s, it was led by middle- and
upper middle-class parents and based largely in private schools, where it acquired a cultural
cachet. Education reformers were inspired to bring Montessori to poor students through
programs like Head Start, but these were frequently short-lived experiments. The rise in
popularity of alternative education like Montessori alongside court-ordered desegregation
programs around the country led to a rapid expansion of public Montessori magnets around the
country, but also instability due to an unsustainable supply of teachers and changing district
leadership that could quixotically move or close programs. Montessori magnet programs created
racially diverse student enrollments through racial quotas, but this often gave a preference to
white students because schools could selectively admit students based on interest. In addition,
school consolidation and relocation challenged parents in poor communities who lacked
transportation to maintain their enrollment. Montessori charters offered the potential of greater
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curricular freedom and institutional stability, but moved further away from an explicit outreach
to low-income students and students of color creating schools that were often whiter and
wealthier than district and magnet Montessori programs. This exclusivity has led to the denial of
several Montessori charters but also sparked a new generation of urban charter Montessori
schools in St. Louis, Oakland, Philadelphia, Washington DC and New Haven with an explicit
mission of racial and economic integration.
The public Montessori story is a microcosm of the great challenge of school choice—
balancing opportunity, diversity and full equity. The next challenge for public Montessori, and
school choice more broadly is to demonstrate school choice options can be equally accessible to
all students. Chapter 4-7 examines a case study of the two public Montessori schools in the
context of a broader system of choice in Hartford, Connecticut.
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Chapter 4
‘Untouchable Carrots’: School Choice in Hartford
Introduction
One overcast Connecticut winter morning in early 2014, I sat on a school bus with
fourteen Hartford parents. All but one of them was black and Latino, and we were starting a bus
tour run by a local educational organization, Achieve Hartford, to show parents the differences
between a magnet school and a local district school in their zone. Most of these magnet schools
were developed in the last ten years to comply with the civil rights case Sheff vs. O’Neill,
mandating that Connecticut end the racial isolation of its urban students. We first visited an
elementary arts magnet that enrolled both city and suburban students. Our tour guide, the
resident artistic director, told us that staff and students gave over 200 performances a year and
the students studied violin, performance, costume design and dance. As we got back on the bus,
Alma, a boisterous community organizer fluent in Spanish and English, explained to parents that
this school had 56 openings in their three kindergarten classes, “and because of Sheff, half of
these kids have to be white.” The bus erupted in a chorus of disapproving exclamations. Aviva, a
black mother in her early twenties, said, “It’s like [the magnet school planners] don’t want to
give you a chance to be outside the box. I’m like, I’m sorry. I want everyone to have a fair
chance” (Field Notes, January 30, 2014). To Aviva, being defined by her city limited her child’s
chances of enrolling in the school of her choice.
Twenty-five years after local activists filed Sheff vs. O’Neill to end the racial isolation of
Hartford students, in 2014, almost half of Hartford students were enrolled in racially
desegregated schools, leading it to be hailed as a national model in effective school
desegregation (Joffe-Walt 2015, New York Times 2015, Orfield and Ye 2015). As the last
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chapter revealed, there are many obstacles for enrolling in public Montessori schools around the
country, even when they are free. Hartford magnet schools, in contrast, had eliminated a huge
number of these obstacles. The Hartford region had a controlled choice lottery which set aside a
certain number of seats for Hartford residents, provided busing for children over 5, free tuition
preschool.
Yet many families were still being left out. The most vulnerable Hartford children: lowincome, special needs, English language learners were disproportionately under-enrolled in the
magnet schools (Dougherty et al. 2014, Dougherty and Zannoni 2015, Zannoni and Dougherty
2013) and in some cases were advised to transfer if they were academically underperforming (De
la Torre 2015). In addition, many Hartford parents perceived the system to be unfair. Why did
the beneficiaries of a racial desegregation program feel this way? The Hartford region’s choicebased desegregation plan and its accompanying marketing frustrated middle-class Hartford
families and limited the enrollment of the poorest families, the majority of whom are black and
Latino.
This chapter introduces the reader to the city of Hartford, where our in-depth case study
takes place, and examines how even in the best of cases, school choice can still act as an obstacle
to the families who might benefit the most. Based on observations at events in the city of
Hartford and on a series of interviews with Sheff coalition volunteers, parents and state and city
policy makers, this chapter examines how Hartford’s inter-district magnet program are marketed
to and in turn interpreted by black and Latino parents. First, Hartford families face the most
difficulty navigating the choice process—and find their choice restricted. Second, Hartford
parents feel more constrained in the choice process in comparison to suburban applicants, and
they judge that marketing efforts are not directed toward them. Lastly, the racial balancing
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measures agreed on as part of Sheff lead schools to focus their recruitment on white students,
locating schools in the suburbs and providing limited transportation, making Hartford families
feel these schools are visible but out of reach. As one Hartford parent described it, “For those of
us who live in the city who don’t have that money or those options, it’s just kind of a cruel joke
where these schools are dangled in front of you, many of them right next door…It’s just hard to
see that carrot dangling and not get to touch it, you know?” (Interview May 2, 2014). As a result,
they are critical of the desegregation program despite its clear benefit to their children.
School Choice Systems and Inequality
As we discussed in Chapter 1, in many American cities, families can choose between
public options including neighborhood schools, magnet schools and charter schools. Most large
urban districts use a “free market” choice system, where everyone who participates in a lottery
has an equal chance of admission. Scholars increasingly understand that this process leads to
unequal education outcomes. Socioeconomic background gives some families the material and
cultural resources to better navigate the school choice process (Olson Beal and Hendry 2012,
Pattillo, Delale-O’Connor and Butts 2014, Pattillo 2015, Pérez 2011, Rhodes and DeLuca 2014,
Smrekar and Goldring 1999). In seeking more equitable choice alternatives, scholars have argued
that “controlled choice” systems, which provide seat allocations for certain disadvantaged subgroups, are more equitable. Controlled choice systems that cross boundary lines between the city
and suburb, like the one in Hartford, are considered ideal because they can compensate for
housing segregation (Orfield and Frankenberg 2012, Stuart Wells et al. 2009a). Yet even such
urban-suburban controlled-choice systems can still be interpreted by parents as being inequitable.
Marketing and School Choice
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Much of this parental frustration may stem from the disconnect between the promise and
lived reality of school choice. Research on marketing and school choice has often focused on
how school administrators or charter networks market their schools (Jabbar 2016, Jessen and
DiMartino 2016, Oplatka and Hemsley-Brown 2004) rather than examining the dynamic
interaction between marketing messages and parental perception. An important exception is
Cucchiara’s (2008, 2013) insightful study of how Philadelphia used targeted advertising and
special amenities to recruit middle-class parents. This chapter is the first to examine the
marketing of an inter-district controlled choice system, and one of the few that evaluates the
dynamic relationship between marketing messages and parental interpretations.
Scholarship has increasingly shown that parents choose schools based on their social
perceptions, mediated through peers, but this process is frequently studied in isolation from
marketing efforts. Rather than prioritizing the academic merit of a particular school, both rich
and poor parents are heavily swayed by their peer network (Holme 2002, Lareau 2014,
Weininger and Lareau 2014) and the racial demographics of the school or district (Dougherty et
al. 2012, Goyette 2008, Goyette, Farrie and Freely 2012). This discovery of the irrationality of
school choice, similar to broader conversations about bounded rationality and the limitations of
choice in multiple academic disciplines (Iyengar and Lepper 2000, March 1978), has led to a
new examination of the cultural meaning of schools, called variously “perception” “reputation”
and “school culture.” School reputation and how a school is perceived can often be critical for
middle-class parents in making a school choice decision (Crain and Wells 1994, Holme 2002,
Kruse 2005, Lareau 2014, Stuart Wells et al. 2009b, Weininger and Lareau 2014, Wells et al.
2013). There is much less scholarship examining how poorer parents understand their school
choice, with Pattillo (2015) a notable exception. She argues that the choice process is particularly
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disempowering to black parents, subjecting them to being chosen rather than actively choosing.
Studying marketing alongside parental perceptions offers a way to demonstrate an alignment or
separation between message and interpretation.
Inequality and School Desegregation
This marketing effort of a desegregation program illustrates what some scholars have
called the “double-edge sword of civil rights legislation” (Crenshaw 1988), or the “hidden
injuries” of desegregation (Brown 2016), particularly for black students and educators (Diehl
2007, Garland 2013, Inniss 1993, Inniss 1994, Stuart Wells et al. 2009a). Others argue that
desegregation initiatives often privilege white students and families in the enrollment process
even in instances where students are no longer selected on the basis of their individual race
(Ladson-Billings and Tate IV 1995, Lomotey and Staley 1990, Olson Beal and Hendry 2012).
The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School
District 1 made it illegal for school districts select students on the basis of their individual race.
This leads districts to use race-neutral diversity strategies including giving preference by
socioeconomic background or census tract, zip code or town. My study of Hartford demonstrates
that even with race-neutral admissions in the post-Seattle era, black and Latino parents can still
perceive a desegregation program as disproportionately benefiting white students.
School Choice Methodology
Examining how choice impacts Hartford families and, as a result, impacts who enrolls in
the two public Montessori schools I was studying emerged out of interviewing 51 parents at both
Birch and Vine Montessori magnet. Though I was initially asking parents about how they chose
a public Montessori school, so many parents talked with me about the challenges of the choice
process that I began attending choice events around Hartford to better understand it. In addition
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to the fieldwork I described in chapter 1, to better understand Hartford’s choice system, I
attended school choice fairs and community meetings, Sheff Movement meetings, and 10 school
information sessions around the Hartford region. To replicate a variety of schools a Hartford
family with limited transportation options might consider, I chose open houses near Hartford city
limits at a variety of public magnet, charter and non-magnet/community schools. The open
houses were in January and February, at various times on various days. As these were public
events, and I did not want the presentation to be altered because a researcher was present, if I
was asked to introduce myself, I presented myself as the suburban parent of a kindergartener,
which was true at the time. I collected and analyzed printed and online marketing materials for
the 2014-15 RSCO and Hartford choice lotteries and 2013-15 RSCO lottery application data. As
a result of this analysis, the Sheff Movement Coalition hired me to write several research briefs
on school choice in Hartford, a process that gave me the opportunity to observe the coalition at
work.
The Context of Sheff in Hartford
At the turn of the 20 century, Hartford was one of America’s richest cities. By 2009,
th
census data showed that it was the fourth poorest city in the nation surrounded by the 13
th
wealthiest metropolitan area (Dougherty 2015). It was against this background of marked
disparities that Milo Sheff and seventeen other school children joined civil rights lawyers and
sued the state in 1989, charging that the lack of educational equity and racial isolation were
unconstitutional under the Connecticut constitution. In 1996, after a lengthy appeal, the
Connecticut Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in favor of the Sheff plaintiffs, and charged that the state
develop and fund a solution.
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Although Sheff litigators had initially pushed for a proposal that would have dissolved
school district boundaries and created one large urban-suburban district, they quickly realized
that a voluntary plan focused around individual choice would be more politically palatable to
state legislators. The resulting plan, implemented in 2008, is a regional program consisting of 48
inter-district magnet schools that enroll approximately 17,000 students alongside 31 suburban
school districts that accept 2,000 Hartford students (Sheff Movement Coalition 2014). Magnet
schools were designed to appeal to both a city and suburban audience with themes including the
performing arts, aerospace engineering, environmental science, Reggio Emilia, medicine,
journalism, classical studies, International Baccalaureate, STEM and Montessori. Many magnet
schools received state-of-the-art buildings for a total expenditure of $2 billion since 2008. Busing
students from Hartford and 42 suburban towns alone costs $22 million each year.
In 2008, when most of the Sheff magnet programs were getting off the ground, it would
have been largely unimaginable that a few years later, over ten thousand suburban families
would apply to send their children to magnet schools, roughly half of which are located within
the city limits of Hartford. A number of Hartford area magnet schools are now some of the most
sought-after schools in the entire region and have brought children and families of vastly
different backgrounds together in the same school building.
The magnets have also transformed the educational experience for Hartford families. In
2004, 16.5 percent of Hartford students attended racially integrated schools and in 2014, 44.5
percent of students were in racially integrated schools (Dougherty, 2015). Hartford’s magnet
expansion has also been in notable contrast to the resegregation of school districts around the
country (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley and Orfield 2008) leading it to be hailed as a “model of
choice-based desegregation” (Bifulco, Cobb and Bell 2009). The New York Times editorial board
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(2015) called Hartford’s plan a model for fixing New York state’s segregated schools. In 2014,
the city was chosen to host the Magnet Schools of America conference to highlight its success.
Yet a significant problem is that even with the creation of all of these magnet school and Open
Choice programs, over half of Hartford students remain in racially isolated schools. If the Sheff
victory was the first-generation solution, the second-generation work is to examine the obstacles
that prevent almost half of Hartford families from enrolling in racially and economically
integrated schools and the negative perception that Sheff faces among a number of Hartford black
and Latino families.
There are three main reasons black and Latino families are critical of the Sheff school
desegregation plan in Hartford. The first is that the choice system places the heaviest burden on
the Hartford’s largely black and Latino families, who are required to choose. Second, black and
Latino families feel limited in their ability to realize the marketed “good fit.” Lastly, the Sheff
racial balancing measures lead to recruitment focused on white families, magnet schools located
in the suburbs and limited transportation, further disadvantaging the poorest Hartford families.
Free to Choose, Forced to Choose
In 2014, I attended my first Hartford regional school choice fair in a local suburban high
school cafeteria. The space had been transformed into three corridors with 60 booths of schools,
the room a sea of purple and orange polo shirts, representing the colors of the two main rival
magnet providers, Capitol Region Educational Council (CREC) and Hartford Public Schools.
Magnet recruiters and principals hovered amiably by parents, working hard to sell something.
Opening lines like “What age is your child?” “Nice sweatshirt, man” seemed meant to put
parents at ease and spark a conversation (Field Notes, February 7, 2015). At an arts school, the
recruiter shined a small flashlight on a six-year-old girl and announced, “At our school the
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spotlight is on you” (Gerona 2015b). Parents picked up giveaways: tiny flashlights for the art
school, small “stress robots” for a science school and seed packets for the environmental magnet.
Although the sheer quantity of information might seem to be overwhelming, parents who had
navigated similar college fairs when they were students might have a slight advantage in
processing the information overload.
Hartford’s complex choice system of competing providers and multiple lotteries, while
confusing for everyone, placed the heaviest burden on Hartford families, who were forced to
participate in the choice process. Suburban families in good school districts had the opportunity
to consider a magnet school; choice meant the option to choose a magnet school alongside the
guarantee of their local school. Meanwhile, Hartford families and suburban families in inner-ring
suburbs had underperforming and failing schools as alternatives.
The choice process was particularly complex for Hartford parents, who participated in
two lotteries: the “high status” Regional School Choice Office (RSCO) lottery for the Sheff
magnet schools and Open Choice suburban schools, and the “lower status” lottery for the
remaining Hartford district schools and several charter schools. Moreover, Hartford families had
no guaranteed local school after the district switched to an all-choice system in 2008. It wasn’t
even clear what to call the Hartford non-magnet schools. Brochure documents refer to them as
“district schools” even though many of the magnet schools were also part of the school district;
elsewhere they were called neighborhood schools, even though they no longer drew students
automatically from the neighborhood. A principal of one of these schools told me he called them
“Joe-Schmo schools” (Field Notes, December 17, 2013). The semiotic flexibility was another
example of their marginalization. These schools also did not actively recruit students like the
magnet schools. In 2014, there were no open house events at these schools.
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While Iyengar and Lepper (2000) found that people were more likely to choose and be
satisfied with fewer than eight jam options, in 2014, a Hartford parent with a 3- or 4-year-old
child might consider a total of 55 public school choices. Not only did charter, district and magnet
schools compete with one another, but there were also four competing magnet providers. In order
to apply to all of these choices, Hartford parents needed to complete applications for a minimum
of two lotteries, selecting four Hartford district schools, four magnet schools and five Open
Choice districts to maximize their chance of a placement. The enrollment process had also
changed every year since the Regional School Choice Office was created in 2008 to streamline
the process and create a neutral administrator for the lottery.
Middle-class parents who delved deep into the school choice process painted a picture for
me of a community obsessed. At kids’ birthday parties, parents discussed the odds of admission
like baseball statistics; some compiled spreadsheets of data; others shared the secret fear that a
neighbor’s child would be admitted in lieu of their own. One mother compared the process to
giving birth.
Poorer families had a somewhat different experience. Over 2,000 families, roughly 10
percent of the district total, did not participate at all in the choice process and needed to be
placed at the last minute (Rey 2014a). A disproportionate number of these parents had children
who were English language learners or special education students (Cotto and Feder 2014,
Dougherty et al. 2014, Schiavino-Narvaez 2014). As in Pattillo’s study of low-income black
families navigating choice systems in Chicago, for these parents, “choice itself [was] a
significant burden on top of other daily struggles” (2015: 42). For many Hartford parents, the
complicated choice process became an additional obstacle to navigate.
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Other low-income parents who did not understand how the system worked made heroic
but ineffective interventions (Pérez 2011). A young black mother explained how she tried to
obtain special permission for her son:
We live right on the line between Hartford and West Hartford...The other side of the
street goes to West Hartford. I really want my son to go to West Hartford because he
loves sports. I’ve heard they have free sports camps in the summer. I went in and talked
to them to try and get them to make an exception for him. I said, “He’s a really good kid.
He doesn’t cause any trouble” (Field Notes, January 30, 2014).
Though she was being a strong advocate for her child, her lack of understanding of boundary
lines and admission procedures hampered her success.
In attempts to keep the system equitable for families with and without siblings, only some
schools granted sibling preference. Hartford families often end up with children split up across
several schools. Curtis, a white Hartford parent, called it a “Sophie’s choice” dilemma,
explaining that she didn’t know what to tell her younger son when he asked, “Why don’t I go to
school with my brother?” (Interview May 2, 2014). For Evelyn, a black mother of five, the fact
that her children attended three different schools in three different school districts presented
unique challenges to getting ready in the morning: “The oldest one has to be to school at the bus
stop at 5:50. You have to be there 10 minutes early…We go to the bus stop, we all come back
home, finished getting dressed. Then our next bus stop is 7:23…Then the next bus is 7:42. That
bus is continuously late…” (Interview May 17, 2014). This splitting of siblings could impact
even the most elite Hartford residents. Mayor Luke Bronin faced criticism on the campaign trail
when he pulled one of his children out of a magnet school after his other child didn’t get in, and
enrolled them together in a private Montessori school (Carlesso 2015). For these parents, a lack
of control over where their children, particularly younger siblings, attended school posed an
additional burden.
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Marketing to Suburban Families: “It’s a Very Safe School”
Alongside the complexity of the school choice process, magnet school marketing
emphasized the idea of a personalized “fit” and individual learning, using practices and language
that invited some parents closer while steering others away (Welner 2013). Magnet open houses
were primarily scheduled for families with time and transportation flexibility, were largely
attended by suburban parents and focused on topics of interest to suburban families. Each
magnet school held approximately three to six open house events, giving parents hundreds of
possible information sessions to try to attend. Learning about the schools required a significant
time investment: magnet fairs and open house events averaged two hours each and were often
scheduled during the workday. I was able to note parents’ town of residence at six out of the ten
magnet open house events I attended, and at these events, Hartford families were a small
minority (17 percent of 63 parents) in comparison to the suburban families in attendance.
Though the RSCO and Hartford Public Schools choice brochures were provided in both English
and Spanish, all school brochures were in English, English was the primary language at all
presentations, and I only saw Spanish translation offered at one of the ten sessions.
It was common for school staff to emphasize topics appealing to suburban parents
coming from a distance. Several presenters emphasized safety—“We are in a very safe
neighborhood with single family homes. It’s a very safe school” (Field Notes, February 12,
2014)—or proximity to major highways connected to the suburbs (Field Notes, January 29,
2014).
As school officials stressed the unique theme of their schools and their desire to find
compatible families, they rarely recognized the exclusionary basis of these ideas. For example,
an arts school presented a desirable candidate as someone who loved the arts—but without
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recognizing the “concerted cultivation” behind such artistic passion (Lareau 2003). Brochures for
an arts academy advertised that the ideal student “values arts and academics equally” (Miller
2015) without recognizing that children who valued arts and academics equally needed to first
have been exposed to the arts and have a parent who believed in their importance.
Suburban parents were more likely to identify with this marketing of a personalized fit,
echoing Pugh’s findings (2009) that the concept of a customized education is more widely
embraced by middle- and upper-middle-class parents. On one school tour, a black suburban
parent who was trying to transfer her daughter from one themed magnet school to another
explained how she was thinking about choice for her elementary-age daughter and son:
“This school is just more her.”
“What about your son?” the Magnet coordinator asked, pointing to her other child.
“Oh no, he’s a STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics].”
The magnet coordinator agreed, “Yes, it’s all about fit. What works with your child’s
personality.” (Field Notes, February 12, 2014)
This mother had already identified her children as customized learners, and the magnet resource
coordinator affirmed her thinking. But parental preferences for school theme also varied by race.
Initial analysis by Unger (2015a) demonstrated that a magnet schools with themes that required
prerequisite knowledge or offered specific ways of learning was more desirable to white parents
while themes with a college preparatory or character focus were more sought after by parents of
color, a difference that was unaffected by school location. Although all of the magnet schools
enrolled a majority of students of color, character education and college prep themed magnets
enrolled the highest share (79 and 74 percent, respectively). In comparison, content and
alternative pedagogies had comparably lower enrollments of students of color including STEM
(57 percent students of color), arts (61 percent students of color), liberal arts (62 percent students
of color) and alternative pedagogy magnets, including Montessori (63 percent students of color).
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The marketing of magnet schools based on theme catered to a middle-class vision of a unique
child without recognizing the cultural assumptions underlying such an educational framing.
Middle and upper-middle-class parents who had chosen to live in Hartford bought into
the idea of school choice as finding a “good fit.” They found, however, that their choices were
more limited than their suburban counterparts, leading them to question the fairness of the
overall Sheff desegregation program. Curtis, a white Hartford mother who fantasized about
moving to the suburbs because of her frustration with the Hartford school choice process,
jokingly calling herself a “Zillow whore” for the amount of time she spent online at the real
estate website looking at suburban houses. She explained to me how she chose a magnet school
for her son, “I really liked [the arts school]. I actually thought [my son] had more of a performing
arts bent. Not in my zone. Not in my neighborhood...So, you can have a sciency child in zone 3
or you can have an artsy child in zone 4” (Interview May 2, 2014). Tara, a black Hartford
mother, described school choice staff as focused on getting Hartford students into magnet
schools without concern for the needs of each child.
It feels like ‘Just be happy you got into a magnet’. Even when you call RSCO or when
we were talking to the Pre-K Lottery people they were like “oh your kids are already in a
magnet.” Well, you can just do sibling preference for them. But wait, I’m supposed to
have choice...Again, it’s a false choice anyway for Hartford. It’s only your zone, really.
(Interview February 28, 2014)
Parents who enrolled in one school and then wanted to switch to another found their choices
limited. Tara’s husband, Dante described how the lottery led them to strategize about their “kids
like chess pieces…if we get one over here, then this one will get sibling priority ‘cause that’s
how we can jump over here” (Interview February 28, 2014). Another limitation was the timing of
the choice. Selena, a Latino parent from an inner-ring suburb, was frustrated by the difficulty of
changing schools in the middle of elementary school when she began to get a clearer sense of her
children’s preferences. She explained, “when you start, you’re getting the basics. But when you
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see that they’re at a certain age and that they’re excelling in a certain area, why are you limiting
them?” (Interview May 2, 2014). After main points of entry at preK, kindergarten, middle school
and high school, families were locked into a particular school and found it hard to switch. For
these parents, the promise of a customized education for each child was contradicted by their
communications with school staff, zone restrictions and the limited number of choices beyond
the initial entry points.
In addition, the marketed emphasis on school theme led some Hartford parents to
erroneously conclude that a particular school would not be able to support the needs of their
children. On one tour, a Spanish-speaking mother worriedly asked whether her son would get
special education services at a magnet school. Similarly, the ten magnet school information
session I attended highlighted their themes and special programming (Suzuki violin lessons, a
resident “bug guy”) and never mentioned special education or bilingual services. A group of
Wesleyan students attended six additional open house events and found a similar pattern of
omitting English language or special education programs unless parents made a point to ask
(Miller 2015, Unger 2015b).
On the other hand, focusing entirely on wraparound services could be interpreted
negatively by parents. While non-magnet schools had no regularly scheduled school visits, one
school hosted a special tour for a group of Hartford parents. An academic dean welcomed us into
the freshly painted lobby. She shared how the school provided support to students through
bilingual remediation; an afterschool program run in partnership with a city social service
organization, where the children received a snack and dinner; and small teacher-student ratios.
Afterward, one mother expressed concern about the afterschool program’s link to the social
service organization: “They work closely with child services? We’re close enough to child
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services already. You’re going to take my kid away if I don’t bring his coat?” (Field Notes,
January 30, 2014). These Hartford parents experienced a disconnect between magnet schools
being advertised for their amenities and non-magnet schools being advertised for their social
services.
Recruiting White Families
One of the paradoxes of the Sheff program was that a system designed to support the
poorest Hartford students focused a significant amount of its marketing efforts on recruiting “non
minority,” meaning white (and as of 2015, Asian), children willing to attend magnet schools, a
student demographic that was in increasingly short supply. A key design of the Sheff magnet
schools was that they needed to reach a racial integration target of 25 percent non-minority
students in order to reduce the racial isolation of Hartford’s students of color. The 2007 U.S.
Supreme Court ruling, Parents v. Seattle, made it illegal to select K-12 students on the basis of
their individual race. Thus in Hartford, “suburban” was used as a proxy for non-minority. One
challenge to this threshold was that the regional demographics had changed dramatically since
the lawsuit was first settled, and an increasing number of blacks and Latinos had moved out of
the city to inner-ring suburbs. In addition to Hartford applicants being predominantly students of
color, in 2013-14, approximately 70 percent of the suburban applicants were also minorities
(Peterson 2013). To try to increase the selection odds for white applicants without selecting them
by their race, the lottery was weighted to preference students applying from “underrepresented
towns,” towns from which few students applied to the lottery. These towns were generally
affluent, whiter, far from Hartford and had good school systems. Thus, even in a lottery program
that no longer selected students by individual race, admissions preference was still given to
students likely to be white.
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The pressure for school administrators to comply with Sheff was intense and required that
they focus their recruitment efforts on suburban parents using a variety of strategies designed to
appeal to a white suburban audience. Hartford choice administrators were frustrated by this
focus, even as they worked toward the broader goal of school desegregation. One principal called
the recruitment process “a ruthless, unattractive part of what we do” (Field Notes, April 3, 2013).
At a 2015 RSCO fair including magnet and open choice schools, 81 of the magnet recruiters
were white, 9 were black, 10 were Latino and 2 were Asian. Struck by the racial disparity, I
asked one of the few black recruiters about it. “Of course they’re all white,” he told me. “They’re
supposed to be recruiting white families, and they have a better chance of convincing them to
come that way” (Field Notes, February 7, 2015). Another magnet recruiter recounted a visit from
a white suburban family who had “three children, all in magnet schools. She added, “It was one
of those gold star moments. They wanted a gold star for sending their kids to Hartford schools”
(Field Notes, June 30, 2014). For educators committed to serving the poorest students, focusing
so much effort on convincing and congratulating white suburban families felt disingenuous when
there were black and Latino students being turned away.
Both magnet recruiters at my two school research sites described extensive and
personalized outreach efforts focused on generating high suburban application numbers to
generate white applicants. In the suburbs, they focused on libraries, playgroups, grocery stores,
pediatricians, dentists and malls. One magnet recruiter arranged for current suburban families to
host intimate house parties where “we dispel all of the rumors” (Field Notes, October 10, 2014).
Another magnet recruiter told me the suburban recruitment was continuous, “we didn’t always
market when we were working. It was everywhere we went. I always kept flyers, and cards,
brochure, Open House dates in my car” (Interview April 30, 2014). I observed magnet school
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principals calling colleagues to share their application numbers, and closely monitoring numbers
by towns. The RSCO choice office would also give advice for targeted recruitment. “[The state]
would tell us randomly…your application pool numbers are looking kinda small,” a magnet
recruiter told me. “You need to target Farmington…West Hartford, Newington, Cromwell
[majority white suburbs]. If our numbers are down in Wethersfield, I’ll drop off a bunch of flyers
there” (Interview April 30, 2014).
In contrast to the multi-site, personalized recruitment used in the suburbs, in Hartford,
magnet recruiters relied on more indirect recruitment strategies. One magnet recruiter paid for a
billboard in her school’s predominantly black neighborhood with a photo of one of the few
neighborhood black students. “It says ‘Hello Neighbor’ because they should know, she’s from
the neighborhood” (Field Notes, February 7, 2015). The magnet recruiter was aware of the
separation between her school and the surrounding neighborhood, but only had time for
impersonal outreach. Tara, a black Hartford parent, was particularly offended by a brochure
advertising the magnet program at her children’s school:
One picture on it. The picture of one girl. Caucasian girl with blonde hair and blue eyes
who did not go to the school … And it wasn’t a picture of 95 percent of the kids… And I
really actually almost cried when I saw it, because I was so upset for my children. I can’t
let them see this. Fine, they’re little, but you can’t discount the message that that sends:
that you’re not good enough to represent your school. (Interview, February 28, 2014)
This marketing disparity was partially due to enrollment pressures. School staff worried
about enrolling too many black and Latino students and being found “non-compliant,” leading to
a loss of funding or the threat of school closure. A number of schools each year were right on the
25 percent line, and one magnet recruiter described “fighting [other magnet schools] for
students” (Field Notes, October 10, 2014). Several of the magnet providers used a strategy of
under-enrolling Hartford students, a strategy that was particularly unpopular among Hartford
families turned away from magnets. There was also a financial incentive to enroll more suburban
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students: magnet schools received $5,000 more in state funding for each suburban student. Some
schools enrolled 55 percent suburban, 45 percent Hartford students for this reason although the
publicly cited figure was 50 percent Hartford, 50 percent suburban (Humphries 2014).
And while the RSCO lottery was created in order to create a fair and consistent
enrollment program across all magnet and Open Choice programs, the marketing efforts and the
existence of empty seats unfilled by students of color led Hartford parents to be suspicious that
their race was used against them. Many people I interviewed had developed their own folk
explanations for the magnet lottery’s inner workings. One black community organizer suggested
that administrators skipped over black-sounding names as they went through the waiting list.
“Maybe they’re not supposed to,” she says, “but what do you think happens? All kinds of stuff.
They go through the roster – Tamika, Shaniqua – no, no. So I tell parents, why can’t you be
white or Asian? Do a bit of genealogy. Find an ancestor” (Field Notes, January 30, 2014). Curtis,
a white Hartford parent with biracial children described a climate of “rumor and innuendo”
leading her husband to wonder how to tick off the racial boxes on their children’s application:
The first year he was like you just gotta put that [our son is] white. Just put that he’s
white. It’s gonna improve his chances. Put that he’s white…I was like, what happens
when he walks in the first day, and they’re like, ‘Who the hell are you?’…And then he
completely flip-flopped. He was like, he heard it’s better if you put down that they’re
black. And then this year, we could do both, and I was like ‘Alright, well let’s do both.’
And he was like ‘No. Just do—’ I don’t even remember which one he wanted me to do
now. (Interview, May 2, 2014)
The cumulative effect, as Tara described it, was the feeling that “No one was marketing to
us…We’ve spent 25 years and we’re still chasing after the white families out in the suburbs who
didn’t want to come to school with us in the first place” (Interview March 7, 2014). Hartford
families concluded that marketing efforts were focused on suburban white families, leaving them
to feel like second-class citizens in the recruitment process.
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Transportation Problems
Finally, the recruitment focus on white families led magnet providers to locate magnet
schools in the suburbs to maximize the enrollment of suburban families. As a result, Hartford
residents’ options to enroll in a magnet school near their house were limited. Depending on one’s
zone of residence, Hartford families trying to get into an magnet in the city would have over fifty
choices, but they only had preference and bus transportation to between one to four magnet
schools in their zone with no guarantee of admission. They had a stronger incentive to bus their
children out to the suburbs where the open choice program allowed them to enroll their children
in 6-10 districts, depending on their residential zone. Eighty-nine percent of the 16 magnet
schools run by the Capital Region Educational Commission (CREC) were located in the
suburbs. A busing coordinator at a school choice fair told me, “We try to keep all of our trips
under an hour and a half” (Field Notes, December 7, 2013) The location of magnet schools and
the limited bus offerings incentivized families in Hartford to enroll their children far away if they
wanted to access a racially diverse school, even if they preferred to have them attend school
close by. As Heather, a single black mother living in Hartford explained, “[school buses] just
scare me…a bus driver let [my niece and nephew] off the bus and nobody was there to pick them
up...” (Interview, May 20, 2014).
Another representation of the focus on suburban white students was the phenomenon of
what I term “magnet school flight” to the suburbs, in part due to land restrictions in Hartford, and
also the greater ease of recruiting suburban families to attend suburban magnet schools. One
white Hartford family had enrolled in the Museum Academy, a school down the street from
them, but then dropped out when they learned the school was moving to suburban Windsor.
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Another magnet, Discovery Academy, was first located in Hartford, but its permanent location
was moved to a suburb.
An additional challenge to Hartford families in particular was the decision against
providing bus transportation to most preschool students. Although the preschool programs in the
Hartford magnet schools were free, the 34 percent of Hartford families who didn’t own cars
(U.S. Census Bureau 2014) were least able to enroll in magnet schools at the moment that they
had the best chance of admission (Debs 2015). Parents who did not own cars made significant
sacrifices to get their preschool age children to magnet schools. One parent spent $100 a week on
taxis.
With the incentive structure tilted toward enrolling white suburban families, the school
locations were often in the suburbs, requiring long bus rides for Hartford students and dissuading
parents who were wary of long bus rides, from enrolling their children in the first place. Not
providing preschool transportation to magnet schools in Hartford made it hard for Hartford
parents without cars to enroll their children in the years they had the best chance of being
admitted.
Sheff Community Backlash
A marketing focus and school locations that catered to suburban families led some
parents to feel that the Sheff magnets had inadvertently created greater inequality within their
city. Curtis observed that creating flagship magnet programs within the city of Hartford shifted
the boundary lines of inequality from city and suburbs to magnet schools and community
schools, and between lottery winners and lottery losers. She explained, “It just doesn’t seem right
to have these [magnet schools] right next door. You know, so you have the biggest achievement
gap in the country in our state, but now it feels like you have the biggest achievement gap in the
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country in our town—which is just a little too close to home.” She observed that a “byproduct of
this is that there’s so much resentment and hostility between people in the city” (Interview May
2, 2014). She remembered an occasion when she felt angry meeting a parent whose child had
gotten into a magnet program where her son had just been denied a spot:
I almost had a coronary [at the Hartford choice office] because there was a woman there,
and she was clearly confused about what had happened. She had gotten an acceptance
letter, a placement letter and she was like ‘what is this? I don’t even know.’ And she had
gotten into [the arts magnet] which is the school that I really wanted my kid to get into
and she didn’t know what it was…She just had filled out the application because
somebody told her to...And I was so angry at her (Interview May 2, 2014).
For Curtis, the lottery process pitted parents against each other, amplifying community divisions
within Hartford.
Moreover, the Sheff Coalition, the civil rights group that fought so hard for school
integration and continued to argue for the expansion of racially integrated school choices, also
had to contend with criticism from local residents. Some Hartford residents wanted to prioritize
access for Hartford students over desegregation targets. Millie Arciniegas, the founder of
Hartford Parent University and a local Latina education activist critical of Sheff, received
resounding applause from a North End audience at a forum on school choice when she argued,
“If we’re going out to the magnet schools and asking suburban students to come, and they’re not
coming, then we need to fill those seats with Hartford kids” (Field Notes, January 31 2015). At
the same forum, Hartford Board of Education member Craig Stallings spoke of his education in
majority black schools on Hartford’s North end. “I believe I got a quality education – I did not
have to leave the city in order to get that. That’s the experience I want to pass down. I don’t want
to have sit next to anybody from Avon, Simsbury” (Field Notes, January 31 2015). Hartford
choice director Enid Rey imagines how the money might have been allocated differently: “Think
about what our system would look like if they had spent that 2 billion in Hartford” (2014a). To
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these parents and policy makers, the insistence on integration had distracted from the bottom line
of serving students of color.
Sheff coalition members felt that many parents and community members no longer
remembered the history of Sheff and its national impact. One member commented, “In
Washington DC and all over the country they know about this – it’s like a beacon for quality
integrated education. It’s a special thing happening in Hartford.” A school administrator agreed:
“I walk through neighborhoods and no one has any idea what [Sheff] is. I go to a [national]
conference and everyone says, wow, Sheff” (Field Notes, October 10, 2014). While Sheff was
known nationally, they felt the work was underappreciated in Hartford. In work with the Sheff
coalition and at public meetings, I frequently heard a tension articulated between the activists’
vision of integration (bringing together poor minorities and suburban whites), and the reality that
the majority of students in the magnet system were from middle-class black and Latino families.
One Sheff volunteer spoke about the magnet school’s “failure to really penetrate the most high
performing school districts – Avon, Glastonbury. On the flip side, the other failure is to really
penetrate the poorest families in Hartford. These are two very different demographics. You don’t
need to blanket the inner suburbs, they are already coming in droves” (Field Notes, October 10,
2014). As Sheff continues to be renegotiated, its plaintiffs will be pushing against the changing
demographic realities of the Hartford region, and those who charge that their push for integration
perversely limits the opportunities for Hartford’s most vulnerable students.
Conclusion
Local Hartford area civil rights activists achieved a monumental victory in 1996, when
the Supreme Court mandated an end to the racial isolation of students of color in Hartford, and
they have continued to fight to ensure that the state meets its obligation of providing an equitable
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and integrated education for all Hartford students. The magnet schools and suburban busing
system have enabled almost half of Hartford students to enroll in integrated school options, and
have created voluntary integration of parents from the suburbs enrolling their children in city
schools.
In a controlled-choice system enrolling roughly half students from Hartford and half
suburban students, Harford parents have a protected stake in the system that should make the
process equitable. In reality, they face a complicated double lottery system with no guaranteed
neighborhood school. Hartford-based researchers have concluded that poor families are less
likely to attend magnet schools, particularly if their children are Spanish speaking and/or with
special needs. As of 2015, over 50 percent of Hartford students are still in racially isolated
schools that have even fewer resources than before. Students offered magnet slots immediately
transfer out of neighborhood schools, leading to a continuous drain of families with the resources
to get out. Dante and Tara, who eventually chose a Hartford community school over a magnet,
told me the school’s entire PTO executive board disappeared over the summer when their
children got into magnet and open choice programs. “It doesn’t feel good the first month of
school when everyone is trying to leave. I don’t know if my daughter’s kindergarten class is
going to be collapsed because of size. You have to think about the effect that’s having” (Field
Notes, October 10, 2014).
My fieldwork examined how parents experience the discrepancy between the marketing
of school choice in the magnet schools in Hartford and the reality for Hartford families. Based on
observations at Hartford school choice events and community meetings, meetings of Sheff
coalition volunteers, school choice branding meetings, and interviews with magnet parents and
state and city policy makers, I have shown how the system, in its current form, offers an unequal
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choice for Hartford families through a mandated choice system, marketing aimed toward
suburban and white families, and structural restrictions like school location and transportation
availability, all of which lead potential advocates to criticize the broader Sheff program.
These variables are an improvement over being denied access to school buildings in the
first place. As Davies (1969) famously argued in his J-curve thesis, societies most likely to have
revolutions have had some taste of freedom and material wealth. The community backlash
against Sheff is possible precisely because many residents now have access to quality schools,
and as the parent explained in the opening, these schools are now “carrots” in their community,
“visible, but out of reach.” Furthermore, the complaints leveled by parents are all related to
mechanisms within the choice system that can be changed. But to do so requires a broad public
coalition willing to continue fighting for the expansion and alteration of the Sheff settlement. The
paradox of Sheff’s victory is that Hartford parents’ expectations are that much higher. They are
disappointed when the promise of choice doesn’t equal their reality. As $50-75 million buildings
are constructed around Hartford featuring butterfly terrariums and dance studios, even the lottery
winners feel dissatisfied to be limited in their school choice. Once again, parents ask of a choice
system, can it deliver for everyone? As the next chapter will show, parent’s experience of an
unequal choice impacted how well they felt fitted in their child’s school.
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Chapter 5
Enrolling Is Believing?
As discussed in the last chapter, concrete obstacles—a complex admissions process,
limited transportation and school location, among others—prevented many of the poorest
families from enrolling in magnet programs, including the Montessori magnets, in Hartford. For
the families that applied and chose to enroll, the next step was figuring out what they thought of
the school. Sociologists who study parents skip over an important moment when parents, having
chosen, try to make sense of the school they have selected, what I call ‘negotiating a fit.’ This
process of making sense of the school influences a parent’s engagement with the school, their
decision to stay enrolled, and their ability to take advantage of the potential benefits of the school
community. The next four chapters examine this process in detail.
Introduction
Alexandra, a white suburban mother, was so insistent on enrolling her child in a private
Montessori school that she sold her prized motorcycle to pay for the tuition. The sale had already
gone through when she discovered late in the summer that her child instead had won the public
school lottery. He had gotten a free-tuition spot at Birch Montessori Magnet school. Five years
later, she used conventional modes of transportation, but she remained as passionate about
Montessori education as she had been when she conducted that first bill of sale.
As we met over coffee, she described herself to me as a “true believer” and a “disciple of
Maria Montessori” (Interview, May 7, 2014), using the terms of a religious conversion. A family
member had recommended Montessori to her, and she was further influenced by her own
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negative school experience. She grew up in a suburb that was considered to have “one of the best
school systems in the state,” but she didn’t fit in. She described feeling like “a round peg in a
square hole world.” While her schooling experience had been traumatic, it also made her a
skeptical about “traditional notions of what made a good school or not.” As she got married and
had children, she began to wonder: “what’s the likelihood that me and my ‘weird’ husband are
going to have normal kids? It’s not very good. We are going to have weird kids too.” Alexandra
thought a Montessori school would give her children a happier schooling experience than she
had experienced in objectively “good” suburban schools.
Alexandra, with her willingness to sacrifice her motorcycle to enroll her children in a
private Montessori school, fit a pattern of parents who become passionate Montessori advocates.
As we saw in Chapter 3, many of these parents, including parents of color, were behind
initiatives to create Montessori schools throughout the twentieth century, including public
Montessori programs. Some of these parents were inspired to become Montessori educators
themselves.19 But not everyone underwent this conversion, and I became curious why parents
had a variety of responses to their children attending public Montessori schools.
Three Types of Montessori Parents
Studying the parent communities at two public Montessori schools in Hartford helped me
answer this question. I observed three groups of parents: true believers, conflicted parents and
satisfied good schoolers. Though every parent’s response was individual and might best be
19
Other passionate Montessori parents include Denny Schapiro, who created and ran the Public School
Montessorian newspaper from 1988 until his death in 2014, filmmakers Vina Kay and Jan Selby, currently working
on the documentary film, “Building the Pink Tower,” the Montessori Madmen, a group of Montessori fathers who
developed Montessori advertising campaigns and Marianna McCall Kulak, Stephanie Miller and Laurie McTeague,
who created the Trust for Learning, a foundation that has so far raised $15 million to fund Montessori research and
expansion around the country.
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characterized as 51 “unique cases” (Small 2009a) not necessarily representative of the two
schools, public Montessori schools, or choice schools more broadly, these cases assembled
together suggest patterns of belief that might apply in other contexts, school or otherwise.
Importantly, differences by race and class reflected parents’ educational expectations and their
available school alternatives. While true believers came from all racial backgrounds, white
parents were most likely to choose a school specifically because it was Montessori, and had
good-quality public school alternatives if the public Montessori school did not work out. At both
schools, the believers were most involved and gained resources from the parental social network.
Conflicted parents were primarily middle- and upper-middle-class parents of color who had high
academic expectations and were concerned that the Montessori approach did not push their
children hard enough. Unlike white and Asian conflicted parents, who were likely to leave after
preschool if they did not become true believers in Montessori, the black and Latino conflicted
parents stayed, and spoke of a limited number of school alternatives. Lastly, working class black
and Latino parents rarely identified as believers, but they were quite happy with Montessori, and
more than one said their child attended a “good school.”
Urban magnet schools were explicitly designed to attract white families coming for the
theme while also enrolling families of color from the surrounding area (Petrilli 2012). Few
scholars have noted this demarcation of belief, where white parents enter as believers while
parents of color are recruited for their proximity. But true believer parents at the research sites
frequently observed the discrepancy. As one white parent explained to me, “I’m not sure [the
Hartford parents are] true believers per se, because they are not making that extra effort to come
in. They are there anyway. Do you know what I mean?” (Field Notes, May 10, 2014, my
emphasis). The distinction between parents who were “true believers” and those who were “there
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anyway” created additional boundary lines (Lamont and Fournier 1992) between parents at the
school. When policy makers and districts ignore these boundaries and apply the language of a
“good fit” to everyone, they ignore the stark division between those who feel fitted and those
who do not. In other instances, schools can use the idea of a “good fit” against families. The
widely reported Success Academy “got to go” list used the criterion of fit to try and get rid of
students (Taylor 2015). Studying how parents understand their children’s school choices,
particularly black and Latino parents, is a missing and important part of the discussion around
how school choice can be empowering and also divisive for families.
The School Contexts: Birch and Vine Montessori
Parents visiting Birch Montessori school magnet for the first time would pass a housing
project in the process of gradually being vacated in order to make way for a new mixed-income
development. On one street corner, a painted cross and flowers pay tribute to a recently deceased
resident. Down the road is a neighborhood of small single-family homes. In the middle, Birch
shares half of an expansive one-story school building. Several parents I interviewed had attended
the school as children before it was turned into a magnet school, and described getting lost in its
many corridors.
Vine Montessori Magnet is located on the first floor corridor of a three-story brick
school from the early 1900s, surrounded by a Latino neighborhood of small single-family and
multi-family homes with gardens and chain link fences. There are visible security concerns: the
school employs a full-time security guard, the playground often has empty plastic bags from
drug deliveries that took place the night before (Field Notes, April 13, 2014; Interview, April 7,
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2015), and at least one gunfight broke out nearby during the course of my fieldwork (Dempsey
and De la Torre 2015).
Inside both schools, the classroom layout is substantially different from a traditional
school, reflecting the Montessori ethos that the physical space is central to learning. The
classrooms are large, and students work at tables and on the floor instead of desks. Instead of
wall space filled with posters and student work that you might see in a traditional classroom,
each Montessori classroom looks as if it was designed by a minimalist grandmother: honey
colored wood furniture, work materials displayed on brightly colored trays on low shelves,
plenty of plants and breakable trinkets. The classrooms are lit with table lamps instead of the
overhead fluorescent lights. There is at least one framed photograph of Maria Montessori on
display in each school.
Instead of planning lessons, teachers prepare by cleaning their shelves every day,
restocking supplies and bringing out new lessons. Andrea, Birch’s principal, and a white woman
in her forties, takes cell phone pictures of messy shelves to cajole teachers into keeping their
shelves in order. “I likes that it’s tidy, people pick up after themselves, and they don’t leave
things on the floor,” one student commented on my first visit to Birch, a compliment several staff
members repeated proudly several times during my visit (Field Notes, March 28, 2013).
Both Andrea and Theo, Vine’s principal, are committed to urban education and
Montessori. Andrea left another public Montessori school that she felt had moved away from its
original mission of serving poor students. One teacher reported being recruited to Birch when
she encountered Andrea shouting outside of a national Montessori conference to “come do social
justice and teach Montessori in Hartford!” Theo, Vine’s principal, a white man in his forties, had
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worked in a variety of public Montessori and non-Montessori public schools in order to train as a
principal. Both educators chose to live in Hartford.
Andrea and Thea understood that many parents they hoped to attract had never heard of
Montessori, and they worked to help parents understand the pedagogy. Dealing with the
challenge of explaining Montessori’s complexity in a series of simple ideas,20 Andrea explained
it to a public audience of prospective parents this way:
There are a couple of main ideas – multi-year classrooms that follow the child which
means that you’re new to the environment, you’re learning how to run the environment,
you’re the leader. We need leaders in our society. We’re building leaders and you have
three tries in a Montessori school to practice (top of primary, lower elementary and upper
elementary.)
In a traditional school, you have 2 ½ months to learn about the kids, 7 ½ months to work
with them, and then poof, they’re gone. In a Montessori classroom, you only have 8 new
students a year…
Montessori is not that you do whatever you want. There are four freedoms: where to do
the work, who to work with, the order you do it in, and how long you do it.” (Field Notes,
April 18, 2013)
Andrea highlighted key ideas about Montessori without pedagogical jargon, emphasizing
leadership skills, repeated time to practice and master skills, teachers who really know students
well, and freedom to learn within structured parameters.
“Chosen” or “All”: How Montessori Educators View Parents
With this kind of outreach, Andrea represented one of two divergent views about parents
held by Montessori educators. Some believe that only "chosen" parents will embrace the
20
In an attempt to overcome the challenge of succinctly explaining Montessori, in 2014, the Montessori Madmen, a
group of enthusiastic Montessori father, held a Montessori elevator speech contest, inviting Montessorians to
describe Montessori in 60 seconds or less. The results can be viewed at
https://www.youtube.com/user/MontElevatorSpeech
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Montessori method, while others, like Andrea, take a more evangelistic view that "all" parents
can become enthusiastic supporters.
The chosen perspective, that only some parents and students are right for Montessori, was
one that I sometimes heard in the field. A stark example of this perspective was a Facebook
advertisement for a webinar training by the Montessori Teacher Institute for Professional
Studies, an AMI training site located in Northbrook, Illinois: “Can you imagine? A list of people
waiting to get into your school. You get to choose which family is the best fit” (MTIPS 2016, my
emphasis). MTIPS staff suggested that some families “fit” a Montessori school better than others
and the best-case scenario for a school is to be able to select those families.
In contrast, other Montessorians like Andrea and Theo supported the evangelical view
that “all” parents can become Montessori supporters. In fact, responses on Facebook to the
MTIPS post questioned this idea of a “chosen” few families who fit, suggesting instead that
educators had a responsibility to help families understand Montessori. One user commented,
“I'm surprised to see that there is criteria, or [a] best fit mind set. This seems contrary to
Montessori's inclusive philosophy,”
MTIPS staff replied, “The best fit notion is really about mission appropriate families. It is
not about the "right" children.”
The user objected, “appropriate families?”
Another user commented, “but if the parents do not have the "appropriate" tools at
admission.... Certainly, we can give them those tools to empower them as a Montessori
community. Correct, bc [sic] I believe that is what is at the heart of the mission for
children and parents alike.”
MTIPS replied, “Hard as it is for us in the Montessori world to imagine, there are a lot of
families who do not believe that an environment of free choice balanced with
responsibility is the right thing for children. They believe in conventional education and
are therefore not a good fit for Montessori. Home and school should be working in
partnership. Accepting that it is not for all families is not such a bad thing” (MTIPS
2016).
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The dispute between the MTIPS staffer and readers was based on whether parents, given enough
information, could come to embrace Montessori. In public Montessori, practitioners were likely
to support the “all parents” approach. Kahn, writing his public Montessori school manual in
1990, argued that the key was starting when children were young, so that parents could become
“loyal to the school community, and to the very philosophical roots of the pedagogy involved”
(Kahn 1990: 13). Chattin-McNichols, who researched the extent of parent education programs in
public and private Montessori schools, viewed more extensive parent education as essential to
parents continuing to enroll their children through elementary school and supporting an
unmodified Montessori curriculum (2016). For Rae Rosen, writing in the Public School
Montessorian, reaching parents of at-risk students included “involving parents more fully in the
education of their children, but first building trust and overcoming parents’ fears that the
Montessori program will not “do right’ by their child” (1990: 6). These public Montessori
educators understood that parents may not understand Montessori at the outset, but hoped that,
with a certain amount of Montessori education and relationship building, parents could become
passionate Montessori advocates.
Parent Outreach at Birch and Vine
Similarly, at Birch and Vine, once families enrolled, staff continued outreach to explain
how Montessori worked with the goal of having parents understand and support the pedagogy.
Teachers presented sample lessons during a Birch fall Open House showing parents how their 3year-old children were learning independent tasks like putting on their pants and coats by
themselves. Vine hosted a Montessori math night to give parents a better understanding of how
all of the beads, boxes and rods equaled sophisticated math concepts. In planning events like
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these, school staff thought carefully about the practical needs of their parent community. In my
field notes describing the set-up of the math night, Theo explained how he had designed the
event to be accessible to as many families as possible.
Initially the suggestion was to bring in an outside curriculum consultant to lecture about
the Montessori approach to math. Theo felt that this wouldn’t be interactive with parents.
Instead they hosted an event from 4-6 – they knew the bus schedule, so made sure it
could end with the 6 pm bus. They hosted dinner and had childcare. Instead of the outside
speaker, the teachers led the event, the parents sat on the floor, and they talked very
specifically about aspects of the math curriculum. Theo said this was a very successful
way to get a lot of parents – I think he said around 80%-90% of the parents came to this
event. (Field Notes, March 28, 2013)
In planning the math night, Theo was attentive to making the event interactive for parents in
order to strengthen relationships with teachers, as well as attending to practical details like public
transportation that would enable families to attend.
Generally school presentations were practically oriented around the curriculum, but
sometimes they also struck a proselytizing tone. Accepted families at Vine viewed a video
produced by AMI. To soft piano accompaniment, mostly white children and a few students of
color were shown working in a Montessori classroom. The narrator repeated ‘This is the promise
Montessori education offers to children…[the] only way to build a new world and bring peace”
(Field Notes, August 8, 2013). Incidents like this one revealed that Montessori educators
believed strongly in the value of Montessori education and hoped to convince parents of the
uniqueness of the approach.
In addition, school staff was also proactively looking for ways to engage more parents
with the goal of raising student achievement. When I first approached the principals about my
project, Andrea explained that Birch was only at a “5 out of 15” on parent engagement, and she
hoped my project could help the school improve. Both Andrea and Theo felt that as their schools
began to grow in size, they had to scale back parent engagement in order to focus on staff
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development (Field Notes, April 3, 2013). Both principals were also under pressure from their
district to demonstrate effective parent engagement by tracking parent attendance at all events to
report back to the district. One Hartford magnet school I visited had a bulletin board prominently
displayed in a public corridor with a graph tracking the number of parents (in the thousands) who
attended school events each year (Field Notes, January 30, 2014).
To support these parental outreach efforts, both Birch and Vine had a full-time parent
resource coordinator, and Vine’s was bilingual. There were several school-wide parent education
events offered during the year that also included dinner and childcare. Vine staff attended
workshops hosted by the “Connecticut Welcoming Schools Initiative” (Field Notes, December
17, 2013). School administrators described going out of their way to support families. When
Theo became principal at Vine, he developed an afternoon program for 3- and 4-year-olds, so
that working parents could access the school, and coordinated special transport for a preschool
student with health problems. At Birch, the parent resource coordinator sent home books and
food via a student’s backpack every week to help his family. All of these efforts were designed
to create strong relationships with parents who would both support their children and the
Montessori method.
Categorizing Parents
As I began interviewing parents, I found they had a range of interpretations and
experiences of both public Montessori schools. I conducted interviews with 44 randomly
selected parents and 7 PTO involved-parents (see more detail on interviews in Chapter 1 and
Appendix B.) “True believers” was a phrase that emerged from a parent, and these enthusiastic
Montessori advocates were the most prominent in identifying themselves. In contrast, I had to
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search through the interviews to see patterns emerge between the conflicted and satisfied-goodschooler parents. In order to categorize parents as true believers, conflicted parents and satisfied
good-schoolers, I noted the following patterns.
True believers spoke of “drinking the Kool-Aid,” of being sucked in, having a conversion
experience. They felt attending a Montessori school uniquely enriched their children’s learning.
In contrast, conflicted parents used phrases like conflicted, confused and expressed mixed
feelings about their children’s academic progress. Satisfied-good schoolers used phrases like
“good school,” or talked more about the school being a magnet than being a Montessori. They
were pleased with their child’s educational progress, but the fact that the school was a
Montessori did not mean so much to them.
To find patterns, I coded the interviewees into a number of general categories, including
by race, gender, family income, profession, immigrant status, and religion. I looked for
differences in feeling about the school along a variety of criteria: between Birch and Vine, by
suburban and Hartford parents, and ultimately found the greatest variation to be by race and then,
within racial groups, by class.21 I also coded for prior knowledge of Montessori before enrolling,
how many years their children had been at each school, and their level of parental engagement.
The coding is a simplified representation of complex parent stories and ethnic identities, but
suggests broader patterns that distinguish the experiences of various families. These groupings
show that only around a third of parents I interviewed experienced their child’s school as a
“perfect fit” and became true believers. Others were more conflicted about their child’s school
choice. Significantly, families of color, particularly middle- and upper-middle-class families of
color, were more likely to feel conflicted.
21
There were only 2 white working class parents in my random interview sample and there were only few white
working-class families at the two schools, making it hard to analyze class differences within white parents, a
variation that might be salient in another context.
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Table 1 shows that while the great majority of white parents I interviewed identified as
true believers, parents of color (including black, Latino and Asian parents) were split between
feeling conflicted and being satisfied.
Table 1: Parents by belief category and race (N=51)
true believer
conflicted
satisfied-good schooler
Total
White Parents
13 (72%)
4 (22%)
1 (6%)
18
Parents of color
(black, Asian,
Latino)
6 (18%)
16 (49%)
11 (33%)
33
Table 2 examines the demographics among parents, broken down by their race, belief and
family income. As Bourdieu (1984) and (Lareau 1989) note, class backgrounds are complex
combinations of cultural, economic and social capital. In general, I considered parents uppermiddle-class if their salary was above $100,000, middle-class if their salaries were between
$50,000 to $100,000 and they had a college degree or higher and working-class/low-income if
they had an associate’s degree or less and/or earned less than $50,000 a year (Cucchiara 2013,
Lacy 2007). True believers attracted white, black and Latino parents across income levels. While
around half of the parents of color identified as conflicted, the majority of these parents were
middle-class or upper-middle-class with incomes from $50,000 a year and up.
Table 2: Demographic background of parents (n=51)
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White
Black
Latino
Asian
Total
13
3
1
2
13 out of 18 white
parents (72%)
5
2
0
2
Middle-class: Family income between
$50,000 and $100,000
6
1
1
0
Working-class & low-income: Family
income below $50,000
1
0
0
0
Not available
1
White
Black
Latino
Asian
Total
Parents who identified as conflicted
4
9
4
3
4 out of 18 white
parents (22%)
Income
Upper-middle-class: Family income
above $100,000
0
5
3
1
Middle-class: Family income between
$50,000 and $100,000
4
3
0
2
Working-class & low-income: Family
income below $50,000
0
1
1
0
Parents who identified as true
believers
Income
Upper-middle-class: Family income
above $100,000
6 out of 33 POC total
POC (18%)
16 out of 33 POC
total (48%)
White
Black
Latino
Asian
Total
1
7
4
0
1 out of 18 white
parents (6%)
1
0
0
0
Middle-class: Family income between
$50,000 and $100,000
0
1
1
0
Working-class & low income: Family
income below $50,000
0
6
3
0
Parents who identified as satisfied-goodschoolers
Income
Upper-middle-class: Family income above
$100,000
11 out of 33 POC
total (33%)
In contrast, the majority of parents who were satisfied-good-schoolers were parents of color who
had family incomes below $50,000 a year.
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The True Believers: “For Some People It Just Sucks You In”
Jennifer drove forty minutes each way to Birch Montessori every day. She had not
completed college, and found Montessori while looking for a better system for her children. Her
oldest daughter was attending public preschool and hated going. When she asked the school
psychologist, “Why does my daughter hate going to school?” The psychologist replied, “She’ll
get over it.” Jennifer thought differently, “We’re done here.”
She started calling elsewhere and talked to a small private Montessori school in a town
close to her. Because of the sequential Montessori curriculum, they didn’t usually take 4-yearolds, preferring to only start with 3-year-olds, but they were willing to admit her daughter
because she already knew her letters and numbers. “That decision changed my life,” Jennifer
explained. She came back to observe. That day, her daughter’s teacher was feeling sick and went
into the nap room to sleep for half an hour while the assistant stayed in the classroom. Instead of
being surprised or alarmed that the teacher abandoned her post, Jennifer was “blown away” that
the classroom continued normally. Jennifer concluded, “For some people, [Montessori] just
sucks you in” (Field Notes, May 28, 2013).
True believers were easy to get to know because, like Jennifer, they were often around
the school, either because they had a job with time flexibility, were a stay-at-home parent or had
gotten a job as a school intern. Some of the believers selected the school even when it wasn’t
convenient, driving long distances from the suburbs. They stayed at school during the three hours
of preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. Enrico, a quiet-spoken Latino father, drove two hours round
trip to Birch Montessori and waited three hours at school while his son attended preschool. Bella,
a white suburban mother, joked “I live in my car,” describing how she made multiple trips during
168
the day to and from school so her children could avoid a lengthy bus ride (Interview, May 9
2014). Many others shared the details of their commutes and how it limited their ability to work
while their children were in preschool.
While they waited at the school, true believers got involved in PTO organizing,
gardening projects or created a knitting club. They attended parent education sessions and
observed in the classroom. If other parents complained of a sense of separation from leaving
their children at the school door leading to a feeling that the Montessori school was a mysterious
“black box” (Interview May 2, 2014), these parents with time flexibility were able to be on-site
during the day, and learn more about not only their own student’s experience, but Montessori
more broadly.
The true believers were excited about being studied, and wanted to tell me their stories of
how Montessori had transformed their lives. Interviews were lengthy hour to two-hour long
affairs, and sometimes expanded to multiple interview sessions. One black father from the
suburbs put it this way, “We’ve been blessed at being able to definitely see the full circle of what
a Montessori experience is like” (Interview, April 17, 2014). True believer were able to describe
the Montessori pedagogy and what they liked about it in detail, and they sometimes mentioned
the level of Montessori implementation at the schools being a factor in their decision. Marina, an
th
upper-middle-class white suburban parent explained “I went to Montessori school until 8 grade
so I was really familiar with the philosophy” (Interview, March 10, 2014).
For others who had not yet encountered Montessori before, learning about the method
required a process of intense scrutiny. Vidya, a South-Asian father living in the suburbs at first
was “a little bit shocked” by the multi-age groupings. “Originally, I felt it is something incorrect;
but...when I studied more and then searched about it, that’s a pretty good concept there. The
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younger kids learn faster and the elder kids have the responsibility to teach the younger kids”
(Interview, May 9, 2014). Similarly, Jacqueline, a black mother, was drawn in by feeling puzzled
when she first observed the students, “I thought of ants, like an ant colony. They were all doing
their job.” She was intrigued to understand further. “I used to help the teacher clean up at the end
of the year, just so I could hold the materials. That’s how I learned everything. Why do you put
things in pouches? What’s the philosophy behind this bowl?” (Field Notes, September 26, 2013).
Ultimately, Jacqueline came to compare the intensity of her Montessori parent identity to being
“a Trekkie,” a Star Trek fan, linking the Montessori approach to allow children to “explore
anything that you want to explore and learn about” to the television show where “the possibilities
were endless, the different cultures or species or beings” (Interview, May 28, 2014).
For Evelyn, another black Hartford parent, understanding Montessori was a
“strangeness,” but also a positive “challenge.”
It was like, how they doing the division with all the puzzle pieces? It was like, do that
again, ‘cause I don’t get that. How did you take this rectangle and make it into a triangle
like this and divide all these pieces? I don’t get that…For me, it’s the challenge. And I
like the challenge of the materials and doing everything, so that was why I was like,
okay, I’m gonna stick it out, just ‘cause I don’t get it. And you know obviously, [my
children] are getting it, ‘cause they’re explaining it to me. It’s work. So I keep ‘em in
(Interview, April 17 2014).
True believers described a process of work to get to an understanding of Montessori, and they
were willing to put in the effort. Most were committed to having their children in Montessori
throughout elementary school. They realized that Montessori was a particular form of education,
and only some people were drawn to it.
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Negative school experience
A common narrative motivating many of the believers to choose Montessori was their
own (or a family member’s) negative school experience and a desire for different options for
their children. Lucinda, a white suburban mother, shared feeling “overlooked” and “left behind”
in a suburban school system that stressed “keeping up with the Jones’.” High school had left her
“so discouraged with the teaching, and I was so bored, I ended up even not even wanting to be
there. I started my freshman year in all honors classes and I ended my senior year barely
graduating” (Interview, April 16, 2014). Daniela’s experience with her children’s Montessori
classroom led her to reassess her own schooling, “If I’d learned that way, I probably would have
done fantastic. I would have been, you know, a great student, but I was just an average student”
(Interview, May 15, 2014). Aricelly’s teenage stepson was struggling in school, and she wanted a
different education for her younger son. Elisabeth, a white mother, saw how traditional education
had harmed her husband who worked a manual job. “I was able to sit there, listen to the teacher
for hours and do the work and get the grades and not necessarily learn…whereas my husband
[would] be reading a novel in the back of the art class. Education is like one-size-fits-all and then
public school, if you don’t fit it; then you fail” (Interview, May 9, 2014).
Consistent with their own negative experiences with traditional schooling, true believers
often had flexible long-term educational aspirations for their children that aligned with the
Montessori philosophy of valuing the whole child. Alexandra explained, “Economically, I want
them to go to college because the difference in how much money you can potentially make in a
long run is vastly different from having high school diploma to having college degree. At the
same time I understand that going to college isn’t the right choice for everyone. And so I just – I
really want them to come away from their education loving to learn” (Interview, May 7, 2014).
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Daniela explained she didn’t want her children in a highly competitive school where the goal
was only focused on a high status college: “you are not going to look at Montessori and be like,
yeah! You get into an Ivy League school. I don’t know if it’s in the cards – on my husband’s
side, they are geniuses, not mine – we’ve got common sense, but we don’t have that!”
(Interview, May 15, 2014). Choosing a Montessori school was part of valuing an alternate path
through education focused on personal fulfillment and happiness.
Unable to Afford Private Montessori
The negative school experience of many white true believers also impacted their
economic outcomes. White true believers I interviewed were roughly split between being uppermiddle-class and middle-class, but frequently had lower salaries than the black and Latino
middle and upper-middle class parents I interviewed. As a result, white true believers often
explained that they considered public Montessori because they couldn’t afford private
Montessori (Field Notes, November 15, 2013; Interviews March 11, May 2, 2014.) One
considered it “a private Montessori education…for free” (Field Notes, September 26, 2013).
The white true believers also took pride in fact that, unlike other white parents, they were
not scared away by the schools being in a “bad neighborhood.” Alexandra, whose child got in
after being on the waiting list, hypothesized why other parents had dropped out – the long
commute and “people are also racists. They walk in, and the school is across the street from the
projects, and I’ve met enough scaredy white people out in those suburbs who are like “oh my
God, you send your kid [there] for school?” And I’m like “Yeah, they mow their lawns too.” So I
think they came in, they saw black faces, like freaked out and pulled out of the school”
(Interview, May 7, 2014). Dawn, a mother living in a western suburb told a nearly identical story
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of being on the waiting list, but eventually getting a spot at Birch. She speculated that other
parents “must go to Hartford and be, ‘It’s scary!’ and change their minds!” In contrast, she didn’t
think that Hartford had a “scary ghetto feeling.” She “grew up in New Haven…so like, I’m not
intimidated by Hartford at all” (Interview, May 17, 2014). Like Alexandra and Dawn, Jason, a
white parent, found positive virtues in Vine’s surrounding neighborhood, “It’s not like a bad
neighborhood in Los Angeles. This has single family homes and tasty ethnic restaurants” (Field
Notes, April 16, 2016). These parents felt comfortable in an urban environment, in contrast to
many of their white suburban peers.
Some of these true believer parents specifically wanted their children to be with a more
diverse population than a majority white school. Alexandra explained the choice was a natural
one for her, “because I believe in diversity and I believe in the Montessori model and
everything” (Interview, May 7, 2014). Another white parent who grew up in Mississippi and told
me proudly that she marched in civil rights demonstrations, said she chose Birch because “I
didn’t want [my daughter] to be segregated” in an all-white suburb (Field Notes, December 5,
2013).The desire for diversity could also lead suburban families of color to choose a school with
a majority of students of color instead of a suburban school where their children would be visible
minorities. A black suburban mother who lived forty minutes away in a town with excellent
schools enrolled her four-year-old daughter at Vine after her daughter told her she “wanted to go
to school with more brown people” (Field Notes, August 8, 2013).
But others were blunt that racial diversity played no factor in their choice. Elisabeth, a
white suburban resident, described explaining to her father why she wasn’t sending her children
to the local school. “It’s not some sort of principle where I’m like, wow, my kid can go to school
in Hartford because we’re so evolved. It’s not that. It’s for the Montessori” (Interview, May 9,
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2014). For parents like Elisabeth, the prospect of free Montessori was the driving factor leading
her to choose a racially diverse public Montessori school.
True Believer Parents of Color, Different Priorities
Parents and staff of color also identified as true believers but often praised different parts
of the pedagogy. While many white parents stressed they liked the freedom of Montessori, a
number of true believers of color appreciated the sense of order in the schools, particularly in
contrast to other Hartford public schools. Aricelly, a Latina mother, contrasted the order at
school with the structure many students lacked at home: “When you see the child at home
they’re just bouncing off the walls, but at schools, they’re little working machines.” (Field Notes,
May 23, 2013). Security Officer Madera, who admitted had begun speaking more quietly since
he began working at Vine, liked the “Order, discipline, children walking in a straight line…I hear
parents in the neighborhood walking their children to school, and they say “It’s the most
wonderful thing. Why wasn’t this here before?” (Field Notes, September 17, 2013). One Latina
mother said the cafeteria workers told her they called the Vine students “soledad” or “soldiers”
for the orderly way they came to get their food every day (Interview, May 1, 2014). For these
parents of color, Montessori was impressive for creating an orderly learning environment.
Many parents who enrolled their children at the two public Montessori schools started out
or became true believers, appreciating Montessori’s distinctive pedagogy. As this section has
shown, parent reactions varied by racial background. Almost three quarters of the white parents I
interviewed identified as true believers, while only 18% of parents of color I interviewed
expressed similar levels of enthusiasm. White parents chose the schools specifically for
Montessori, were often considering or aspiring to a private Montessori school and were
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passionate about alternative education after bad experiences in traditional schools. Parents of
color who identified as true believers often learned about Montessori after enrolling, and they
valued the order and safety of the school environment. As we will see in the next section, a much
larger number of parents of color, particularly middle-class and upper-middle class parents of
color, identified as conflicted about the Montessori pedagogy.
Conflicted Parents
Like the Montessori believers, parents who were conflicted liked some aspects of the
Montessori method, but during interviews, they frequently expressed doubts about the
effectiveness of the Montessori method. Selena, a Latina suburban parent, exemplified this
conflict: “I like the school. I like the unity. I like the fact that they can pick their work and the
fact that they’ll have some independence…But as much as I love all of that I am often conflicted
about the fact that am I really doing them a service keeping them in this school when they’re not
even learning how to spell correctly? That’s basics” (Interview, May 2, 2014). While Selena
appreciated the school community and the independence granted to her children, she was
concerned that they were missing out on basic academic skills.
Like the believers, the conflicted parents understood and appreciated certain qualities of
Montessori, and some had even sent their children to private Montessori schools prior to
enrolling in the public program (Interviews May 2, May 5, 2014). Many had the school
recommended by a trusted peer or relative. Rita’s sister and her pastor’s wife had both sent their
children to Montessori, “so I thought it was something to try,” though she admitted that the
philosophy of Montessori was less appealing to her than “the opportunity to have her start school
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at age three” (Interview, May 5, 2014). Heather reported, “My cousin had a kid enrolled in there
and my god-sister. They talk very highly about the school” (Interview, May 20, 2014).
As Table 1 showed, half of the parents of color I interviewed were conflicted. Most of
these parents were middle- and upper-middle class parents who earned high incomes and lived in
mostly inner-ring suburbs. They expressed doubt in the quality of their school districts. The
relative absence of a large number of conflicted white parents suggests that I was already seeing
a selected sample. White conflicted parents had the alternative to return to their home districts.
Considering how long the few white conflicted parents had been sending their children to public
Montessori confirmed this pattern. In comparison to the black and Latino conflicted parents
whose children had attended for four years or longer, all of the conflicted white parents were in
their first year of sending their children to the Montessori school and mentioned that they were
considering pulling them out after preschool. This meant they could turn into “free preschool
parents,” a term used as a negative epithet at both schools that emerged in conversation with true
believer parents who resented parents who would come for only two years. In this regard,
conflicted Asian parents were similar to the white parents in that their children attended the
school for less than three years, and they were also considering returning to their home districts
for kindergarten. In contrast to the Latino and black parents, the white and Asian conflicted
parents expressed confidence in their home school districts.
Table 3: Conflicted Parents, number of years child enrolled at school (n=20)
1st year
2 to 3 years
4 years and above
White
4
0
0
Asian
0
3
0
Black
1
3
5
Latino
1
0
3
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Black and Latino parents kept their children in the schools despite feeling conflicted, and
frequently explained that they felt they had few school alternatives. Curtis, a white Hartford
parent, chose Montessori as the “the next best option” when her younger son failed to get into the
same magnet school as his older brother (Interview, May 2, 2014). Though Curtis was white, her
experience was most similar to parents of color living in Hartford who shared her sense of the
limited number of alternative options (Denice and Gross 2016).
Sense of community
Like Selena, conflicted parents of color frequently highlighted how much they valued the
caring, nurturing community, particularly in contrast to surrounding schools, where, as Selena
explained, “there’s a lot of more disciplinary things going on” (Interview, May 2, 2014). Others
highlighted the fact that their children had not been bullied at Birch or Vine, while older siblings
had been targeted at other schools (Interviews May 2, 9, 15, 2014). Oliver, a black suburban
father and Caribbean immigrant, was locked in a heated debate with his wife about whether their
youngest daughter would stay at a Montessori magnet for kindergarten or transfer back to the
suburbs. His enchantment with Montessori came from observing the care with which the staff
was educating his daughter in contrast to his own experience attending city schools as a child. He
described being unaccountably moved by a birthday celebration.
It almost brought tears to my eyes, just how they recognized her, how they celebrated her
birthday. It seemed simple. They read a birthday story, sat in a circle, we brought pictures
in and we talked about every year and what she was doing at that time. I just thought it
was the coolest thing…Just bringing it back to the form without the cake and the ice
cream. It’s one really small event in her learning, but I just thought it was one of the
coolest things for a kid and a parent…I thought it was the best birthday celebration
ever—it beats Chuck-e- Cheese.
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Similarly, Rita, a black mother, appreciated her daughter’s Montessori classroom for how it
developed “social skills...it’s that strong sense of community, that we’re in this together and that
the kids are just happy” (Interview, June 5, 2014). Jill, another black mother, highlighted the
close relationship with the teacher and fellow classmates over three years of being in the same
class “knowing my kid’s temperament and knowing how she forges these bonds, I really wanted
her to have that level of continuity...see she was empowered, because she became a leader; she
became bonded with the pack…” (Interview, May 20, 2014). Numerous black and Latino parents
I interviewed valued the social development of Montessori for their children, particularly in
contrast to surrounding schools.
High aspirations
Yet unlike the Montessori believers, many of the conflicted parents noted the ways in
which Montessori challenged their beliefs about education. Unlike believers Alexandra and
Lucinda, who had negative school experiences as children, many conflicted parents attributed
their perseverance in traditional school as key to their professional success. Marie moved from
Haiti to the U.S. at age thirteen and landed in the New York City public schools, which were
“awful, but I survived” (Interview, April 17, 2014). After only five years in the country, she got a
full scholarship to attend college. Christopher, a Puerto Rican immigrant credited the ESL
program in the Hartford public schools for his success (Interview, June 9, 2014). Moreover,
because of their success in school, they worried about a program that was radically different
from how they themselves had learned. Anuradha, an Indian immigrant, was considering pulling
her son in order to have a, “set curriculum because I have [studied] in that, my husband has
studied in that” (Interview, May 22, 2014). Learning differently for some of these parents was an
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obstacle instead of a benefit. As I elaborate in detail in chapter 6, the conflicted parents’
orientation towards traditional academics and a “utility-focused” view of education also came
into conflict with how Montessori educators represented learning. While Montessori educators
thought that parents needed more orientation to fully understand Montessori, parent explanations
suggested that the conflict was due to contrasting philosophies about the purpose of education,
and specific conflicts over how education was being implemented at the school.
When I asked parents about their future goals for their children, conflicted parents had
clear aspirations for their children and were specific about colleges in contrast to the believers,
who often emphasized personal fulfillment. Though some of the conflicted parents earned more
money than some of the believer parents, they often came from immigrant backgrounds or they
had achieved middle-class status in their generation, and they viewed college as a “utility”
(Lewis-McCoy 2014) to become financially secure. Ram referred directly to my university
affiliation when he replied, “We want them to improve their reading skills, mathematics skills
and we want them graduate from some very nice colleges like Yale” (Interview, May 15, 2014).
Rita, a black parent, explained, “we are all approaching this from the stance that, all of our kids
are going to go to Yale and Harvard. That all of our children are going to be lawyers and
doctors” (Interview, June 6, 2014). Christopher, a Latino father, wanted his children to be
directed towards significant career goals: “I want them to better prepare themselves as much as
they can, which is why I worry sometimes with the Montessori, because it’s so much freedom of
choice, and I just really hope they choose well.” His daughter scared him when she told him, “I
want to work at the school.” He asked her, “Really, what do you want to do?” She said, “I want
to be a crossing guard” (Interview, June 9, 2014). Many of the conflicted parents considered their
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own success in traditional school as the reason for their economic advancement, and wanted the
school to directly support their children in reaching these same goals.
Satisfied Good-schoolers
While the conflicted and true believer parents had made a deliberate choice for
Montessori, parents who were satisfied good-schoolers were primarily looking for convenience,
or the best option available with limited good schooling options. George and Maria Velasquez
made their choice mainly because Vine was two minutes from their house by car: “we were
working so we need something that [our son’s] grandfather can get him from school. So it was
the closest school that we can have” (Interview, April 23, 2014).
Maria and George exemplified the satisfied good-schoolers. As Table 1 showed, among
my interview sample, the group was predominantly low-income and working-class black and
Latino parents. Most of them lived in apartments that they rented, and their address information
and phone numbers were often out of date, suggesting frequent moves and unpaid bills. In
contrast to the true believers who were very willing to talk, it was hard to schedule interviews
with these parents, largely because of the instability of their daily lives and changing work
schedules. For example, the letter I sent home to Maria and George was returned, the email
bounced, and when I called their home number, I was told they didn’t live there anymore.
Finally, the Vine parent resource coordinator gave me George’s work number, and he agreed to
meet me, but then forgot to come to the first meeting. We scheduled a second meeting, but when
I called, he needed to reschedule for a job interview. Finally on the third try, George and Maria
met me at a nearby Dunkin Donuts. They apologized for their limited English, and I apologized
for my limited Spanish. As much as I tried to make George and Maria and other satisfied good
schooler parents feel comfortable, my interviews with them were often brief, twenty to thirty
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minutes. They often apologized for not having much to say or doubted that their information was
useful.
Like the true believers and the conflicted parents, the satisfied good-schoolers were
looking for quality educations for their children, but they identified more with the school being a
magnet school than a Montessori school. Shawn, a black Hartford father who was living on
public assistance and raising two children as a single parent, liked that magnet schools had “more
advanced learning,” new buildings, and that the school uniforms prevented “somebody trying to
steal your sneakers” (Interview, May 9, 2014). Lareau, a Haitian father who I met at an
international potluck at Vine told me, “At first, my friends weren’t interested in the school...I say
‘It’s a magnet school, and it’s free.’ Now they want to come, but they can’t get in” (Field Notes,
December 6, 2013). For both fathers, being a magnet school marked the schools as quality
schools, not the Montessori curriculum.
While these parents had not made a deliberate choice about Montessori, they implicitly
understood some of its central tenets and saw the impact it was having on their children. Lareaux
observed that his son “likes working with his hands” and then proceeded to name specific
Montessori materials “the number chains, the movable rods” (Field Notes, December 6, 2013).
George and Maria sensed a greater level of discipline in their son, and felt that it was, as Maria
explained, “a different education. They need to respect. I mean they’re not talking every time
they want to. It’s an order, you know?” George added, “They show them how to interact with the
world. When they grow up, they know that they have to clean up the mess. They show them a lot
of stuff that in public school they don’t show them” (Interview, April 23, 2014). Similarly,
Shawn observed that his six year old son had “gained that independence where he want to do
everything on his own…He know how to go to the fridge and open and get, if he’s thirsty, go get
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some milk” (Interview, May 9, 2014). Maria echoed, “He’s independent you know. He wants to
do everything himself” (Interview, April 23, 2014). Without being able to explain Montessori
principles explicitly, the satisfied-good-schoolers could identify foundational Montessori ideas in
lay-person terms: their children worked with their hands, had discipline, cleaned up after
themselves and had greater independence.
Satisfied good-schoolers appreciated Montessori enough that they wanted to enroll other
children into the program. George and Maria asked me for advice on how to get their eight-yearold son into the Montessori program with his four-year-old brother. They noticed the four-yearold could do things his older brother hadn’t yet learned. Asuncion, a Latina mother who hadn’t
completed high school herself and worked as a home health aide, had a five-year-old daughter in
the Vine program, and was also working on getting her much older daughter’s children into
Vine’s Montessori program.
These parents also appreciated that their children were surpassing their own limited
education. Asuncion started off liking that her daughter knew the continents at age 3 and was at
level 10 in reading at age 5, but ultimately, she was most impressed that her daughter was able to
teach her things. “She stays focused more and she enjoys the work more. Every day is a different
day, different learning. She comes home excited. She teaches me also, she corrects me. And then
I come and I confirm with the teacher and she says, ‘she was right, this is how we do it in
school.’ And I still learn along with my five-year old” (Interview, June 6, 2014). Sarah, a
Jamaican immigrant and stay-at-home parent, shared her pride in her son’s knowledge, “He’s so
proud that he can spell… and big words…and he was like mommy, it’s Mississippi and
Minnesota, and he’s showing me all the states on the map. I’m like, I don’t even know where
they are, and he’s just like pointing them out and telling…He loves going there. He loves it. He
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asks on Saturdays and Sundays, too” (Interview, April 14, 2014). Maria also proudly
commented, “[my son is] very smart. Sometimes he look at me and he’s like, he’s talking about
histories that I never know…” (Interview, April 23, 2014). For Maria, Sara, Asuncion and other
satisfied good-schoolers, the proof of their children’s learning was that they already knew more
than their parents.
Satisfied good-schoolers were some of the poorest families at both schools. They had
successfully navigated Hartford’s complicated application but rarely chose the school for its
specific pedagogy. Once they arrived, they were pleased with what they found, as they observed
their children being happy learners and following advanced academic trajectories in comparison
to their siblings and parents. Their satisfaction with the school demonstrated how they felt their
children were getting a transformative education. But even though they were happy with
Montessori, their level of belief and understanding of Montessori separated them from the
believers.
How Belief Mattered for Parent Involvement
For the true believers, belief facilitated connections with other parents. Anna, a white
parent from a poor socioeconomic background, found that her status as a believer allowed her to
connect with other parents who identified similarly. She felt that parents who chose Montessori
“might just care a little bit more.” In contrast to other schools her children had attended, at Vine
“a lot of the parents did their research to try to find a Montessori school because they knew about
them in the past. A lot of the parents have told me that they’ve transferred kids from other
Montessori schools to come over here.” (Interview, February 24, 2014). Anna considered a
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benefit of her children’s public Montessori school to be parents who had made a deliberate
decision for Montessori, and cared enough to be highly involved.
Parents’ identification with Montessori also became an additional separation between
believers and satisfied good-schoolers. This separation exacerbated other social divisions like
social class and urban-suburban geographies and further limited the ability of these two groups to
connect in a meaningful way. Believers occasionally questioned the commitment of the satisfied
good-schoolers. Like the white parent at the start of the chapter who observed that while she had
made a deliberate choice, Hartford parents were “just there,” Jill, a black parent who lived in the
suburbs, also doubted whether Hartford parents really cared about the Montessori focus. She
described some Hartford parents as being so passive in the school choice process that they were
“just kind of random,” leaving the school district to make excessive accommodations for them,
“You can’t have the random nature or mentality of folks who aren’t vested and engaged in the
process drive the process” (Interview, May 20, 2014). These parents saw themselves as
deliberate and engaged, by contrast.
Parents who were believers were also more likely to be involved, although the influence
might potentially go both ways. From the interviews, I categorized parent engagement into low
(attended student-teacher conferences, but otherwise rarely attended school events), medium
(attended school events but mostly as a passive participant) and high (involved in school and
PTA events, often in a leadership role.) Table 4 shows that true believers were most likely to
have a high or medium level of involvement, and formed the core of the parent leadership at both
schools. Satisfied good-schoolers had a low participation rate, in part due to transportation
limitations and inflexible work schedules. Conflicted parents had a medium to low level of
participation.
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Table 4: Parental participation by level of Montessori belief (n. 51 interviews)
High Involvement
(involved in school
and PTA events, often
in a leadership role)
Medium (attended
school events but
mostly as a passive
participant)
Low (attended
conferences,
but otherwise
rarely attended
school events)
Total
True Believer
11
7
1
19
Conflicted
3
8
9
12
Satisfied Good-schooler
2
2
8
20
True believers who were involved at their child’s school gained specific advantages
through friendships with other parents and employment opportunities at the schools. The social
network of involved parents (Horvart, Weininger and Lareau 2003, Small 2009b) swapped
childcare and shared informational resources about the school, city, jobs and higher education.
Both schools offered parents an employment opportunity through a yearlong internship program
working as support staff and training as a Montessori assistant, potentially garnering a more
permanent school position in the future. Six staff working at both schools had started out as
parents.
Impact of a Conflicted Fit
Black, Latino, Asian and white families who experienced a conflicted fit with the
Montessori theme were less involved with the school community and also considered pulling
their children from the school. Only three out of the twenty conflicted parents were highly
involved in the Parent Teacher Organization or volunteered at school, though all of them
attended school events. This meant that they were less likely to take advantage of the social
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network of involved parents. Some black and Latino parents focused their school involvement on
ensuring that their children were academically challenged. Despite working full time and
attending mortuary school, Angela, the black mother concerned about her son’s academic
progress, decided to start coming in every Thursday and “mak[ing] my concerns known,” (Field
Notes, December 12, 2013) a time-consuming practice Lewis-McCoy terms “hyper-vigilance”
(2014). And a number of the conflicted parents decided to try the school lottery again to see if
they could find a different school. Among my interviewees, five black and Latino families were
actively searching for other options for their children due to academic concerns. Feeling
conflicted about their children’s schooling led to a fractured sense of belonging in the school
community.
Conclusion
This chapter examined in how parents engaged in sense making around their child’s
school choice. While schools and districts market the idea of finding a “perfect” or a “good” fit,
parents whose children enrolled in public Montessori had a wide range of reactions to the
Montessori method. This wide range of identifications continued even though both Birch and
Vine staff devoted considerable outreach to engaging parents and teaching them about
Montessori.
While these three categories of parents might vary in another public Montessori school or
another school community, in this context, parents’ racial and social class backgrounds were
influential in their group identification. This linkage was not because of any inherent
compatibility or incompatibility between Montessori pedagogy and certain groups, but more
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because middle-class parents of color had both high aspirations and more limited alternatives
than their white counterparts, based on the offerings of their home district.
True believers, who believed Montessori was a distinct and superior form of education,
either came to the school specifically for Montessori or discovered it with a fervent passion once
their children were enrolled. Believers included parents of all racial backgrounds, but the great
majority of white parents were believers who had chosen the school specifically for the
Montessori curriculum.
Conflicted parents liked some aspects of the Montessori curriculum, specifically the
respect for children and strong social community, but were concerned that the schools lacked
academic rigor. Conflicted parents were primarily middle- and upper-middle-class black, Latino
and Asian parents who had also made a deliberate choice, but had philosophical differences with
the Montessori method, particularly given their own experiences of success through traditional
education. They were not confident in the quality of school alternatives in their home districts,
leading them to stay at the public Montessori schools even if they were dissatisfied. Only a few
white parents I interviewed were conflicted, representing the fact that many conflicted white
parents returned to their home districts after preschool and therefore were missing from the
school sample.
Finally, satisfied good-schoolers, who were primarily working-class and low-income
black and Latino parents, liked the schools, but didn’t strongly identify with the Montessori
pedagogy. True believers sometimes looked down on them for making a less intentional choice
and making fewer commuting sacrifices to attend the school. Thus, belief became a significant
force in the way parents related to the community of parents at the school: it demarcated a group,
creating symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Fournier 1992) between believers and non-believers
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that had significant implications for whether these parents stood to share in the benefits of the
community’s resources. In particular, the limited participation of conflicted parents of color
represents a lost opportunity in that they might have provided a valuable bridge between the
white parents and working-class and low-income families of color. In the next chapter, I examine
how conflicted parents understood of education in contradictory values to Montessori educators,
and what this conflict shows us about the importance of examining parental experience in their
children’s schools.
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Chapter 6
“I Just Need More rigor”: Black and Latino Parents and Conflicted Fit Inside the Schools
Introduction
Rita, a black educator in Hartford, Connecticut, was concerned about her 10-year-old
daughter, whom she enrolled in Birch magnet Montessori school as a three-year-old. Rita
worked at a non-magnet Hartford school, which, in contrast to her daughter’s school, showed
visible signs of neglect: a trash can overflowing outside the school and no one at the desk to buzz
in visitors when I arrived. Rita was a tall, statuesque woman, and she was one of the educators
responsible for discipline at her school, but we still watched passively as a security guard quickly
intervened to stop a group of Latino and black middle school students talking loudly in the
hallway. Back in Rita’s classroom, she shared what initially attracted her to the Montessori
method: a child-centered curriculum with uninterrupted time for individual learning, giving
children independence and respect even when they were being disciplined. In contrast, Rita
explained that at her school, “our first response typically appears to be ‘okay, you’re suspended’”
(Interview June 5, 2014).
While Rita connected with the social development and community of the Montessori
approach, over time, she and several other middle- and upper-middle-class parents of color also
began to question whether Montessori practices would put her child at a disadvantage in a
traditional secondary school. Rita explained, “I like the smallness, I like the community. But
there’s also the academic component... I just need more rigor. I mean ideally if you could have
that Montessori environment with more rigor, that will work.” Instead of being allowed to work
at her own pace, Rita believed her daughter needed to be pushed harder.
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This tension between valuing the community offered by Montessori and having concerns
with academic rigor is an example of what I term a conflicted fit around school theme. This
chapter explains why nearly half of the black and Latino parents I interviewed felt conflicted
about Montessori. Although Montessori educators told me they thought the problem was that
parents didn’t fully understand Montessori, through listening to parents, I came to understand
that the conflict was due to two factors: 1) contrasting philosophies about the purpose of
education, what Lewis-McCoy distinguishes as the “abstract” versus “utility-focused approach”
to education (2014) and 2) parenting recommendations that became racially charged when
delivered by white teachers to parents of color. Ultimately, Rita pulled her daughter out of Birch
one year early, in a large part due to her academic concerns.
As we saw in the last chapter, once parents enrolled their child in one of two Montessori
magnet schools, they began to assess what they thought of the choice. As a result, they fell into
one of three camps: true believers, conflicted parents and the satisfied good-schoolers. True
believers had selected the schools for Montessori, and often suggested it was the only way to
learn. Satisfied good-schoolers liked the school as a good school, but not specifically for its
Montessori curriculum. Conflicted parents were often actively considering another school and
described liking and disliking aspects of their children’s school.
Middle- and upper-middle class black, Latino and Asian parents I interviewed were most
likely to identify as true believers or conflicted parents. Working-class black and Latino parents
were most likely to identify as satisfied. And while my sample of black, Latino and Asian
parents revealed complex interlocking dynamics around identities of race, class and immigrant
background, here, I focus on common themes among parents of color, roughly half of whom
identified as conflicted. In contrast, only 4 out of 18 white interviewees (22%) were conflicted.
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At my two school sites, while it wasn’t entirely predictable who would identify as conflicted, as
this chapter tries to explain why this was the case with a specific focus on the way in which
conflicted parents interacted with the pedagogy.
Conflict around school theme and communication between parents and teachers might
potentially be an issue at all schools (Lightfoot 1978), but seemed to be exacerbated by certain
Montessori practices and related cultural assumptions, particularly when delivered by a
predominantly white staff. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the need to diversify the Montessori
teacher pipeline is a broader problem under discussion in the Montessori community. The
Hartford area public Montessori schools are at the vanguard of Montessori diversity initiatives
through hiring community members and parents as paid school interns, training them to become
classroom assistants and eventually Montessori teachers. Still, at my two school sites, while
roughly half of each school’s support staff were people of color (including classroom assistants,
parent coordinators, front desk people, security guards and custodians), the two principals were
white, and only 3 of 19 teachers at the schools were black or Latino.
The issues around which parents felt the lack of a fit ranged from major to minor
concerns, but ones that my black and Latino interviewees repeatedly highlighted as moments of
disjuncture between themselves and the school. Parent concerns about the Montessori method
related to 1) academic rigor, 2) gardening, and 3) healthy eating. The consequences of not fitting,
including how parents differentially interacted and went missing in the school community, will
be discussed in Chapter 7.
Abstract Education, School Marketing and Parental Communication
Part of the disconnect for these parents began in the marketing of both schools and
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continued through interactions with staff. At my two research sites and elsewhere in the public
sector, Montessori was most commonly presented in “abstract” terms, emphasizing personal
development and intellectual exploration. These abstract terms that contrasted with the
expectations of many of the black and Latino parents who shared a “utility focused approach” to
education, where they were concerned with concrete outcomes (Lewis-McCoy 2014).
Montessori wasn’t always represented in these abstract terms. As we saw in Chapter 3,
Montessori education has meant different things to parents at different times in the last century.
In the 1960s, Montessori was the academically rigorous option in contrast to play-based
preschool programs popular at the time. Hartford parents in 1964 might have read a Hartford
Courant article profiling Maria Montessori as a “mathematical prodigy” and describing the
surging Connecticut Montessori scene where “Montessori pupils learn numbers at the age of
three, they write at four, read at five, do higher mathematics at six. The system is a no nonsense
approach to education, the schools are ‘work’ schools, not ‘play’ schools” (Massaro 1963).
In the 1990s, Montessori in Hartford was publicized for benefitting students of color.
When a majority-black Hartford public school opened up a Montessori preschool classroom in
1996, Hartford parents in the 1990s might have read a Hartford Courant article about Montessori
education as a way of teaching “basic skills” to urban youth. George Coleman, chief of the
Connecticut Department of Education’s Early Childhood Office at the time, stressed the benefits
of Montessori for “urban children” and praised Montessori’s “structur[e]” and “methodical
approach” (Green 1996). Similarly, Lillard (1972) links Montessori’s success with disadvantaged
youth to the “lack of assumptions of pre-learned skills” (143) and a systematic approach to
learning everything from a pencil grip to how to wash hands.
In contrast, when Hartford created Montessori magnets in response to the Sheff vs.
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O’Neill desegregation court order, much of their marketing efforts were directed toward
recruiting enough white families to reach the 25% non-minority threshold. Unlike earlier
representations of Montessori, recruitment efforts tended to emphasize abstract educational
attributes like personalization and independence that would appeal to families with significant
educational capital (Pugh 2009). In Birch’s and Vine’s brochures, a diverse array of white,
Latino and Asian students hold a slug, blow bubbles, plant seeds and weave, alongside images of
students working with Montessori math materials like the trinomial cube. Brochures for both
schools emphasized the whole child and independence:
learning communities where children work on their individual social, emotional, and
academic skills…
independent exploration and discovery…
children emerge as independent, confident, compassionate, responsible leaders of
society…
learning is an exciting process of discovery leading to concentration, motivation, selfdiscipline and a love of learning…
Birch and Vine were marketed as places broadening education beyond academics through
spending time in nature, experiencing “exploration and discovery,” and becoming “leaders of
society.” Moreover, these descriptions emphasized long-term and broad benefits, rather than
concrete outcomes that might appeal to parents with a utility focused approach. Similarly, in
compiling a current and historical dataset of public Montessori schools, a research process that
involved spending significant amounts of time on public Montessori school websites, I found
few public Montessori schools that advertised the strength of their academic program or stressed
having a “college preparatory curriculum.” Yet marketing a curriculum by de-emphasizing
academics and highlighting holistic characteristics could have the unintended consequence of
appealing to people who are confident in their children’s ability to succeed academically and are
willing to take the risk that an alternative education might not deliver translatable skills to a
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mainstream job market (Kimelberg 2014a, 2014b). In this way, a good deal of Montessori
marketing at Birch, Vine, and other public Montessori schools around the country, was targeted
to parents who already valued abstract approaches to education.
Once they enrolled, black and Latino parents felt a gap between their academic
expectations and school communication even after attending parent education events, suggesting
their problem was not one of misunderstanding Montessori, as some Montessori researchers
suggest (Chattin-McNichols 2016, Murray 2008, Parker 2007, Zarybnisky 2010). Birch and Vine
school staff offered extensive Montessori parent education including pre-enrollment orientations,
open houses and math nights, but their communication often presented Montessori through
abstract ideas that did not resonate with all of the parents. Theo, Vine’s principal, explained
Montessori to prospective parents at an Open House: “We look for our students to direct their
learning. We feed them. If you look in a Montessori classroom you will see twenty-four children
doing twenty-four different things based on their developmental needs.” (Field Notes January 19,
2014). Theo’s comments focused on abstract educational ideas like responding individually to
the needs of students and comparing education to nourishment through letting them “direct their
learning.” Similarly, Birch’s handbook explained the primary focus of Montessori education is
the “natural development of the child...Our task as teachers – and parents, a child’s first and most
important teachers – is to assist that development through patient attention to the child’s needs.
Development, in other words, is the child’s work” (Birch handbook 2013-14). Montessori staff
communicated their valuing of “natural development,” an idea far removed from the typical
discussion around educational outcomes in a traditional school. Furthermore, school staff
expected parents to support the school theme. Both schools’ handbooks stated, “We build our
most productive relationships with families who understand and embrace the mission of the
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school” (Birch and Vine handbooks 2013-14). Parents were expected to learn about and
“embrace” Montessori, suggesting that families who questioned the school theme might not have
“productive relationships” with school staff.
Competition and Academic Urgency
As we saw in Chapter 5, even after extensive outreach by school staff, black and Latino
parents who valued the social environment found the Montessori philosophy of having their
child work at his or her own pace was less appealing. Thirteen out of 28 black and Latino
interviewees (46%) told me that some aspects of Montessori’s maxim “follow the child” ran
counter to their sense of educational urgency, a sense that was rooted in their racial experience
and identity. Though these interviews only measured parental perception and not student
performance, both schools had significant racial achievement gaps beginning with state testing in
3rd grade, though this rating was never mentioned in interviews with any administrators, parents
at the school or prospective parents and only came up once at a parent meeting I attended.
Summer school students I observed at Vine were almost entirely black and Latino.
Two observations highlight what these academic concerns might look like in the
classroom. One day I observed a Birch elementary classroom and focused on one student, a
black boy who looked to be around seven or eight. He was tall and thin, his hair was braided and
he wore high top sneakers with red laces. Over the course of an hour, I watched him construct a
long tube out of eight paper towel rolls, go out into the hallway to talk to a group of girls, talk to
the teacher, talk to another group of boys, shoot marbles through the tube, work with a group of
boys to shoot marbles through the tube and collect clumped pieces of tape. Thirty-one minutes
after I began observing, he sat down, consulted with the teacher and began trace a geometric
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shape on a piece of paper (Field Notes May 30, 2013). Though I could not see what assignment
he was working on, it was hard to observe the amount of time the student was wandering and
switching work. In my field notes, I wrote “I want to intervene!” in big letters. When I spoke
with a Montessori trainer at the school, she responded that they evaluated student progress over
the course of a week, rather than a smaller section of time, and that students had times of being
more and less productive. She was not alarmed by what I had observed in the classroom.
In another instance, a black mother who was training as a Montessori teacher, echoed my
own frustration when she observed her son “sashaying all over the classroom.” She described
wanting to get a seat belt to keep him down or go talk to him and tell him to stop wandering. The
teacher’s response to her concern was, “He’ll be fine” (Field Notes, May 13, 2013). In these
observations, outside observers were concerned that the freedom of movement and choosing
work resulted in lost learning, particularly for black boys, while the Montessori educators saw
this process as part of the child acquiring self-discipline to regulate their own work.22
Working at the student’s pace, which Montessori teachers heralded as a benefit of the
approach, could be viewed by some parents as holding their children back. Natalie was a Latina
parent who was raising two children on her own. Her older son had learning difficulties, but the
district had been quick to identify her younger daughter as academically gifted, and enrolled her
in a special gifted preschool. The district suddenly closed the gifted preschool the following year,
enrolling her instead at Vine. While Natalie’s daughter had adjusted well to the Montessori
school, both mother and daughter missed the gifted program. “At [the other school] they did
have certain subjects to go over and tests and stuff like that there, whereas [at the Montessori]
they don’t really have that that much, they let them learn at their own pace. So I don’t know if
22
This more fluid sense of educational time stands in stark contrast to Doug Lemov’s educational handbook, Teach
Like a Champion, used widely in urban charter schools, that instructs teachers on efficiency systems for passing out
papers in order to maximize instructional time (Lemov 2010).
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that might end up not letting her go as far as she can…
Interviewer: Oh, tell me more about that.
Natalie: I don’t know too much but that’s – the [Montessori] teacher would say ‘oh, I wish
you would try to challenge yourself a little more’ whereas to another schools, they would
be challenging her more. But here, they let them do it at their own pace.
Interviewer: It sounds like your sense is you wish the teachers were doing more pushing.
Natalie: Yeah, knowing my daughter, she’ll do good but I think sometimes she needs a
little more push because I think she can do more. (Interview, June 6, 2014).
For Natalie, working “at their own pace” was problematic, giving too much power to the child at
a point that she felt her daughter needed high expectations.
While Montessori educators did not encourage academic competition, some parents I
interviewed expected their child “to compete on a national level,” as one black mother stated
(Interview May 20, 2014). Selena, a Latina mother I interviewed during her son’s Suzuki violin
lesson, was disappointed that the school had been slow to test her son for the district’s gifted and
talented program. She explained, “While I understand that there’s a focus on everyone
developing on their own, I think that just a little competition is not going to hurt. It makes them
excel sometimes.” Although her concerns were mostly “little things,” she thought they added up
to “sometimes make you question just the program itself, the school” (Interview May 2, 2014).
Similarly, Angela, a black mother who shared concerns with fellow parents in the Birch parent
room that the school wasn’t pushing her son enough: “There’s nothing wrong with
extraordinary...I work for a doctor. His son is my son’s age. He speaks so much more clearly.
My son, he mumbles. [The doctor’s son is] in a public school. I thought I did good by having
[my son] in a Montessori school” (Field Notes, December 12, 2013). Other black and Latino
parents echoed these concerns explaining they saw their child “level[ing] out, to be a little bit
below their peers,” (Interview, May 2, 2014). Parents were actively evaluating their children
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alongside the children of their friends and co-workers and wanted to ensure that their children
would be competitive.
‘The Gift of the Fourth Year’
Middle- and upper-middle-class black and Latino parents were especially concerned if
their child was asked to spend a fourth year in the primary classroom of preschool and
kindergarten-age students. This extra year was a common Montessori practice, but one that could
trigger alarm bells of an incompatible approach. I heard Montessori educators refer to it as “the
gift of the fourth year” and one similar in logic to kindergarten “red-shirting” where parents with
the means to pay for an extra year of preschool wait a year before enrolling their children in
kindergarten. While one white parent spoke positively of having her twins do a fourth primary
year, Cynthia, a black mother, shared mixed feelings about her son spending a fourth year in his
primary classroom where she worried he had gotten “too comfortable.” She compared him to her
niece who was the same age but was already academically ahead. Her son “started school before
everybody, and I wanted to give him that head start, but I don’t know if it really helped!”
(Interview June 9, 2014). She and several of the other parents I interviewed were considering
pulling their children out of Montessori after being told they would need to repeat a grade.
Homework
Other black and Latino parents were concerned about the lack of homework beyond
nightly reading throughout elementary school, a common Montessori practice. I heard the policy
promoted by administrators and explained in the school handbook as “valu[ing] your child’s
participation in family life” (Birch handbook 2013-14). Marilyn, a white Montessori parent who
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drove her daughters almost an hour each way to school, valued the no-homework policy by
emphasizing the pointlessness of her stepson’s homework which he frequently forgot to bring
home. “He was stressed, his mother was stressed, we were stressed, and to what end? What did
he really gain by completing the homework?” (Field Notes, March 28, 2013).
Four of the black parents I interviewed, however, viewed homework more positively and
wished it were offered at Birch and Vine. Heather, a single mother who lived in Hartford with
her parents, said her children “want homework because they see other kids with homework…”
(Interview, May 20, 2014). She and others reported asking teachers for homework, and in some
cases, homework was covertly given to them in defiance of school policy. Selena, a Latina
mother, reported that she had heard of teachers “getting in trouble” for giving homework
(Interview, May 2, 2014). Pam, a black mother, told me homework was her only problem with
the school: “I have threatened [my son] couple of times, tell him I’m going to change him
because he’s not getting any homework…I think he’s comfort[able]; I think he like it there but I
just think he need little more push” (Interview May 15, 2014). Given the achievement gap
between black and Latino students and white students at the school, for these parents, homework
was an important way to support their children and monitor their progress in an unfamiliar
curriculum.
Hard Work: “Trying to Make up for History”
To some extent, this parental anxiety around academic performance isn’t unusual, and
some researchers argue it is linked to parents of all socioeconomic backgrounds working to
maintain an insecure class position (Cooper 2014). Private Montessori educators have told me
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they have the academic conversation constantly with parents, and in some cases, it jeopardizes
their ability to maintain a stable enrollment. A private Montessori school leader recently called
this the “Montessori paradox,” writing, “if parents choose to send their children to a Montessori
school with the hope of protecting them from the pressures commonly associated with education,
especially at the upper levels, can they really resist the need to also worry that their children will
not be prepared for their lives in the ‘real world’?” (Howe 2014: 28). While parents of all social
backgrounds might feel anxious about their children’s future success, particularly with an
alternative curriculum, for many of the black and Latino parents I interviewed, the anxiety was
compounded by a familial history of limited educational opportunities and their awareness of the
discrimination their children of color might face in the future.
Many of these black and Latino parents had achieved middle- and upper-middle-class
status in their generation and attributed their success to hard work in traditional schools. Marie
Lyne, a Haitian immigrant who came to the U.S. at age 13 spoke about the virtue of raising
children with a strong work ethic. As we spoke in her formal dining room, she explained,
“looking at where I’m from and the opportunities that I’ve been given and the privilege that I’ve
had, I think it definitely drives me even more, and I also drive my kids because I want them to be
on that path.” Later, she added, “we want [our children] to know that you have to work hard, you
know. I mean, nothing is going to be handed on a platter to you...I’m a hard working person. I
was at work. Every single day this week. Four days. And that was vacation” (Interview April 17
2014). The personal experience of black and Latino parents also reflected a belief that they
needed to work harder to overcome a legacy of discrimination, or what Rita, the black mother
whose story was featured at the opening of the chapter called “mak[ing] up for history.” When
Rita and I met a year after our first interview, this time at a suburban coffee shop, she told me
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that her daughter had transferred to another magnet school and was now excelling academically
and socially. When I asked her to reflect back on her anxiety from the previous year and the
pattern I observed among other black and Latino parents, she explained:
...in order for me to be successful, I have to work harder, I see this among my peers...we
are all approaching this from the stance that, all of our kids are going to go to Yale and
Harvard. That all of our children are going to be lawyers and doctors. And we’re coming
at this from this competitive background because we’re so afraid that our kids are going
to miss out on some opportunity that we weren’t afforded. We’re trying to make up for, I
feel like history and in us trying to make up for history, my daughter plays the piano, she
plays the violin, she plays softball, she plays basketball. (Interview May 13, 2015)
Rita’s focus on her daughter’s academic competitiveness and extracurricular activities was
linked to her own history of “opportunity that we weren’t afforded.” Others spoke with concern
about their children’s vulnerability in the world outside school. Evelyn, a black mother who had
not finished college decided to quit her retail job in order to be home and keep her children out
of “a world of trouble.” She challenged her sons to get A+s while she expected her daughters to
get As, and she told me how she explained this incentive to her skeptical husband: “Boys give up
easy, boys give up quicker. So they have to have the highest and hardest goal to achieve”
(Interview, April 17, 2014). The impulse to work harder in response to this discrimination felt at
odds with the Montessori philosophy of learning at one’s own pace. In this way, the value of
Montessori’s abstract educational benefits came into conflict with parents’ racial experiences
leading them to be concerned about concrete academic outcomes.
The Gardening Dilemma
Gardening emerged as another area of the curriculum that black and Latino parents
interpreted as an abstract benefit that contrasted to their desire to focus on concrete academics.
While Posey-Maddox (2014) found that a school garden could be a powerful amenity recruiting
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middle class parents to enroll their children in a gentrifying neighborhood school, I found that
this reaction varied by race. Middle and upper-middle-class black and Latino parents were most
skeptical about the gardening focus at the schools.
An ideal Montessori classroom has an exit door to an “outdoor classroom” where
students can work independently planting, watering and weeding. Though not all Birch and Vine
classrooms met the ideal, both had multiple gardening beds around the school that were tended
by parents, students and in some cases volunteer organizations. They grew cabbages and herbs,
eight-foot-tall sunflowers and corn. The schools hosted a Garden Day and an Earth Day and
served food grown and cooked by students at multiple events during the year, including a
memorable vegetable lasagna.
The school’s attentiveness to nature extended to the local flora and fauna. One spring
afternoon, I was writing field notes in the staff room at Birch when the following announcement
came over the PA system: “Hi, everyone. Excuse the interruption. Please stay out of the
courtyard. There are some baby robins that have just hatched and we don’t want them to get
squished.” I turned to look at the school secretary, a black woman with a warm demeanor, who
was having her lunch in the staff room. I asked her, “Is this different from the PA
announcements you hear at most schools?” She agreed – only at a Montessori school, and then
joked, “Where else in this world would that be appropriate? It doesn’t even faze you now” (Field
Notes, May 20, 2014). Her reaction highlighted the wonder and strangeness of this focus on
fauna in an urban public school.
White parents of all backgrounds and some parents of color who already identified as true
believers enthusiastically embraced the focus on gardening and viewed it as a way to bring
nature access to students who wouldn’t have otherwise had access to it. A number of the parents
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volunteered in the gardens, which were largely parent-run. Vine hosted a special gardening day,
after which Jacqueline, a black parent, commented that her children “want to start a garden at the
house” (Field notes, May 13, 2014). Alejandro, a Latino parent, said “Montessori started [my
son] eating vegetables… and everyone in the family can benefit out of that, you know, because
we can start eating healthier and stuff like that” (Interview, May 29, 2014). Gwen, a white parent
with dreadlocks who lived on a farm with her children, volunteered extensively with the
gardening program and was actually concerned that Vine did not have enough green space and
outdoor time. As a result, she took her children out every Friday in order for them to be enrolled
in a “Wilderness” school. For all of these parents, gardening was a way of improving nutrition,
being outdoors and connecting with animals and nature, and they appreciated the broader focus
beyond academics.
In contrast, several middle- and upper-middle-class black and Latino parents were
concerned about the extensive gardening emphasis. While most research on school gardens has
highlighted their positive impact (Gerona 2015b), a few have argued that they are tilled on elitist
soil. In The Atlantic Monthly, Flanagan describes school gardens as a “cruel trick” delivered by
“an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if wellmeaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American
schoolchildren of hours they might otherwise have spent reading important books or learning
higher math” (2010). According to Flanagan, asking the children of farm laborers to do farming
was not only disrespectful but was preventing them from advancing their education. Similarly,
Christopher, a Latino father whom I interviewed in front of a massive saltwater fish tank in his
dining room, worried that his children were spending far too much time gardening for minimal
concrete rewards:
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I can’t figure out all this motherly, green thumb, nature-loving hippie part of the program.
I’m trying to prepare [my daughter] for modern-day stuff like technology and computers
and all these advances in medicine – and they’re planting peas. I know it’s important, but
can she read, can she add, can she do computer-based stuff that we’re all leading to? She
can rake, and she can trim bushes, but real-world practical use?
Gardening for Christopher was a “hippie” program that didn’t fit into his aspirations for a
“modern” education focused around technology and computers.
Parental concern about gardening grew when one of the Hartford area Montessori magnet
schools joined a growing group of Montessori schools to open a farm-based Montessori middle
school program, called an Erdkinder, meaning children of the land. Montessori did not envision
the training in order for children to become farmers: “We have called these children the
Erdkinder because they are learning about civilization through its origin in agriculture”
(Montessori 2004) and she stressed that the Erdkinder would help children to understand their
world by taking them back to simple social forms of production and exchange. In Montessori’s
original vision, this included a residential school for adolescents based on a working farm
including a business run by the students, a bed and breakfast for parents to visit, machines
students could take apart and places for creative work. Some schools have modified this vision,
for example, the private Metro Montessori Middle School in Portland, Oregon operates a
student-run bicycle repair shop. Other schools try to hew close to Montessori’s vision by setting
schools on working farms or through gardening and beekeeping in urban and suburban settings.
Some initial reactions from parents suggested this middle school model posed potential
conflicts to parents with family backgrounds in agricultural work. Tara, a black mother,
described her mother-in-law becoming alarmed upon learning that the middle school program
was set on a farm. “[She] grew up on a farm in the South, and she says it isn’t like we imagine.
She’s worked her whole life to get away from a farm” (Field Notes, April 16, 2014). Similarly,
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Alissa Levy, a former teacher at the Grove School, a public Montessori high school based on a
farm in Redlands, California, explained that it was difficult to recruit Latino students from the
area because “so many of [their parents] work as farm laborers, and the last thing they want to do
is have their children work on a farm” (Field Notes, September 22, 2014). As these two
narratives show, farming for parents whose families worked in agriculture was something to be
avoided in school, not romanticized. The emphasis on gardening as a positive amenity separate
from academics was based on both race- and class-based assumptions of privilege.
On the other hand, when teachers communicated the academic relevance of the gardening
program, emphasizing its curricular utility, parents felt better. Several months after he
complained about planting peas, I encountered Christopher by a seven-foot corn stalk just after
his eight-year-old daughter had given him a full explanation of its reproductive biology.
Christopher and his wife were visibly impressed (Field Notes, August 7, 2014). When farming
was closely connected with science, the school fit his vision of the type of education he wanted
for his children.
Healthy Eating
Disagreements between parents and teachers over abstract and utility-focused ideas of
education took form in conflicts over academics and gardening. Black and Latino parents I
interviewed also felt a conflicted fit through racially charged interactions with school staff over
parenting practices. In the final example, I discuss how healthy eating became a contested arena
at both schools.
Staff saw their parent education role to not only explain the curriculum but also to share
Maria Montessori’s ideas on child development to help parents improve their parenting.
Devyani, the instructor for the Montessori training course I attended, paraphrased Montessori’s
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own words to remind our class, “Adults are the biggest obstacle to the development of the child”
(Field notes, May 15, 2013). In the field, I observed that Montessori educators were equally
likely to critique parents of all racial and class backgrounds for practices that limited children’s
independence including co-sleeping with a four year old, excessive iPad use and hand-feeding a
toddler. But the way in which parents interpreted these staff recommendations varied by race.
Black and Latino parents of all class backgrounds had negative reactions to staff giving parenting
advice around healthy eating, perhaps because they interpreted this advice to be racially charged
when delivered by predominantly white educators (Delpit 1995, Ladson-Billings 1994). As Tara,
a black mother, explained, “it’s just juice and milk, but it really isn’t about juice and milk”
(Interview, March 7, 2014). Healthy eating guidelines were minor in the context of the broader
educational experience at the same time that they symbolized bigger tensions between black
parents and a perceived alliance of white parents and teachers.
In order to grant children high levels of independence in the classroom, teachers at Vine
and Birch attended to minute details, like recommending children wear drawstring pants in order
to use the bathroom independently. This attention to all aspects of the child’s experience
extended to what they ate. And while healthy eating is now increasingly part of a broader
nutrition campaign in American public schools, both Montessori schools staff went further by
mandating what foods were allowable at school, focusing on limiting sugar consumption in order
to help children to focus in the classroom. These good intentions however, ran directly into
conflict with some black and Latino parents who were concerned about their children going
hungry.23
23
After parents brought this issue to my attention, I started researching Montessori’s original nutrition
recommendations at the turn of the century that were most concerned with giving Roman slum children adequate
calories to ward off malnutrition. She advocated a diet for children “rich in fats and sugars,” favored soups
thickened with bread, and advised against children consuming, among other things, cheese, lobster, uncooked
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A black prospective parent texted me a photo of Birch’s 2014 welcome letter to incoming
parents, in part because she was so offended by the nutrition language. The letter stated: “We
have found that many children react negatively to sugar intake and would appreciate your
cooperation in helping your child learn to eat and enjoy natural foods with no added sweeteners.”
From this initial guideline around limiting sugar intake, white parents and school staff at both
schools worked to ban flavored milk and eliminate the free district breakfasts kits that they
believed had an excessive amount of sugar.
At a Birch, school staff and a group of white parents worked together before I began my
fieldwork to ban flavored (chocolate and strawberry milk), a policy that made them unique
among area magnet schools. Subsequently, I observed at several PTO meetings how they defined
the district school breakfast kits as the next nutritional problem before sharing a petition with the
entire parent community. At one PTO executive board meeting, Laura, the one black mother on
the PTO board asked the group “what’s the problem with the kits? My kids don’t eat breakfast
here.” She didn’t understand why it was important to focus on breakfasts because she and the
other PTO parents’ children were unlikely to need them.
Ruth, a white mother, indicated this was an issue for the benefit of all students. “What’s
the percentage that’s getting breakfast here? Even if it’s just one percent, we want them to be
eating something healthy.” They discussed another public school that had its own cafeteria and
hot breakfasts. Ruth continued, “We get the breakfast kit menu—muffin, graham cracker, some
kind of cookie or cracker, juice and sugared cereal. We are asking for a fresh piece of fruit and
you must have some whole grain. The options are there—we want [the district] to use them.”
vegetables, boiled meats and unpeeled fruits (Montessori 1912: 125). I was surprised to learn, given how much
Birch and Vine staff advertised their Montessori fidelity, how much healthy eating had evolved in Montessori
schools, though some would argue the current focus on sugar still represented the spirit of her intention to give the
best available food to children.
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Gina, another white mother clarified how she interpreted the stakes: “when children are
eating these breakfasts, teachers are saying it’s affecting the classroom environment. It is
affecting your child. It does affect the child sitting next to your child and how much attention
they’re taking in a classroom of 25” (Field Notes May 6th, 2014). Birch PTO parents went on to
circulate a petition and set up a display at the end-of-year celebration, educating parents about
the problem of the school breakfast. While this initiative had good intentions, it was led by
parents whose children were unlikely to eat these breakfasts and targeted children whose
behavior they believed to be problematic. In my interviews with the poorest families at both
schools, none of them complained about the food. Their greater concern was the lack of
transportation for three and four-year-olds, a topic discussed in Chapter 4. Ultimately, the
concern over healthy breakfasts was a coded way for privileged parents to exert some control
over children they believed to be disruptive at the school.
At Vine, several black parents noted similar anti-sugar efforts, this time led by school
staff. Tara and another parent learned that flavored chocolate and strawberry milk were no longer
being served at Vine, and “white milk” only was on offer. A number of black parents requested a
meeting with the principal. I was not present for the meeting, but Tara told me the Principal
suggested the white milk only policy was a new policy for a new school, and that she worried
about a backlash from the new suburban parents who didn’t want their children drinking flavored
milk. Instead, Tara’s husband Dante and several other parents argued
for five years before this, there were people coming to this building, to this Montessori
program who thought they were coming to a school...and their kids had always been
offered white milk, chocolate milk, strawberry milk. And all of a sudden they find out
two months into the school year that this whole school year they haven’t been having that
choice, and they want to have input. So you’re only worried about the people who are
new? ...But what about the people who had it taken away? (Interview, April 7, 2014)
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Dante argued that the Montessori program had been at the school, and it should continue serving
the original students with the same offerings, not just the newly-arrived suburban families. The
principal decided to reinstate flavored milk.24
A year later, some parents still remembered the episode and referred to it when I asked if
there was anything they didn’t like about either school. Evelyn, the black mother who insisted
her sons get A+s, used the language of choice so prevalent in the Hartford school system to argue
that school officials didn’t have the right to make nutritional decisions for parents: “When you
start telling [the children] they can’t have strawberry milk and chocolate milk…if the federal
government say they can have it, and the federal government paid you for it, they should be able
to have it. Who are you as teachers, guides, principals…to take that choice and options away and
not contact the parents?” (Interview, April 17, 2014). Evelyn felt that the school staff had
overstepped their bounds in choosing appropriate beverages for students. Tara found the milk
issue
so culturally and socioeconomically insensitive...it seemed paternalistic based on this
idea that...you know there’s all these kids in Hartford schools that are like amped up on
chocolate and sugar...So we’re going to make this choice that’s better and we’re not
going to even tell people. And it’s like missing the point that for some of these kids that’s
the only milk that they get. It’s their free lunch. (Interview, April 7, 2014)
The controversy highlighted first, the nutritional privilege of those who were concerned about
levels of sugar versus those who just wanted their children to drink milk, regardless of its form
and color. Second, the milk became a proxy to talk about the level of power and control given to
the newly-arrived suburban parents.
24
Coincidentally, that same year, a new Connecticut nutrition law with tighter sodium codes would have effectively
banned chocolate milk from all Connecticut school cafeterias. Governor Malloy, realizing the populist support for
chocolate milk, threatened to veto the bill until a ‘chocolate milk’ exemption was put in place. The exemption
passed quickly (Hdlaky 2014).
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As I talked about this issue in the course of my fieldwork, several Montessori parents and
principals from around the country shared with me other examples of how healthy eating became
a conflict in diverse populations of parents. A white director of a new public Montessori charter
in the Southwest told she got in trouble with a Latino parent who brought in Sunny Delight to
share as the communal snack. When the director requested a healthier beverage in the future, the
Latino parent grew agitated and said, “This is a school for white people!” (Field Notes, March
13, 2015). An administrator at a Northeastern public Montessori school said her staff refer to the
“Whole Foods kids” and “the Free Lunch Kids” to talk about social differences at their school,
but such distinction led to racial segregation when it was used to assign seats at lunchtime. “The
Whole Foods children would come with their beautiful lunches. They’re nice children, it’s not
their fault. At lunchtime, the assistant was sitting them separately because it was easier for
passing out lunches. I had to tell her that she couldn’t do that” (Field Notes, March 13, 2015).
In other instances, public Montessori educators shared with me how they lost low-income
parents and parents of color over practicing yoga, sending the children to play outdoors in cold
weather, eating in classrooms instead of a cafeteria, and the acceptable noise level in the school.
They lost some evangelical and religious Christian parents over teaching evolution through the
elementary “Great Lessons.” Some of these conflicts focused on practices peripheral to
Montessori that might occur among the parent community at any racially diverse urban school,
but others were specific to the Montessori context and reflect a challenge to Montessori
educators to continue Maria Montessori’s maxim to “follow the child” and “follow the family.”
Conclusion
Almost half of the black, Latino and Asian parents I interviewed at two public
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Montessori magnet schools experienced a conflicted fit, in this case, being both appreciative and
concerned about the Montessori theme. Black and Latino parents experienced finding a fit as a
racially/ethnically contingent process. They highlighted their positive connection to both
schools’ caring communities, particularly in comparison to other school alternatives, but they
were also concerned that Montessori educators didn’t share their sense of educational urgency
for their children’s academic success. The beliefs that children learn at their own pace and should
not get homework outside of school were particularly challenging for middle- and upper-middleclass black and Latino parents who had been successful in traditional schools and shared the
greatest anxiety about their children’s academic performance. The school gardening program and
farm-based middle school concerned some middle-class black and Latino parents who wanted
their children to escape agricultural work. And lastly, school expectations around healthy eating,
particularly around the breakfast kits and the banning of chocolate milk in favor of “white milk,”
were interpreted positively by some white parents, but led some black parents to feel school staff
were prioritizing sugar reduction over concerns about basic nutrition.
White upper-middle class, middle-class and working-class parents had selected the
school for its Montessori program and were therefore supportive of extending Montessori ideas
into the home. Having a majority-white faculty also helped white parents feel that parenting
suggestions were not racially weighted. Low-income parents of color were more likely to accept
the guidance of educators and to feel that their children were learning. But middle- and uppermiddle-class black and Latino families in Hartford were most concerned with their children’s
educational progress and most sensitive to the idea that teachers and administrators were
overreaching into their home lives.
This experience of a conflicted fit highlights an understudied process of parental
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interpretation after school enrollment. While researchers have begun to examine school
marketing and parents’ interpretation during the choice process, parents only really begin to
understand their school choice after enrollment. And while much research has examined the way
in which black and Latino parents are marginalized in racially diverse schools, the conflict over
school theme highlighted here suggests another process by which such marginalization may
occur.
The small sample size of these 33 interviews with black, Latino and Asian parents limited
my ability to consider important variations by race/ethnic group, by social class and by
immigration status, and the focus on one city limits the ability to generalize these findings across
public Montessori schools. While this research focused on public Montessori, research on racial
exclusion in dual-language (Lewis 2003), International Baccalaureate (Donaldson 2016) and
gifted and talented programs (Cross and Donovan 2002, Ford 1998, Roda 2015) suggest the
utility of examining conflicted fit in other theme schools.
It is also important to further delineate how parent perceptions of fit may adapt or stay the
same over time. In some cases, parents may embrace Montessori or another form of education
despite initial conflicts. Early in the 20th century, Americans like Alice Keene, writing in the
Hartford Courant following a series of ten successful Montessori lectures in the city, worried
that “American children do not respond to [Montessori learning materials] as readily as do the as
Italian” (1912). The presence of nearly 4,000 Montessori schools in America suggests that this
initial concern of cultural compatibility has not played out. Additionally, Christian
homeschooling families who use the Montessori method have found ways to adapt the
Montessori “Great Lessons” which teach evolution in elementary school to a modified six-day
view of creation (My Boy's Teacher 2013). Further research is needed to delineate how much the
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problem is about communicating with parents versus a learning environment ill suited to
particular students, a topic outside of the scope of the current inquiry.
As public schools, theme schools will continue to draw parents who choose the option for
a variety of different reasons and expectations. Rather than concluding that parents with a utilityfocused approach are not a “good fit” for a particular theme, schools can make sure to use both
abstract and utility-focused language when talking to parents, to be respectful of parents who
follow the utility-focused approach, and to be explicit about a school’s academic achievement
and student outcomes to prospective and current parents. If there are racial achievement gaps,
school staff should discuss them and explain the strategies underway to improve them. It should
be possible for parents to disagree with parts of a school theme and still feel welcome at the
school.
Once parents have chosen a particular school, it is important that they feel their child is
being challenged, and that they can take part in the networks being cultivated there (Small
2009b). Both the school theme and how parents interpret its meaning can either further that goal
of parent and family engagement or get in the way. While theme-based public schools offer an
opportunity to create racially and economically diverse schools of choice, it is important that all
parents who choose these schools feel comfortable after their children enroll. The consequences
of not fitting into the school environment from the parent’s perspective and how parents
differentially interacted and went missing in the school community will be discussed in Chapter
7.
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Chapter 7
Community and Conflict Among Diverse Families
“We never really desegregated the parents, but we made a tremendous impact on the children.”
Martha Vincent, a former Kansas City public Montessori educator (2014)
Introduction: What Lena Needed
Lena, a black grandmother, spent the first three hours of every day at Birch Montessori
school waiting for her youngest granddaughter to finish preschool. Though she lived only a mile
and a half away from school, a small fraction of the distance many suburban families traveled, it
cost too much and took too long to take the bus home. Often Lena sat all morning at a table in
the staff room, reading and rereading the same day-old newspaper.
To the small community of other parents who waited during the morning preschool, Lena
was a central support. She could advise them on bus routes, a topic on which she was an expert,
and she occasionally provided afternoon childcare for a fellow parent who worked. Lena and
other parents who waited during the morning shared information and concerns about their
children’s academic progress and how to communicate with teachers. They also had fun. One
day it snowed, and when Lena discovered that an immigrant parent had never seen snow before,
she convinced a group of parents to go outside and make snow angels.
Lena also frequently bridged the gap between the magnet school and the surrounding
neighborhood. She was a lifelong Hartford resident who had moved up from South Carolina at
the age of five. All of her children participated in Project Concern, the voluntary city-to-suburb
transfer program where Hartford children enrolled in suburban schools. Her daughter, Stacy,
attended school in a wealthy suburb and had assimilated, spending all of her time in the suburbs
where she felt “more comfortable” in contrast to her neighborhood where “there was a lot going
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on” (Interview, November 2, 2014). As one of the few neighborhood residents whose children
attended Birch, Lena frequently acted as a cheerleader for the school, defending it when
neighbors told her they had heard it was “no good.” She asked, “How do you know it’s no good?
I’m there. I’ve seen what it’s like, and it’s a good school” (Field Notes, December 5, 2013). Just
as she had chosen to send her own children out to the suburbs, she also liked having her
granddaughters attend a racially diverse magnet school in the city: “There are people of all
different colors here. Other people didn’t understand that. They said, why do you want to go to a
white school? But it wasn’t a white school. There were people of all different colors” (Field
Notes, November 15, 2013). Lena valued racial diversity when she enrolled her children in
suburban schools and her granddaughters at Birch.
Yet accessing this diversity was still a struggle, and Lena had tried a variety of different
transportation options to get her granddaughters to school every day. Her preschool age
granddaughter was too young to qualify for the school bus, so for a while, Lena got a ride with
her son, who took his own children to another school. But he insisted on bringing his children
first and then bringing Lena and her granddaughters afterward, which often led to them arriving
at Birch an hour late. Lena explained, “I was paying him five dollars every day. And sometimes
if his tank was on empty, I had to give him 10!...Then my other friend, she was doing it, and then
her daughter sold the car. Now how are you going to sell a junk car?” (Field Notes, November
15, 2013).
In frustration, she switched to the public bus, which involved transferring to a second bus
and also leaving the older daughter home alone to catch the school bus. “I say to my
granddaughter, ‘Why can’t you be five?’” Another parent waiting for her preschool age daughter
agreed, “I know, I say that too” (Field Notes, November 15, 2013).
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Lena’s granddaughters wanted to attend social events held at school in the evening, but
were limited because the buses did not run regularly at night. Once they took a taxi, and the
principal gave them a ride home. In December, I gave Lena and her granddaughters a ride to a
game night. The girls were so excited to attend that they cried in the car the whole way home.
From January to April, I was busy attending school choice events and interviewing
parents, so it wasn’t until April when I discovered Lena in the staff room after the morning
preschool dismissal. I asked her why she was still there. Lena explained that her younger
granddaughter was now able to stay for the full day of preschool, so she had been staying all day
as well. “How long have you been staying a full day?”
“Since January...I don’t have the money for the bus fares,” an additional three dollars to
return home and back to school.
“It’s such a long day to be here,” I sympathized, marveling at her endurance.
Lena began to cry. “I’m just so tired,” she said, pulling a napkin out of her pocket and
dabbing her eyes. “I’m here all day, so I can’t get anything done at home. ”
I asked Lena if she had reached out to anyone for help, the other parents who waited?
“They drive in other directions,” she said. The principal or other schools staff? Lena shrugged.
“It’s two more months. I’m almost there” (Field Notes, April 16,2014).Lena had activated
family networks and asked immediate friends, but had been unable to come up with a
transportation solution.
As a researcher, I had ambivalent feelings about intervening, but I was so bothered by
Lena’s long wait at school that I approached two staff members to ask whether there were any
options to help her. At first, the parent resource coordinator did not recognize her name. When I
described Lena, she said, “Oh, we call her Grandma here” (Field Notes, January 16, 2014). The
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parent resource coordinator explained to me that state law didn’t require transportation for
preschool children, and she had worked closely with Lena and was well aware of her situation
(Personal communication, April 21, 2014).
Perhaps it was a reflection of my own privilege that I believed other parents would want
to help if they knew about her situation (Ridgeway 2013, Smith, Menon and Thompson 2012). I
began to reach out to the parent network at the school to help. Bella, a white mother active in the
PTO who spent most of her day driving her own children back and forth from Birch,
immediately began taking Lena and her granddaughters home for the remaining two months of
the year.
Lena’s transportation problem was solved for the short term, but it was part of a broader
challenge that kept poor families from accessing the magnet schools and enrolled families from
participating in the school community. Her experience demonstrated both the social separation
among parents and the potential of what parents could gain from the social community of the
school (Small 2009b). Although Lena was active in the school community through advocating
for the school in her neighborhood and supporting the small group of other waiting parents, she
was not on the PTO where broader organizing occurred. Without intentional efforts to be
exclusive, at Birch, the PTO executive board was dominated by white middle-class mothers who
held meetings in the evenings when Lena could not attend. They communicated primarily by
computer and over email, technologies that were out of reach for Lena, who didn’t have a
smartphone. With the exception of Bella’s offer of a ride, despite the fact that their children all
attended the same school, the organizers of the Birch PTO were entirely separate from the Lenas
of the school.
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Chapter 7 highlights one of the dilemmas inside racially diverse schools, how the
marginalization of conflicted and satisfied parents, primarily parents of color, could also be
exacerbated by a parent community dominated by middle-class white parents. Many individual
parents made efforts to socialize across racial and class lines, and both school administrators and
school PTO volunteers also worked to bridge these divides. But despite these efforts, formal
PTO organizations at Birch were led by middle-class white parents, and within two years of
becoming a magnet school, the PTO parent leadership at Vine shifted as well.
Despite having good intentions, when middle-class white parents led the Birch PTO, they
were not focused on helping Birch’s parents develop stable transportation and afternoon
childcare. Instead, their primary concern was adding foreign languages, bringing back a Suzuki
string program and reducing the sugar content of the free breakfasts, demands around enrichment
that didn’t fully represent the interests of the broader parent body at the school. While it might be
easy to blame these parents for pursuing a privileged agenda, more broadly, the problem was a
structural one. As school districts increase expectations for parent involvement without adding
supports to empower parents with fewer resources, such parental participation can act as a
greater social filter, particularly in racially and economically diverse magnet schools. As one
parent explained, getting parents from diverse backgrounds to connect is not an automatic
process: “It’s not like making oatmeal. You can’t just add water and make it work” (Field notes,
June 30, 2014). In two schools created as part of a desegregation court order, the makeup of the
parent leadership did not follow to the broader missions of the magnet schools. The chapter
concludes with some suggestions for building a more equitable parent community at racially and
socioeconomically diverse schools.
Four Models of Parent Involvement
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Examining parental involvement involves first unpacking the different roles that parents
play in schools and the ways that scholars study these parent activities. These roles can be
grouped into four broad categories: transactional, professionalized, social network and activist.
In the transactional model, parents support school expectations of academic success. As
professionals, they leverage fundraising and organizing to support the school. The social network
model emphasizes the social capital of the parent community, and the activist model emphasizes
parents as agents of social change, in the school and the broader community.
In the "transactional model” of parent involvement, policy makers and researchers view
parent engagement as a critical transaction supporting children’s academic success (Desforges,
Abouchaar and Britain 2003, Fan and Chen 2001, Hill and Tyson 2009, Jeynes 2005, Lopez,
Scribner and Mahitivanichcha 2001, Weiss, Lopez and Rosenberg 2010, Williams and Sanchez
2012). Parents support student success through fostering a learning environment at home
(reading out loud, helping children to complete their homework, providing good nutrition, etc.)
and by interfacing actively with the school (for example showing up to attend a school event, a
parent teacher conference or chaperoning a field trip). In this model, parents mainly interact with
the school, and have high or low levels of interaction. As mentioned in Chapter 5, schools and
districts that increasingly emphasize the benefits of parent involvement and require principals to
report parent involvement statistics are primarily interested in this transactional, academic
benefit.
Researchers suggest that parents’ socioeconomic background is the main explanation for
high or low levels of involvement. Annette Laureau (2003), drawing from Bourdieu’s ideas of
cultural capital (1984), found that middle and upper middle-class parents used their cultural
capital and time flexibility to volunteer in their children’s school and more effectively advocate
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for their children. Others call for an expansion of the definitions of “involvement” to recognize
the hidden contributions of minority and low-income families who may not attend school events
but can support academic success at home (Lopez, Scribner and Mahitivanichcha 2001,
McKenna and Millen 2013, Williams and Sanchez 2012). Even with such an expansion of what
constitutes “involvement,” this model still envisions parent involvement as a transaction between
the school as an educational provider and the students and parents as consumers.
A second avenue for examining the role of parents is through a “professionalized”
capacity (Posey-Maddox 2013), where parents often contributing a critical amount of fundraising
and organization to support the school. Posey-Maddox observes that, as an increasing number of
volunteer parents come from professional backgrounds, there has been a related
“professionalization” of the PTO. This highly structured organizing, often with the goal of
extensive fundraising, often comes at the expense of community building. While
professionalized PTOs can help schools expanding services and programming and change the
perceived reputation of a school (Edelberg and Kurland 2009, Stillman 2012), they also present
problems, particularly in racially diverse communities. Such fundraising, in some cases more
than a million dollars a year, can serve to widen the gaps between schools with well-resourced
PTOs and those without (Spencer 2012, Smith 2014). These professionalized PTO parents can
also create organizational structures that are so complicated that the time commitment becomes
prohibitive for many parents (Cucchiara 2014, Lareau 1989, Williams and Sanchez 2012). Such
organizational sorting leads a population of parents to become invisible in the school community
while another group dominates (Cole 2016, Cucchiara and Horvat 2009, Posey-Maddox 2013),
and can also lead to conflicts with administration (Lareau and Munoz 2012). As Ridgeway
(2013) notes, these social interactions are an important mechanism that perpetuates inequality.
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A third role of parents in a school community is as a “social network,” where the parent
community functions as a place of sharing resources and social capital (Johnson 2008, Small
2009b). Small (2009b) studied childcare centers in New York City, and found that they could
serve as “resource brokers” helping parents gain necessary social capital from one another.
Similarly, Johnson (2008) theorized that schools functioned as spaces where parents and students
gained “proximal capital,” benefiting from being brought into proximity with others and tapping
into their social networks. Some PTO organizations are able to operate as a social network, what
Lareau and Horvat (1999) call a “collective orientation,” particularly if a key parent can create
bridges across diverse groups. But much more often, middle-class parents dominate the school
organizations (Cucchiara and Horvat 2009; Lareau, Horvat and Weininger 2003, Posey-Maddox
2013), a contrast that is particularly acute in schools located in gentrifying neighborhoods where
white parents taking over school leadership mirror patterns of displacement occurring elsewhere
in the community (Cucchiara 2013; Posey-Maddox 2014). Although this “social network model”
offers additional benefits to parents, social class still impacts the way parents take advantage of
these networks. While some scholars have suggested that low-income parents are more likely to
use the PTO as a community-building group (Posey-Maddox 2013), they are less likely to ask for
favors from other parents. Middle-class parents are more likely to draw on parental ties from
other parents, while low-income parents are more likely to engage extended family networks
(Horvat, Weininger and Lareau 2003; Smith, Menon and Thompson 2012).
A last framework for examining parents is through their activist organizing for better
educational and economic outcomes for their students. Sometimes these efforts empower parents
who would otherwise be powerless. Instead, they work to transform their schools, unite
communities and train as classroom tutors (Fine 1993, Warren and Mapp 2011). In other cases,
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Kohn (1998) reminds us that parental activism can be a zero-sum game, where requesting an
increase in services leads to a reduction for someone else’s child. Diamond and Lewis (2015)
and Lewis-McCoy (2014) refer to such behavior, both individually and collectively, as
“opportunity hoarding.” Parent support of and opposition to desegregation initiatives have been
dramatic examples of these divergent grassroots organizing efforts (Anderson 2010; Kruse 2005;
Lukas 1985; Sugrue 2008).
Researchers often focus on one of these four models of parent engagement without
considering how they might overlap. In this chapter, I examine the tensions between the
interacting and overlapping expectations of these four categories. Racially and
socioeconomically diverse schools offer a tremendous opportunity for parents to derive social
network benefits they wouldn’t otherwise have access to in other social circles, but often, a core
group of parents work in a professionalized capacity and create small social networks, while the
rest of the parent community become transactional participants. Magnet schools, like the two
where I did my research, face an additional challenge in that the distance students travel to
schools limits the development of a strong parent community and parent “face-to-face
interactions are typically brief unpredictable and unrelated” (Smrekar and Goldring 1999:3).
Over fifteen years ago, Smrekar and Goldring were calling to “bring community back” to magnet
schools (1999: 62).
As Small (2009) demonstrates, parents can develop “unexpected gains” from a schoolbased parent social network. But the efforts and goodwill of parents and school administrators
are not enough to sustain a diverse parent leadership team. Just as creating and maintaining
racially diverse schools requires intentional policy planning, helping parents to accrue the
benefits of these racially diverse schools alongside their children also requires intentional
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planning at both the school and district level. The next section details the efforts and limitations
of parents, administrators and PTO groups at Birch and Vine.
“I’m just not comfortable”: Informal Parent Efforts to Socialize
At Birch and Vine, a number of parents recognized the challenge of creating a cohesive
magnet parent community and tried to create social bridges through scheduling formal and
informal play dates, contrary to findings from another study that white mothers used play dates
to maintain social boundaries (Kendall 2006). At Vine, Deirdre, a white suburban parent and
Jacqueline, a black Hartford parent, organized play dates at a nearby park after the noon pickup.
Birch parents also organized a weekly playmate at a nearby playground.
School support either assisted or hindered these socializing efforts, similar to a pattern
observed by Small (2009). Birch and Vine had limited access to a school gym at their school
sites, so when the weather turned cold, the play dates had to stop. At both schools, parents had
inconsistent access to other parents’ contact details, unlike many suburban schools in the region
where the PTOs compiled annual family directories. Some teachers compiled parent contact lists
for their class, but because of security concerns, Birch did not publish a list of parent contacts.
Instead, parents developed creative solutions to contact other parents, and PTO volunteers went
around with clipboards at parent events collecting parent email addresses to assemble a mailing
list. At Vine, the principal shared a list of all parent contacts with parents who volunteered in
some capacity with the PTO.
Parents’ work schedules and transportation affected whether they could participate in
play dates, but beyond these constraints, there were also differences in how much middle-class
and low-income parents sought out these informal ties through play. Middle-class parents I
interviewed described themselves as being more likely to seek out play dates for their children
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than working-class parents (Horvat, Weininger and Lareau 2003). Alexandra, the white suburban
mother who sold her motorcycle for Montessori in Chapter 5, described taking extra efforts to
contact parents in the absence of any school-provided contact information. She found other
families were sometimes “squirrelly” or evasive about getting together. To her, it felt “like dating
all over again. Like ‘please call me back.’” She described running after a parent of her child’s
friend “at car pickup...I didn’t even know who her mom was, I had to like figure—I had to see
the kid go to the parent...I come over and I’m like ‘Hey, our kids love each other, let’s have a
play date!’” (Interview, May 7, 2014). Similarly, at Vine, Curtis, a white mother, described a
complicated transmissions of notes in order to get in touch with the parents of her son’s friend to
invite him to a small birthday party, “So I sent this letter, and I was like, ‘can you give this to
Laquan to take home to his mom to give back to me, and maybe she’ll e-mail me?’” (Interview,
May 2, 2014). Curtis and Alexandra made explicit efforts to connect with other parents.
Other parents were less willing to seek out play dates, a reflection of previous bad
experiences with untrustworthy families and an awareness of the family dysfunction that often
accompanies extreme poverty. Evelyn, a black mother, told me a dramatic story about the perils
of play dates. When she was a girl growing up in Hartford, her mother invited her whole class to
attend her birthday. At the end of the party, one of the children’s parents never came to pick her
up. Evelyn’s mother called the police, and they were unable to locate the family. The police
called child protective services. Evelyn’s mother, worried about sending the child to foster care,
took the classmate in until the girl’s parents turned up four months later. Today, Evelyn and her
siblings joke about the absurdity of the incident, but it had significant repercussions on her own
socializing as a child. “We couldn’t have sleepovers, not even with our cousins...that still
traumatizes me because my mother never gave me a birthday party after that.” At the time,
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Evelyn was frustrated by her mother’s vigilance, but as a parent, she sees its wisdom. “When
[other parents] go ‘let’s have a play date’, and I’m like, ‘if it’s not at a public place, it’s like, nuhuh.’ And if all of us can’t come then...I’m just not comfortable” (Interview, April 17, 2014).
Taking in an abandoned classmate led Evelyn to be cautious about forming social connections
via school.
Other Hartford parents shared this social concern. Pam, a black Hartford parent whose
son had been attending Birch for five years, described how the careful calculations she made for
her eight-year-old son’s safety limited his social activities.
Pam: There’s a little boy on another block over there that walk to his school sometime.
Him and him take the bus, stuff like that. But I don’t, we don’t—I don’t really let him
[socialize]. Like when they come from school right now, if I’m going to go down to the
playground, [my son] plays ball, I walk with him and sit with him. I don’t really let him
out. I don’t like to see the kids on the street ride...without a parent or—so many thing
happen, you know?
Interviewer: Yeah.
Pam: So he’s always here by himself. So. He probably don’t congregate with a lot of
kids. He more run more adult and stuff, so I don’t know.
Interviewer: And are there any other parents at the school that you’ve met since you’ve
been a parent there?
Pam: Yeah. Um, well mm. Well, not really. No, not really. (Interview, May 15, 2014)
Pam’s concern for her son’s safety led her to accompany him to the playground, and not “let him
out” because “so many things happen.” Although she had been a parent at Birch for six years,
she still had not made social connections with other parents.
Social class differences and levels of trust could be obstacles in arranging play dates, but
birthday parties were another opportunity to try and bring a classroom together. Birch’s parent
handbook notes that “Birthday party invitations may not be distributed in school,” which
provided additional challenges when the school didn’t provide a parent directory. Evelyn and
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Alexandra and several other parents I interviewed described inviting all of the children in their
child’s class to a birthday party, but only having a handful of school classmates turn up. Parents
also frequently chose Chuck-e-Cheese as a social equalizer for birthday parties. It was in a
suburb nearby Hartford, and was affordable enough to be frequented by parents of many social
backgrounds. Even at Chuck-e-Cheese, parents reported it was still a challenge to get more than
a few class friends to attend.
“The Usual Suspects”: PTO Volunteers
While individual parents made efforts to pursue stronger connections with other parents
to develop the social network of the parent community, the organizing activities of both Birch
and Vine’s PTOs demonstrate how the PTOs became professionalized, dominated by white
parents, and focused on an enrichment agenda that reflected the priorities of the organizers.
It is important to stress at the outset that this domination was not deliberate on the part of
school administrators or PTO volunteers, who used many best practices for parent engagement
(Henderson et al. 2007). Unlike some PTOs in wealthy communities that request a minimum
donation from families (Smith 2014, Spencer 2012), both the Birch and Vine PTOs could be
joined free of charge. Administrators at both schools worked to make the PTO accessible by
providing dinner for families at monthly PTO meetings. Theo, Vine’s principal, arranged for the
Vine PTO to offer both evening and morning PTO meetings to fit a range of family schedules.
Theo and Andrea, Birch’s principal, often came to meetings to encourage broader parent
attendance.
Moreover, leading the PTO was a generally thankless task with few willing volunteers.
Those who served in the roughly six executive committee positions at Birch and Vine ran
unopposed in the elections that occurred during my fieldwork, and were often pressed by friends
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to run when no one else would do it. They became a small group informally called the “usual
suspects” who were willing to repeatedly volunteer (Field Notes, May 6, 2014; Interview, May
29, 2014). PTO organizing activities were not glamorous. Parents collected hundred of egg
cartons and pipe cleaners for a planned art activity and debated the merits of bounce houses (lots
of fun, but high potential of injury). Few PTO volunteers passed their organizing activities down
to the next group, requiring PTO leaders to restart the work from scratch every several years.
Parents who were deeply involved in the PTOs at Birch and Vine also described discovering the
behind-the-scenes-reality at their children’s school, including staff members who were not
enthusiastic about partnering with them. Lareau and Munoz (2012) argue these parentadministration conflicts are frequent in PTOs and are related to the tension of well-meaning
volunteers working alongside professionals. At Birch and Vine, both principals sometimes
complained to me of PTO presidents past and present who had been difficult to work with or
who had not come through on organizing an event. These school administrators wanted parents
who would do the work, regardless of what race or economic background they represented.
Despite these challenges, the Birch and Vine PTO executive boards often worked in a
“collective orientation” (Cucchiara and Horvat 2009) for the benefit of the entire school
community. The Birch and Vine PTOs organized schoolwide events, raised money for field trips,
and set up a uniform hand-me-down program. Parents at Vine organized babysitting during the
monthly PTO meetings and created a petition to the Board of Education requesting discount bus
fares for families taking public transportation to school and a bus shelter outside the school. But
in other cases, the priorities pursued by the PTO varied depending on who was leading it.
From Social Network to Professionalized PTO
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The evolution of Vine’s PTO demonstrated how well-meaning volunteers could go from
supporting a community of parents of color, as in the social network model, to professionalizing
in a way that unintentionally reduced their participation. This professionalization occurred
through creating a PTO organization that was more complex, requiring computer access and
proficiency alongside the time-flexibility to conduct significant amounts of business over email.
When I began fieldwork, Vine Montessori was just becoming a magnet school with an
influx of almost one hundred new students, nearly all of them suburban. Its Montessori program
had a PTO executive board that was led by Hartford parents, four black, one Latino and one
white parent who had oriented the PTO as a social network, supporting the broader needs of the
school community. This orientation was particularly critical due to a broader leadership vacuum
in the program. In the previous six years, Vine had been a small program inside two different
schools with limited administrative oversight from building principals and limited off-site
support from Montessori specialists elsewhere in the city. In the void, the PTO had assumed
leadership of the Montessori program. Their priorities were linked to the immediate needs of
Hartford’s families, educating themselves about Montessori, creating a clean space around the
school, providing back-up childcare and helping to retain families in the program.
During this time, Vine’s PTO organizers described a feeling of shared responsibility to
make the Montessori program successful. Jacqueline, a black Hartford parent who was one of the
group’s leaders, was an energetic supporter of Montessori and had a background in community
organizing. She hadn’t originally planned to lead the PTO, but took over when the first parent
leader decided to pull her son.
So they just handed me the paperwork and said, “OK, get going.” So that’s what I did. We
began to hold meetings. We decided we wanted to be informal; I don’t even think we had
elections. We just met as a group and we wanted to learn more about Montessori. So every
month thereafter, we had a [teacher] come and explain the materials that our children were
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using, because they were such a young age, and when they came back from school and you
asked them what they did, they couldn’t explain it (Interview, May 28, 2014).
The group was informally organized and built off parents’ initial curiosity about Montessori
pedagogy. Subsequent PTO efforts ranged from the mundane to the more critical to meet the
needs of students and their parents. Alejandro, a Hartford Latino father on the PTO Executive
Committee, wanted the community to take pride in the school and was upset that “there was dog
feces all over. And it was bad, you know, for the kids in the morning and parents stepping in
that.” He launched a campaign with his family to change the neighborhood perception of how
people should behave around the school. “I went with my daughter. We put fliers all over the
streets around. We went at night time and took my daughter, my son…We kind of ‘come on
man’ and people—everywhere I saw a dog, I say ‘here’” (Interview, May 29, 2014).
Jacqueline remembers intervening to help parents keep their children at the school, both
by helping parents to feel “supported” if they were having a conflict with their child’s teacher,
and stepping in to help with another parent if they were struggling to find afternoon childcare.
“We would watch the children until the parents would come and get them – to try to keep them
in the school, to build a retention…And they’re still there, which is very nice” (Interview, May
28, 2014). Jacqueline told me another parent who lived in the neighborhood established a
daycare where she provided afternoon childcare for Vine students. Through all of these small
and larger interventions, Vine’s pre-magnet PTO leadership was focused directly on the families
in the program, educating them about Montessori and working to retain them in order to make
the program successful in the long term.
When the school became a magnet, Jacqueline and the existing PTO were eager to
harness an influx of potential new parent volunteers, but in doing so, unwittingly
“professionalized” the PTO (Posey-Maddox 2013), creating additional school events and a
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formal organizational structure to reflect the school’s new status. This professionalization
paradoxically led the PTO executive committee to become all white two years later.
The PTO executive board created seven subcommittees, and every classroom had at least
two parent volunteers. A month later, volunteers attended a welcome breakfast. They received a
folder of information on the seven subcommittees and the contact details of the parents who had
signed up to volunteer. Although the school didn’t otherwise share parents’ contact information
due to privacy concerns, parent volunteers were given the complete contact details of all of the
parents at the school.
The parents with time flexibility and interest were the ones who stepped up immediately,
and that first year, the majority of parents who volunteered on staff committees and in
classrooms were suburban white parents, although the PTO Board and the Principal both worked
hard to enlist others to volunteer. Jacqueline said she “welcome[d parent volunteers] with open
arms” (Interview, May 28, 2014) and, informed by earlier community organizing work, she was
sensitive to issues of representation. She strategically attempted to diversify the PTO community
by race, ethnicity and gender, which initially involved soliciting the leadership of suburban white
parents who started off underrepresented in the PTO. She wanted to “break...up” the dominance
of women and kept her eye out for fathers bringing their daughters to school who she would
“would target...specifically for room parent activity or some type of event that we would have”
as a way of getting them involved (Interview, May 28, 2014).
Jacqueline’s success recruiting the new suburban parents was apparent by the start of
school, when Aricelly, a Latina mother, hoped that the dominance of suburban parents would be
a wake-up call to other Hartford parents. “In other places, the parents are used to being involved
in their children’s school. Not so in Hartford… Maybe this is the way to get the Hartford parents
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involved. It’s your school. Who is going to run it? The suburban parents or you?” (Field Notes,
September 17, 2013).
But few Hartford parents replied to the increased involvement of suburban parents by
springing into action as Aricelly had hoped. By the spring of the magnet conversion, Jacqueline
noticed “long standing parents that had been there before we became a magnet kind of pulled
back,” and she was trying to figure out why. When she talked to parents, they explained their
work schedules had changed or they had new family members to take care of. But she wondered
if the presence of middle-class suburban parents was also changing the participation of the
Hartford parents.
Maybe they feel comfortable that now that we’re a school and we’re a magnet everything
is going to be fine and they don’t have to participate like they did before...So I think
there’s a comfort level there, but then some parents may feel intimidated because of the
education level of the suburban parents. (Interview, May 28, 2014)
Meanwhile, Anna, a white Hartford parent who served on the executive board both before and
after the magnet conversion, was enthusiastic about the influx of support:
We have a lot more involvement in the PTA. There’s a lot of people from outside of
Hartford. You can see a huge growth in the involvement of parents. Last year we had a
good amount of parents that came, but there wasn’t a lot that were willing to get
involved. It was kind of like they came, they wanted to know what was going on, and that
was it. Now that we have parents outside of Hartford, they really want to get involved
and make a difference, which is a huge thing this year. Everybody wants to make it easier
for the child. (Interview, February 24, 2014)
For Anna, Vine becoming a magnet school meant there were many more parents wanting to “get
involved and make a difference,” and she saw this as benefitting all children.
In the process, the demands of serving on the Vine PTO had become more complex and
demanding. Recognizing this, Theo, Vine’s principal, encouraged the PTO to purchase a laptop
for the PTO president to eliminate a barrier for parents who didn’t have their own computers.
This intervention still wasn’t enough to maintain parent diversity on the PTO. After the two-year
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term of the current PTO was up, the parents who volunteered to run the PTO all turned over,
with the exception of Anna. The elections were not contested, there were no alternate candidates.
Within two years, a school that enrolled over two-thirds minority students now had a PTO
leadership that was entirely white.
Petitioning for Enrichment
I left the field just as Vine’s school leadership was transitioning to a group of white
parents, and I could not examine in detail how the priorities shifted afterward. However,
observing Birch’s PTO executive board, which had been led by a majority of white parents since
the school opened, let me to observe how parental background influenced PTO priorities, in this
case professionalized and activist activities in pursuit of student enrichment.
To participate in Birch’s PTO, a parent had to either not work or have a job flexible
enough to be in continuous email contact. One white mother who had served on the PTO
commented about the communication demands: “everything is done on email, 800 times a day,
and if you don’t speak at that moment, they’re moving on to the next thing.” Even with her
flexible schedule, she felt overwhelmed by the level of email communication, and reflected that
this had an unintentionally exclusionary effect. “It’s really difficult for Hartford families to be
advocated for when the board is made up of suburban moms who are on email making their own
decisions all day long” (Interview, May 9, 2014). The one black parent on the Birch PTO, who
arrived to meetings in medical scrubs, often had to leave meetings early or asked for updates on
deliberations that had occurred over email.
Birch’s PTO executive board pursued an activist strategy of formally petitioning the
administration to add enrichment activities for students. Three of the Birch PTO’s main priorities
while I was observing at the school were to create a Spanish language immersion program, to
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bring back the Suzuki music program, and to offer healthier breakfasts, discussed in the last
chapter. None of the demands were met, reflecting a contrast between the concerns of the
administration and those of the parent leaders.
Language Enrichment
Asking the administration to add Spanish might have reflected parents’ desire to support
Latino students at the school or acknowledged Hartford’s sizable Puerto Rican population.
Instead, the PTO petition to the administration asking for Spanish language instruction focused
on language learning in a Montessori context and parity with a nearby private Montessori school.
Daniela, a white PTO committee member who drove her children 40 minutes each way to
school, explained to me the critical importance of early foreign language instruction because
“foreign language is one of those things where the brain starts to close up [at later ages]”
(Interview, May 15, 2014). When she was first considering Birch, the principal had announced
that foreign languages were going to be added. She explained, “holy cow, this school has it all,”
and this amenity was a major reason she chose to enroll her children. The fact that foreign
languages had not yet been implemented was one of her continued complaints about the
administration. In pursuit of adding foreign language instruction, the Birch PTO executive board
conducted an online survey of parents about foreign language preferences and determined that
Spanish was favored over other languages. The PTO executive board stressed in the petition that
they wanted this Spanish language instruction to occur in a Montessori appropriate manner “to
enrich children’s brain development, increase cultural awareness and enhance language
development,” and they highlighted a nearby private Montessori school that rotated a bilingual
Montessori trained Spanish teacher through all of the classrooms offering voluntary lessons to
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students. By asking for parity with a private Montessori school, parents expected the Birch
administrators to not only deliver a quality Montessori curriculum but also offer the same
provisions as a private Montessori, a feat few Hartford parents would have expected of a local
public school.
Music Enrichment
In another petition, the Birch PTO executive committee argued for bringing back a grantfunded Suzuki string program, to “enrich children’s knowledge and appreciation of music.” The
program had previously served 25 out of 300 students at the school. The program was voluntary
and open to all students, but parents had to be available to attend lessons during the school day.
Selena, a suburban Latina mother who I interviewed during her son’s private Suzuki lesson,
noted that the program did not represent the overall student population: “I know that the reason
for the grant was to allow folks that are under…how do you say it…you know…need the
economics, that don’t have funds to pay for it, that was the purpose, and I feel that throughout
the process, those individuals didn’t even know about it” (Interview, May 2, 2014). Andrea, the
Birch principal similarly criticized the program, noting, “the students are all suburban.” (Field
Notes, January 16, 2014). Both petitions went nowhere, due to funding concerns, and in the case
of the Suzuki program, criticism from the administration that the programs served an elite group
of students. The lobbying efforts of Birch’s PTO parents, though unsuccessful, demonstrated
their desire for the school to offer a Montessori curriculum plus enrichment for their children.
In a few other instances, the Birch PTO focused on enrichment or uniting Montessori true
believers across schools, at the expense of additional community-building initiatives at their
school. As mentioned in chapter 6, the Birch PTO hoped to make school breakfasts healthier and
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had previously banned sweetened, flavored milk in favor of plain “white milk” (as it was referred
to in public discussion at the school.) These initiatives were favored by middle-class white
parents, and quietly opposed by several parents of color and working class parents I interviewed.
The Birch PTO also focused on raising public awareness of Montessori, setting up a fall festival
in a Hartford park that brought together area private and public Montessori schools. These
interventions did not address the concerns of low-income and middle-class black, Latino and
Asian parents I interviewed. A number of low-income parents like Lena were concerned with the
limited transportation provided to the school, while middle-class parents of color were concerned
with conflicting ideas about academic achievement.
Leaders at other racially and socioeconomically diverse public Montessori schools
observed divisions in parental organizing priorities. Christie Huck and Nicole Evans, leaders of
St. Louis’s City Garden Montessori School discussed in Chapter 3, noted a similar pattern for
their PTO. While the more privileged group of parents developed plans to build a $250,000
garden and play space at the school, the school administration and its parents of color were
focused on closing the achievement gap between students, providing free summer school and
maintaining affordable housing in their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Huck observed that
“Poor parents want three things from their school: they want school uniforms, food and
transportation. Privileged parents want a play space, enrichment, and afterschool activities”
(Huck 2014). At both Birch and City Garden, poorer parents wanted necessities, while wealthier
parents worried about amenities.
Some at other Hartford area magnet schools echoed this concern. Terry Schmidt, a
Hartford area school board member and magnet school parent, observed the challenge of middleclass parents dominating school resources, “if you create a system that’s supposed to be open and
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available for everybody, the very first people to use those resources would be at least highintensity parents, highly involved and highly—I won’t say that they gobble of all of the oxygen
in the room—but it’s close to that in so many ways” (Interview, May 29, 2014). In their
enthusiasm and desire to help their children succeed, these “high-intensity parents” were using
vital resources and unintentionally diverting them from other parents.
Conclusion
While creating choice schools around a particular theme offers the potential to bring both
students and diverse parents into a shared space, in the case of Birch and Vine, a common
interest in Montessori education was not sufficient to overcome external power differentials
between parents. Magnet status at both schools attracted suburban white families to act as
integrators, but the process also led white parents to dominate the parent organizations. While
parents worked hard individually to form social ties with other parents and some efforts of both
school PTOs were “communitarian” in focus, the white middle-class dominance of the Birch
PTO led them to pursue an enrichment agenda, rather than supporting the most pressing needs of
low-income families or the academic concerns of the middle- and upper-middle-class families of
color. In this way, some of the parent organizing reinforced the marginalization of parents of
color at the schools, despite intentions to the contrary.
Although magnet schools are intentionally designed to promote student diversity, they
currently lack the focus and resources for an equally important mission: to better integrate the
diverse families who send their children. School administrators told me they had too many
responsibilities to focus so extensively on the parents, and their ultimate focus was recruiting
parent leaders who would work collaboratively and get projects done. The parent resource
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coordinators were often parents themselves, which limited their authority in regulating other
parents.
Several specific changes could support building a stronger parent community and push
more diverse schools towards a social network model of parent engagement. First, in choice
schools where many students live far from the school, providing a parent directory is an
important resource in connecting parents to each other. While some schools permit the PTO to
create the directory, the process would be more consistent if schools themselves organized and
provided the resource. Second, some schools and districts with diverse parent populations have
begun to develop more intentional training to diversify the parent leadership in their
communities. Teaching for Change, a Washington DC non-profit, partners with parents in
several white-gentrifying DC schools, helping to mediate challenging conversations about race,
privilege and power and then building community to create a common working agenda. Hartford
and other cities in Connecticut offer Parent University, a series of workshops to train parents
with advocacy skills, to help equalize issues of comfort and confidence across social classes.
Several public and private Montessori schools including City Garden Montessori and Near North
Montessori school, a private school in Chicago, have embraced anti-bias/anti-racism training for
staff and parents. This training helps individuals proactively identify areas of racism and bias and
work to make corrections. Third, PTOs in mixed and gentrifying communities could have an
additional provision to include parents in leadership positions from a variety of backgrounds,
similar to power-sharing agreements practiced by political organizations in racially and
religiously divided communities (Hartzell and Hoddie 2003). For the Sheff magnet schools, this
could involve requiring that the PTO executive board included both Hartford and suburban
parents. In other locations, such a mandate may be limited by some PTOs being independent of
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schools or districts, but they could be influenced by the national PTA organization if it decides to
make this issue a priority.
A school or district that hopes to bring out the voices of all parents has its work cut out
for it. As this chapter demonstrates, even the efforts of numerous parents and school staff did not
lift substantial barriers to both informal socializing and formal organizing among parents. Yet
racially diverse public schools have tremendous potential to not only support their students, but
to also act as “resource brokers” (Small 2009b), creating transformative impacts on the lives of
parents. Lena and the other parents who waited at Birch gained a small community from their
daily three-hour vigil at the school, but they had the potential to build a more extensive network
through having their children attend a racially and socioeconomically diverse magnet school.
Parents may enter into these communities with the best of intentions, but without structured
support and guidance to encourage collaboration across racial and class lines, parents are unable
to fulfill these communal aspirations.
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Chapter 8
Conclusion
School desegregation scholar Gary Orfield observes that “[school] choice has a thousand
different faces, some treacherous, some benign” (2013:3). In the public Montessori sector, school
choice is both treacherous and benign, even when idealistic educators are working to expand
educational access.
Why is this the case? Public Montessori education is a place where we would expect the
best-case scenario, racially and socioeconomically diverse schools and the empowerment of
children from all backgrounds. Teachers are trained to set aside pre-existing bias, observe
without judgment to understand the individual needs of each child. The pedagogy can be
characterized as Friere’s (1970) “problem-posing learning” where students have the opportunity
to ask open-ended questions, direct their learning, and work in collaboration with teachers.
Children have the same teacher for three years and can form a trusted relationship with an adult.
Instead of being tracked into academic levels at an early age, children work in a multi-age
classroom where they learn at their own pace without being judged for being ahead or behind.
Montessori education has its American roots in the education of poor students and creating
school desegregation, and the individualized focus is attractive for families of many backgrounds
(Metz 1986).
For some parents, discovering Montessori is akin to a religious quest. In the 1950s,
Virginia Varga dropped everything to move with her husband and child to Connecticut to take
the first American training course and witnessed other parents stealing Montessori materials in
their desperation to have some piece of the method. As chapter 3 demonstrated, Varga wasn’t
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alone. Over the last sixty-five years in America, middle-class white Catholics, black nationalists,
hippies, anti-testing advocates, Christian homeschoolers and tech entrepreneurs have all
discovered Montessori and embraced it as a solution to their own particular critiques of
traditional education. In particular, parents and educators of color like Mae Arlene Gadpaille in
Boston, Jamal Hakim in Los Angeles, Martha Urioste in Denver, Luwannia Martin in Hartford,
Maxine Jeter in Milwaukee, Nakisha Washington in Washington DC, Roslyn Williams in New
York City and Samuel Tasby in Dallas embraced Montessori for the children in their community,
raising funds and sometimes going to court when school districts tried to remove their local
public Montessori schools.
In some cases, this rainbow coalition of ‘true believers’ helps public Montessori schools
enroll a diverse student body, but it doesn’t always necessarily work this way, nor do the
challenges of bringing a diverse community together necessarily stop at the school door. First,
like the broader school choice sector, parents are limited from enrolling in public Montessori
schools due to complicated choice systems, limited transportation, and in some cases, schools
that do not provide lunch. As we saw in Hartford, the Sheff magnet schools were doing many
things to try and counteract these obstacles. Public preschool programming was free and began at
age three, and families from Hartford had a designated number of seats in magnet schools. But
despite these supports, the poorest families were limited from accessing public Montessori
magnet programs due to complicated choice systems and the lack of transportation for preschool
students.
Montessori educators have added to these restrictions by imposing some of their own.
The programs start at a young age and charge tuition if there is not state funding, sometimes
excluding the poorest families. Some Montessori preschool programs, like those in Hartford, are
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only partial day, making it challenging for working families to choose the school and leading
both schools to have some of the lowest free and reduced lunch student enrollments of Hartford
area magnet schools. Public Montessori educators frequently restricted enrollment after
preschool, believing children to have missed a critical window and foundational material in the
preschool program to learn effectively in a Montessori environment. In the early days of magnet
schools, some public Montessori schools evaluated parents for admission based on “interest,” a
process that could lead to giving “Montessori-aligned” parents preference, alignments that I have
argued are closely linked to parents’ racial and class background. Even when this negotiation of
fit isn’t a formal part of the admission process, schools informally communicate to parents that
they seek parents who are compatible with Montessori.
Alongside the structural barriers for poor families and communication around fit, public
Montessori schools are often highly desirable but scarce public goods, leading to intense
competition for a spot. In 2016, Elm City Montessori school, the charter school I helped to start
in New Haven, received 681 applications for 36 seats, admitting 5% of applicants, a lower rate of
admission than nearby Yale University. In urban areas, successful public Montessori charter
schools like City Garden Montessori School in St. Louis can become “gentrification charters”
(Zucarello 2014) attracting middle-class white residents (Makris and Brown 2016) and driving
up property values making it challenging for families of color to remain. Small town Montessori
charters can be sought-after alternatives to public education, but if there are no transportation or
free lunch services, the schools can also become locations of white flight from the school district
(Renzulli and Evans 2006). As a result, over two thirds of Montessori schools enroll fewer
students of color than their surrounding district, and nearly three quarters of public Montessori
schools enroll fewer low-income (free and reduced lunch eligible) students than their
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surrounding district (Debs 2016). This more white and advantaged population can help bring
needed diversity into racially isolated urban schools, but can be grounds for denying a charter or
closing a school in other cases around the country. Today, as public Montessori leaders try to
make the case for the relevance of Montessori education as an alternative pathway in education
reform, they are increasingly confronted by the perceived exclusionary elements in their
pedagogy and their schools.
Alongside the limitations of broader school choice structures, public Montessori school
enrollment policies, and middle-class demand, all factors that challenge creating and maintaining
a diverse student enrollment, families of color may either reject Montessori at the outset or feel a
conflicted fit after they enroll because of philosophical differences over the purpose of education.
I do not argue here that Montessori is incompatible with the educational priorities of families of
color, and the historical record shows repeatedly how communities of color have enthusiastically
claimed Montessori education. But I have also tried to explain here why the reverse has been
true. In places like Charleston, South Carolina, San Francisco, California and Memphis,
Tennessee, parents of color have protested attempts to replace their neighborhood school with a
choice-based Montessori program. Some of these cases relate to broader concerns about topdown reform and a concern about educational displacement. But as I documented in Chapter 6,
there were also important concerns that related to conflicting interpretations about the purpose of
education.
Listening to parents of color at the Hartford Montessori magnet schools indicated that the
problem was partially a failure of translation: school staff who talked about Montessori in
abstract pedagogical terms were not adequately responding to the queries of parents whose first
concerns were practical, measurable educational outcomes. As Lewis-McCoy (2014) argues, the
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ability to focus on abstract education comes from a background of educational capital and a
certain degree of privilege, something that went unrecognized when Montessori educators
concluded that those who did not understand Montessori were not a “fit” for the school. Lowincome families of color I interviewed were pleased with public Montessori education in contrast
to their Hartford neighborhood school alternatives. Many middle- and upper-middle class parents
of color felt the insistence on child-centered learning lacked urgency and risked making their
children fall behind. The racial achievement gap at both schools, which was rarely mentioned,
was a tangible reflection of the concerns of these parents of color. In addition, these concerns
were exacerbated by a predominantly white school leadership and teaching staff whose mission
to bring Montessori “into the home” through healthy eating became racially weighted when
communicated to parents of color .
Moreover, the parent community exacerbated this feeling of marginalization where
middle-class white parents dominated the PTOs. While parents of all backgrounds made efforts
to socialize across geographic, socioeconomic and racial distances, parents who identified as
Montessori “true believers” and were most often in the schools fostered connections, building
community through weekly play dates and formal PTO activities. These connections resulted in
an expanded social network, educational support for parents continuing their education and
intern jobs at the schools. They mobilized for enrichment activities instead of working to support
low-income parents without cars who struggled to get their preschool age children to school
every day. Parents of color, in contrast, often stayed on the social periphery, missing out on the
potential benefits of the parental social network. While few schools or districts mandate that
leadership of their PTOs represent the broader parent community, the experience at Birch and
Vine show the problems of encouraging increased participation from parents without providing
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the structural supports to ensure that parent organizations represent the broader mission of the
schools.
What Public Montessori Reveals About School Choice
The public Montessori case highlights both the appeal and the danger of asking parents to
choose schools based on the idea of a “good fit.” While the language of fit has become a
ubiquitous part of school choice in many cities, its implications have gone largely unexamined
by scholars. School choice systems offer many different types of pedagogical choices, but even if
parents buy into the idea of a “good fit,” they are unequally able to make such a match.
As Pugh argues (2009), part of the idea of “fit” is class-based, with middle-class parents
more likely to value an education that uniquely reflects their child. Parents with the greatest
resources seek out a fit and can continue searching if they don’t like the first school they choose.
Parents with fewer resources are sometimes stuck with a partial match, what I called here a
“conflicted fit.” In addition, “fit” can reflect those who have economic and geographic privilege.
In the Hartford area, white-middle-class parents living in outlying suburbs had the geographic
privilege to choose from all of the magnet school options and receive preferential weighting in
the magnet lottery while still retaining good public school alternatives in the suburbs. Inner-ring
suburban parents, predominantly parents of color who formed 70% of the magnet applicants,
were underweighted in the lottery in order to meet racial balancing targets, and many were
concerned about the quality of their district schools. Hartford parents had no guaranteed district
school option, and transportation restrictions complicated their ability to freely enter the magnet
of their choice. Parents were advised to be happy that they got into any magnet school, regardless
of theme. Thus while parents were marketed fit, part of the great frustration of the Hartford
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parents with Sheff outcomes was that the schools that they wanted remained untouchable
“carrots.”
It is imperative that research on school choice considers both the structural obstacles that
limit the choices of parents, but also examine how parents interpret the meanings of the choices
they have, and how their perspectives change after their children enroll. To focus entirely on
structural inequalities misses an important dimension, how parents are interacting and
interpreting within these structures, particularly low-income parents and parents of color who are
sometimes assumed to be passive choosers in this process. How parents negotiate a fit shows that
parents make complicated interpretive calculations to determine if they like a school or not. This
process occurs during the time of choosing, but it also continues after the child enrolls in the
school. The result is a school choice process that is interpretive, interactive and continues beyond
the initial period of choice. School choice research must convey this complexity.
In addition, while parents at public Montessori schools may have particularly strong
preferences, parents and students look for a fit with many varieties of schools. This research has
focused entirely on the public Montessori choice, but research on other types of choice schools
whether dual-language, International Baccalaureate, gifted and talented, arts or science magnet
or even upper level courses suggest that families can be similarly dissuaded from these programs
(Donaldson 2016, Lewis 2003, Roda 2015, Yonezawa, Wells and Serna 2002). Further research
is needed to consider how conflicted fit operates in these other contexts.
Two education controversies playing out in New York City exemplify parents working to
create a fit with their child’s current school, and how the process is particularly fraught for
parents of color. One might argue that the debate over the level of discipline in charter schools
like Success Academy in New York City is both about the material consequences for children
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who are excessively disciplined, and also how parents interpret the symbolic meaning of
practices like lining up silently in the hallways (Taylor 2015, 2016a). In another corner of
Harlem, Central Park East, one of New York’s pre-eminent progressive public schools, a
principal attempting to the address achievement gap for students of color came under attack by
other parents for modifying the progressive bedrock of the school (Taylor 2016b). In this case,
supporting the educational needs of students of color and their families was pitted against white
parents’ desire to retain undiluted progressive pedagogical practices.
Policy Implications
Research at two public Montessori schools in Hartford indicates that a system that is
implementing some of the best practices to create diversity and educational equity between cities
and suburbs can still result in unequal outcomes. While scholars have suggested that the problem
is primarily a combination of structural obstacles and the individual decisions of middle-class
white parents combining to create more segregated schools, a critical addition is the way that
teachers and parents communicate and interpret the meaning of the school and education itself.
In closing, I will briefly discuss how work at all levels can help to decrease some of the
disparities around school choice, and ensure that school choice serves its most positive function,
as a force for social integration of students from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.
In the waning days of the Obama administration, the federal Department of Education,
under the leadership of Secretary John King,25 has begun to place school diversity back on the
policy table. Setting aside $135 million in grants like the Investment in Innovation (I3) award
(US DOE 2016) and outlining guidelines for weighted charter lotteries (US DOE 2014) are
25
Despite his background founding and leading No-Excuses charter schools like Roxbury Preparatory Academy in
Boston, King’s own children attended Montessori schools (Otterman 2011).
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initial steps for school diversity that create incentives through funding and guidelines. But
funding without accountability will have a limited impact. The federal government currently
awards millions of dollars to charter and magnet schools with no explicit racial diversity
requirements. Such funds should have school diversity measures explicitly attached.
At the state level, state governments create charter legislation, determine the criteria for
charter approval and renewal and design the metrics of public school evaluation. Measures to
encourage charter schools to reflect the racial and socioeconomic diversity of their surrounding
district, alongside funding designated for special education, school transportation and early
childhood education would help remove some of the educational disparities at charter schools.
States can establish clear procedures for charters to establish weighted charter lotteries to
designate a certain portion of their seats for educationally underserved students. States can also
measure the racial and socioeconomic diversity of schools and include these ratings in their
evaluation systems.
At the district level, meaningful and lasting integration requires districts to commit to an
“integrative” rather than free market model of choice that prioritizes racial integration and
removing obstacles for poor families (Orfield and Frankenberg 2012). This could involve
creating one combined school lottery, setting aside a portion of seats to certain disadvantaged
sub-groups, ensuring information in all local languages, and providing free early childhood
spots. But as we saw in Hartford, all of these measures alone can not overcome a sense of
unfairness when there are lottery winners and losers in a district. Though a weighted lottery is
more likely to enroll a racially and socioeconomically diverse student body than first-come-firstserve enrollment or a market-based lottery, the overall problem remains the continued scarcity of
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good school options for all families. The promise of school choice continues to ring hollow to
families until all choices are good choices.
At the school level, school choice systems allow unprecedented power to individual
schools and their administrators to be proactive or unreactive in creating racially and
socioeconomically diverse environments. Like the Montessori magnets that have always had this
as part of their school design, a new generation of urban Montessori charters in Oakland,
California, Baltimore, Maryland, Austin, Texas, St. Louis, Missouri, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Washington DC and New Haven, Connecticut are writing racial and economic diversity into the
mission of their school. But as Baltimore Montessori Charter and City Garden Montessori
School both experienced, that diversity mission can come under challenge if the demand grows
too high for the school. Schools can ensure diverse enrollments through setting up weighted
admissions lotteries, practicing targeted recruitment to educationally underserved communities,
and also making sure that they communicate about a special program like Montessori in a way
that is culturally responsive and open-ended to parents seeking both a holistic education and
clear educational outcomes. Education models that support racial diversity and empowerment
like the culturally responsive toolkit (Griner 2012), anti-bias/anti-racist training (Pollock 2008)
and an assets based model for working with families encourages schools and staff to maintain an
open dialogue about issues of race and social class.
As engines of racial and socioeconomic diversity and one of the few “cosmopolitan
canopies” (Anderson 2011) where parents of vastly different backgrounds mix together for a
common purpose, diverse schools also serve an important social function for parents. Parents
who are integrated into a social community of other parents gain an expanded social network of
other parents who can help pick up their children in case of an emergency, organize social
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activities, and offer career and education advice. But this social network does not occur
spontaneously. Without intentional preparation, even the most well-intentioned parents end up
replicating structures where middle-class parents dominate. Principals and staff receive little
training to support parents of diverse backgrounds in learning to work together and are eager to
avoid conflict with parents around challenging topics like race and privilege. In addition to
extending culturally responsive and anti-bias/anti-racism training to parents, another strategy
could be to employ “bridging cultural practices,” creating rituals among parents to build
communal trust (Braunstein, Fulton and Wood 2014). Teaching for Change, the Washington DCbased non-profit, organizes a “Tellin’ Stories” program that uses parent narratives in gentrifying
schools to help parents identify and work towards collective goals.
These complex choice systems are unlikely to disappear in the near future. Instead,
school institutions must work to ensure that choice lives up to its purported meaning of freedom
and access, and that the choices themselves are presented in a way to draw and empower a
diverse array of families.
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Appendix A
Best practices for Public Montessori schools to create and maintain diverse student
enrollments
Access
● Locate the school in a community of color to attract students from the neighborhood
● Provide full-day programming and before- and after-care to support working families
● Provide transportation to all families
● Participate in the district lottery process to simplify enrollment for parents
● Use a weighted lottery to increase enrollment of disadvantaged students
● Offer sliding scale tuition if the preschool program is not free.
● Follow federal law mandating that charter Montessori elementary schools that have private
preschools conduct open lotteries at age 5 to ensure that all students have access to the
charter elementary program
● Offer summer programming
Outreach
● Develop a thorough outreach plan and share it publicly with your school community
● Print brochures in multiple languages, and include translations or a translation service on
website
● Hold information sessions at community libraries, public housing, Head Start facilities,
places of worship
● Publicize Montessori’s efficacy with English Language Learners and Students with Special
Needs
● Publicize Montessori’s rich curriculum around cultural diversity
● Share academic results so that parents will know they are choosing a college preparatory
curriculum
Cultural Diversity & Student Support
● Hire diverse staff, and create school-based pathways for training and hiring from within the
local community
● Use curriculum materials that accurately represent economically and racially diverse
students and families
● Include a parent-outreach coordinator on staff who recruits a diverse population of students
and supports a diverse population of families
Advocacy
● Advocate for increased public funding for all early childhood students, starting as young as
possible
● Advocate for well-planned and intentional urban renewal plans, including mixed-income
housing and affordable units.
● Advocate for greater support/mandates in federal, state and local policy to promote racially
and socioeconomically diverse schools.
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Appendix B
Methodological Appendix
Like Susan Stern’s (1998) “conversation-based research,” many of the questions I asked
during the course of this research emerged in tandem with two endeavors, helping to start a
public Montessori charter school and creating an online forum for public Montessorians, projects
that brought me deep into the Montessori world, providing me a unique vantage point for
studying parents and public Montessori schools. My participation was integral to building the
“cycle of inquiry” (Marshall and Rossman 2010) that emerged in my research. Such active
participation, what Lichertman calls being an “observing participant” (1996) rather than a
participant observer is common among ethnographers (Stern 1998, Thorne 1979), especially in
education research where ethnographers are frequently parents at the schools they study (AndréBechely 2005, Olsen Beal and Hendry 2012, Cole 2016, Stillman 2012, Wilcox 1982) and
educators (Cossentino 2005, 2006, Khan 2011). School desegregation scholars including Amy
Stuart Well, Richard Kahlenberg, Jennifer Holme, and Gary Orfield also play active roles in
policy circles promoting and testifying about desegregated schooling options. Yet such involved
participation is not without its challenges. This appendix describes my work as an ethnographer
and interviewer, discussing the project design, data collection and analysis and reflections on my
own balancing act while doing research.
Finding the topic
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I started thinking about school diversity and education when I got my first job teaching
high school history at a predominantly white suburban Boston public high school and when I left
it four years later to go teach at an urban charter school serving predominantly students of color.
The schools were roughly sixteen miles apart, but my students lived in entirely separate worlds.
When my husband and I moved to upstate New York and then Connecticut, I saw how
concerns about schools for our children could lead us to settle in inner-ring suburbs, overriding
our initial preference to live in a city. This contradiction began to drive my interest in studying
parents and school choice. Earlier, I researched Little Rock’s dramatic school desegregation and
how it was still impacting the community fifty years later, but I began wonder how desegregation
and racial diversity were playing out in urban schools today, particularly in gentrifying
neighborhoods. I began to consider studying a gentrifying neighborhood schools in New Haven,
but soon discovered several excellent books had just been written on urban school gentrification
(Cucchiara 2014; Posey-Maddox 2014; Stillman 2012). Outside of my PhD program, I became
involved in creating a website called schoolhaven helping parents navigate school choice in New
Haven, which connected me to a group of parent activists, the New Haven Parents Network, who
were working to make the preschool choice process more transparent to New Haven families.
I went to California for a year to be a visiting student at UC Berkeley, and when I came
back, the New Haven parents network had embraced a new agenda, creating an alternative public
school choice, a public Montessori school in New Haven. I had attended a Montessori school for
two years in Chicago as a child, and had become newly curious about the method after the birth
of our daughter. In Berkeley, we sent her to a modified Montessori preschool where Alice
Waters had once worked, the children frolicked in a circular courtyard and served each other
afternoon tea. In New Haven, I volunteered to help with the public Montessori project, quickly
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becoming part of the founding board. Beginning in December 2012 and until we hired the
Principal as our first paid staff member in April 2014, getting our nascent school off the ground
was entirely the project of the eight volunteer board members including myself. My
responsibilities including creating the school’s website and all communication materials,
overseeing community outreach and building public support for our charter proposal, hiring the
Principal and the teachers, visiting possible site locations, and attending community fairs on
behalf of the school, all the while being mindful of our goal of creating a school that appealed to
the full spectrum of New Haven families. Throughout, I spent a lot of time moving around stacks
of folding chairs for public events.
After Elm City Montessori School opened, I continued to help out at the school during
the first year, covering the front desk and occasionally volunteering in the classroom when they
were short staffed, and providing behind the scenes support in the challenging start-up period. As
I was trying to think about how to study parents in New Haven, Fred Wherry, my dissertation
supervisor, suggested I study public Montessori schools. It hadn’t even occurred to me that this
would be an option. He also wisely recommended that I seek one or more alternate research sites.
Through my involvement with Elm City Montessori, I connected with the principals at
several Hartford public Montessori schools. Andrea, the principal at Birch school, invited me to
conduct research at her school. On my first visit to the school, she picked up the phone, called
Theo at Vine Montessori and told me I should head right over to see him. Theo also welcomed
me to study his school, explaining that he wanted to provide better outreach out to parents,
particularly those who were uninvolved in school events. I was intrigued in the idea of studying
the two schools, one that had originated as a magnet, the other a program undergoing a magnet
conversion, and how the experience of parents at the two schools might be similar or different. I
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was even more intrigued as I better understood the history of the Sheff vs. O’Neill desegregation
court case in Hartford, and the fact that the desegregation history I had studied so much in Little
Rock was continuing today in Connecticut.
Though some might question the decision to focus so intensively on Montessori, a
marginal sector of public education and even more marginal in education scholarship, I quickly
found that the context was ethnographically and historically rich, linking to broader topics of
educational equity, school choice, and all of the social reforms in the education sector in the last
forty years. Moreover, while there was considerable scholarship on the efficacy of Montessori
education, a few unpublished dissertations on parents and Montessori (Cisneros 1994, Mead
2013, Murray 2008, Van Acker 2013, Zarybniski 2010), and several excellent cultural studies of
the Montessori classroom (Cossentino 2005; 2006; 2009), few people had studied the social
context of Montessori schooling (Whitescarver and Cossentino’s (2008) history of Montessori in
America is a notable exception). At the time I started my research, few had studied race in the
context of public Montessori, and I’ve been fortunate to be part of an emerging community of
researchers on the topic (Banks 2016, Brown 2016, Brown and Steele 2015, Trondson 2016).
While I had initially proposed to have Elm City Montessori School as a third site, the
logistics of conducting multi-sited ethnographies at two, much less three sites, and also a
sensitivity to the challenges of studying a school in its first year of existence made me decide
drop it as a third site, although I obtained permission from the ECMS Board to include our Board
meeting deliberations in my research.
Though, like most ethnographers, I had no idea how my study would fully play out, in
studying two public Montessori schools with students from racially diverse backgrounds, I was
interested in comparing one school with a relatively stable population alongside a Montessori
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school that was transitioning to becoming a magnet school, and bringing in a large number of
suburban white parents. Based on the reading I had done around gentrification and schools, I was
curious whether similar patterns of middle class white parents dominating school communities
would occur at the two magnet schools. As a cultural sociologist who had been steeped in Yale’s
strong program of cultural sociology, I was also hoping to respond to what I saw as Bourdieu’s
over-deterministic influence of the role of class in education. Surely individuals had space for
individual experience and interpretation!
I wrote my dissertation proposal hoping to look at parents as “civic participants” and how
their investment in a diverse school choice could be viewed as an important point of activism.
While I found limited evidence that parents prioritized racial diversity in their school selection,
during my fieldwork, I was already beginning to ask different questions. In my notes to my
supervisor after completing the assistant training in June 2013, I wrote, “I’m curious how the
“rigidity” of the Montessori model differentially affects children and families of a variety of
backgrounds. Are their cultural assumptions or practices which are less welcoming to families
from certain backgrounds?” (Field Notes, June 2013). As I continued to examine the experiences
of the parents who were “missing” from the school community, I learned that some of their
obstacles centered on issues of accessing school choices, and others were related to their
ambivalent feelings around the pedagogy that affected their sense of belonging in the school
community. These differences mapped much more closely onto racial and class differences than
I had initially theorized. The result is a project that drew closer to Bourdieu and became more
critical of the two schools and of public Montessori than I might have anticipated at the outset.
This ability to be surprised in the field and adapt research questions through learning from the
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people you study remains a paramount advantage of ethnographic research (Anderson, 1990;
Duneier and Carter, 1999; Small, 2009a).
Table 5 presents an overview of my combined data at the two magnet schools, in the
Hartford region and at the national level studying the Montessori field.
Table 5: Research Data
Level of Research
Level 1: 2 Montessori Magnet
Schools
Level 2: Hartford’s school choice
field
Type of Data
1. Participant observation at PTO meetings (approx. 1.5
hours each over 24 months)
2. Participant observations at special events (parties,
potlucks, end of the year picnic)
3. Observing in classrooms
4. Observing pick-up and drop-off and parents waiting at
school
5. Interviews with parents (51)
6. Informal conversations, telephone calls and email
exchanges with parents, teachers and administrators
7. School and district documents
8. Birch and Vine district, state and federal data on student
applicants, enrollment and achievement
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Level 3: National public
Montessori field
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Getting In at the Schools
Participant observation at 10 school information
sessions, 2 school choice fairs
Participant observation at community events (Sheff
meetings, State Department of education testimony
Interviews with 8 Hartford area educators and policy
makers
Newspaper coverage in the Hartford Courant
District, state and federal data on Hartford magnet
student applicants, enrollment and achievement
Participant observation at 5 national Montessori
conferences
Interviews with 22 public Montessori educators
Dataset of public Montessori schools using the National
Center for Montessori in the Public Sector 2014
Census, the Public School Montessorian 2005 directory,
the 1993 Montessori Public Schools Consortium
(MSPC) list and the National Center for Educational
Statistics.
Archival research via ERIC, Proquest Historical
Newspaper Archives and the American Montessori
Society archives for national news on Montessori
Secondary research sources on Montessori
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After I had received permission from the school leadership, I faced the next task of
“getting in” with the parents. Several things helped me in this endeavor. In the spring of 2014, I
took a month-long training as a Montessori assistant from the New England Center for
Montessori Education. Several staff members from Birch and Vine, some of whom were also
parents themselves took the course along with me. They proved critical to welcoming me into the
school community becoming key informants and helping to vouch for me with other parents.
Working with the principals, I drafted a letter to the parent community explaining my research at
the school. I also planned that I would spend some time observing in classrooms at the start of
the fall, observing parents at pick-up and drop-off, and attending formal parent events. Then in
the spring, I would interview the parents.
Despite the support of staff, in the beginning, observing parents, particularly at drop-off
and pick-up was an awkward endeavor. I felt clearly out of place. One staff member even
suggested I bring my children along to events to help fit in. I did bring my children to several
events, but this was more a reflection of attending events on evenings and weeknights than a
deliberate research strategy. I also found it hard to concentrate on observing with my own
children around. But being a parent, even if I wasn’t a parent at the two schools, did have
advantages. It helped with building rapport with all parents. Having car seats in the back of my
car enabled me to transport Lena and her granddaughters, helping me to learn more about her
family’s story. Gradually, routinely showing up to school events and having conversations with a
circle of parents helped me to feel more comfortable in my role as an observer. If I had been
gone for several days, staff and parents noticed and commented, “I haven’t seen you in a while!”
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Data Collection
Observations at Birch and Vine
At Birch and Vine, I observed in classrooms, parent trainings, PTO meetings, pick-up
and drop-off and school social events. In classrooms where I observed for the first month at each
school, I carried my notebook with me, and took notes directly in it. When I was standing with
parents, I couldn’t record notes, so I typed up my notes immediately after at a local restaurant or
coffee shop. I tried as much as possible to follow Lareau’s golden rule of ethnography that I
couldn’t return into the field until I had first written up my field notes (1989). As I realized that
parents hung out to wait in the parent rooms at both schools, I started going there to write down
my observations, and in some cases, took notes about interactions as they were occurring. When
I attended PTO meetings, I used a tape recorder that I had out on the table in order to make its
use clear to participants. I did not receive any complaints about this practice, even when
meetings were on controversial topics.
There were also differences in how welcome I felt making observations at both schools.
Though both schools had been studied by researchers before, at Vine, I was well known to staff,
there was a parent room where a number of parents spent time in the morning, and I began
observing in classrooms early in September. Birch was a less-welcoming site for fieldwork,
despite the fact that Andrea had been my initial source of contact. This was due to several
factors. While I began at the start of the year at Vine, I was asked to delay beginning fieldwork at
Birch until the middle of October in order to let the classrooms orient a large number of new
students. The fact that parents dropped off and picked up their children while waiting in cars and
the lack of a dedicated parent room meant that there were fewer interactions to observe, and
fewer parents just hanging out at the school. Perhaps due to greater number of interactions at
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Vine, my research focus shifted more strongly toward that school. I attended more events there,
spent a longer time at the school, and followed the PTO meetings through the following year.
When I attended events there, I was recognized by a number of parents and greeted warmly, and
at Birch, parents were less likely to recognize each other, much less myself.
Initially this climate difference between the two schools seemed most salient to
understanding parents who were actively involved with the PTO or spent a lot of time around the
school. Six months into my research, I shared feedback with Andrea and Theo six months
focusing on the difference between the two schools and whether parents felt welcomed or kept
separate from the school. As I stayed longer however and began to interview a broader set of
parents, I gained a better understanding of more subtle conflicts, particularly the way in which a
set of parents was grappling with the Montessori curriculum. Ultimately, I realized that the two
schools had more in common than differences in the way in which parents identified with
Montessori ideas.
Selecting and Interviewing parents
Theo, Andrea and I initially planned that I would interview parents who volunteered.
Advice from Yale classmate Alison Gerber helped me realize how this would limit my sample,
particularly from the parents I most wanted to reach. I decided instead to randomly select parents
to be interviewed. This strategy was useful because it took me away from the most involved
parents who I had met either during the school day or after school, and gave me a broader range
of stories.
Staff members helped me to compile a numbered list of parents for each school, and then
I used an online random number generator to select 25 numbers for each school that I matched to
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the numbered parent roster. Sitting alongside the parent resource coordinators and matching the
numbers with the names was somewhat dramatic. I remember that they both immediately began
speculating about the responses, “Oh, that will be interesting…” I generated a list of 25 families
from each school, with the goal of interviewing 15 families at each school, for a total of 30
interviews. I ultimately interviewed 32 families from each school, in some cases with both
parents for a total of 44 interviews. With the exception of a handful of interviews conducted at
the schools, I spoke with parents at their homes or at a nearby Dunkin Donuts, so that parents
could be more candid in presenting an honest reflection of their relationship to their child’s
school. All interviews were audio-recorded, and transcribed. I also wrote up field notes about
each interview to note non-verbal interactions (Pugh 2013).
Once I started recruiting parents for interviews, I encountered the same challenge school
staff faced: the most involved parents were excited to talk, and the least involved parents did not
return my calls. At Vine, Aricelly, the parent resource coordinator, put considerable muscle into
cajoling reluctant parents to speak with me, sending letters home, calling parents on the phone,
and I am tremendously grateful to her for this work. As a result, I was able to interview 18 of the
25 families whose numbers were selected. At Birch, school staff only shared parent home
addresses with me. They followed up with parents by phone on my behalf but were more limited
in their follow-up. As a result, at Birch, I interviewed 11 out of 25 families.
Because I was interested in the work of the PTO and the experiences of parents like Lena
who spent a lot of time waiting at the school, I added 7 additional interviews, for a total of 51
parents interviews. The PTO and ‘waiter’ parents helped me to understand more about spending
time at the school during the day, the working of the PTOs, how the organizations had changed
over time, and internal disagreements among PTO members.
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Though I successfully interviewed a handful of working-class and low-income black and
Latino parents, I wish I had been able to speak with more. My ability to connect with some
Latino parents was limited by the fact that I do not speak Spanish, and being a white, middleclass female may also have impacted how my interviewees perceived me. I was also conscious in
my interviews how much more challenging it was to develop rapport with low-income parents of
color, and several of my interviews were between 20-30 minutes as a result. Although these brief
interviews still generated considerable insights, I wonder how another researcher with linguistic,
racial or socioeconomic connections to the interviewees might have elicited richer responses. I
look forward to future research on this topic.
Race and Privilege
As I began attending school choice events around Hartford, I was frequently aware of
my privilege as a white woman. Staff sometimes assumed because I was white that I was an
administrator. “Are you with a school district?” I was asked at one school fair (Field Notes,
February 20, 2014). “Do you need to see my supervisor?” another asked when I arrived at a
childcare center for a bus tour (Field Notes, January 30, 2014). I also noted my tendency to
sometimes make class-based assumptions about students and families based on their racial
background, assumptions that frequently turned out to be wrong. In my field notes, I reflected on
these moments and my own racial biases, part of an ongoing process of questioning and
conversation.
Talking directly about race wasn’t always something respondents willingly brought up,
particularly since I was a white woman often interviewing Black and Latino parents. Talking
about race often involved dancing around the topic with softer terms like “diversity.” For
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example, black parent Rita and I had the following long exchange in order to hone in on what
she meant when she said the upper grades at Birch had become “less diverse.”
Mira: So tell me more about what you mean by less diversity in the upper grades.
Rita: So when we first started and even, I don’t know whether you’ve been to any events
at the school,
Mira: Um hmm, yeah.
Rita: And so what I see in the younger grades it seems to be more diversity in regards to
ethnicity. In her classroom now it just appears as if there’s less diversity. I know a
number of students have left and some students they left because of the fact that there
was concern whether or not they would have a [the middle school]…
Mira: Yeah. And so when you say less diversity, because people use that in different
ways…
Rita: Yes.
Mira: So do you meanRita: Ethnicity.
Mira: Right. But you mean that the class is now predominantly minority, or that there’s
less minority students and it’s more white?
Rita: More minorities.
Mira: So it’s more minority.
Rita: Correct. (Field Notes, June 5, 2014).
And while my research found that racial categories were salient to different parents’ experiences,
I also was conscious of the social construction of race (Haney-Lopez 1994), and the fact that the
people I interviewed often saw their identities in more complex and multi-faceted dimensions. I
asked all interviewees what race they would identify on a census form. Adrian initially told me
that he would say he was Jamaican, which resulted the following conversation.
Mira: You know, I don’t know if on a census form if it gives you the option of saying that
you’re Jamaican.
Adrian: Now black. I’m black. Because—
Sarah: Anything you fill out, you always say black or African-American.
Adrian: I wouldn’t say either Black American or African. I would like put Other. That’s
what I do anyhow so, because—
Sarah: The fact that it says African-American, I’m not African-American. So I’m like
sometimes I write ‘Prefer Not To Answer.’
Adrian: So. That’s why I always like put Other, you know.
Sarah: ‘Cause sometimes I’m like why does it matter?
Mira: Right.
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Sarah: If I’m black or if I’m Hispanic or if I’m white. I just look at it like my race is not
on here. (Interview, April 17, 2014).
Race for Adrian and Sarah was complicated by the fact that their Jamaican identity did not
appear on American documents. Though condensing my interviewees into American racial
categories helped identify broader patterns, I regretted simplifying parents’ complex
understanding of their immigrant and racial identities.
Another issue that came up in interviews was my stake in Montessori. Middle- and
upper-middle-class parents often wanted to know if I was also sending my children to a
Montessori school as a litmus test of how much I supported the method. I answered honestly that
my daughter had attended a Montessori preschool, but my children do not currently attend a
Montessori school. I also stressed to parents during interviews that I had been a traditional public
school teacher, so I had an awareness of the broader system of education and was open to
criticism about Montessori. Being honest about my openness to hear a variety of perspectives
allowed parents like Oliver and Marie, who were debating whether to keep their daughter in
Montessori for kindergarten, to share their deliberations with me.
Sometimes my interviews emerged serendipitously. Birch parent, Rita, was not one of my
random draw interviews, but she contacted me, and her insights turned out to be critical in
helping me to understand patterns of concern among middle-class black and Latino parents. A
year later, she turned up, out of the blue, at my 8:30 am roundtable presentation at an education
conference in Chicago, and we resumed the conversation, generating additional insights. Three
interviewees, Jean Powell, David Paull and Virginia Varga, were all people with whom I struck
up conversations at Montessori conferences, and they generously agreed to be interviewed and
shared critical stories to share about their work in Montessori schools.
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There were also many people who shared stories with me that I couldn’t fit into the
manuscript. These narratives helped me understand the broader landscape of the school, and I
apologize for not having the space to tell more of them here.
The Hartford field
As I spent time with parents, I learned more about how much the complicated landscape
of choice impacted their school choices, and this topic also became part of my research. Hartford
is a relatively small pond, and because I connected early on with its research nexus, Trinity
College Professor Jack Dougherty, I was able to interview several school administrators at the
Hartford, regional and state level who were kind enough to attend an early talk I gave on school
choice hosted at Trinity. (As one state level policy maker described me to a colleague in an email
on which I was cc:ed, “She’s a good kid, let’s help her out.”) I ultimately gave three additional
talks in Hartford, presenting on the Hartford choice system at the Magnet Schools of America
conference, Trinity College and the Sheff Movement Coalition, and each opportunity gave me
valuable feedback on my research. The Sheff Movement Coalition also hired me to write two
policy memos based on my research, first on how the magnet lottery preferences system could be
simplified and second on magnet preschool enrollment. I welcomed the opportunity to share my
findings with a broader audience in a format that could potentially generate policy change. This
participation with the Sheff Movement Coalition gave me insights into the group’s work, though
members gave me independence to develop my own independent research findings. I am grateful
to the Hartford research and policy community for welcoming me and for being willing to
engage with my findings throughout my research.
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I was also reminded how small Hartford was when I ran into, Sara Bronin, a former
graduate school classmate at a school open house. She invited me to her house to advise her on
how to navigate Hartford school choice. A year later, their son was attending a public Montessori
school and her husband, Luke Bronin, was running for Mayor of Hartford. Education policy, and
candidate’s personal decisions about education were front and center in the campaign. Bronin
authored a blog post about my Sheff PreK report during the campaign (Bronin 2015). Bronin’s
support of Montessori education also became controversial during the election when the
incumbent mayor, Pedro Segarra, challenged Bronin’s decision to withdraw his son from the
Montessori magnet after his other child was not admitted, enrolling both children in a private
Montessori school (Carlesso 2015). Bronin’s use of my research reminded me of the political
salience of my research topic, and his own Montessori controversy provided another instance of
how Montessori could be used as a political football to denote elitist leanings.
Observing Participation in the National Montessori Community
In my research, I also hoped to understand the place of public Montessori in the broader
Montessori community and to see whether my observations in Hartford reflected broader
patterns nationally. To this end, I attended five national Montessori conferences in 2013-2015,
including AMI and American Montessori Society (AMS) conferences and two public Montessori
“Unconferences” for which I was one of the organizers. I also interviewed 22 Montessori
educators, who were assembled through a snowball sample.
The interviews I conducted with Hartford policy makers and Montessori educators were a
combination of formal and informal interviews. For formal interviews, participants signed a
permission form at the beginning of our conversation or gave their verbal permission, and the
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conversation was tape recorded and transcribed. For informal interviews, I took notes either
during the conversation or immediately following in a notebook. I double-checked with informal
interviewees afterward to verify their informed consent, usually sending them a copy of my
written notes from our conversation.
Just as I got involved in policy work in Hartford based on my research, I also was
enlisted in the national Montessori community to connect my research to policy and communitybuilding efforts. Through drafting the Elm City Montessori School charter application, I
connected with Keith Whitescarver and Jackie Cossentino at the National Center for Montessori
in the Public Sector (NCMPS) who ended up hiring me as a research fellow to help them
compile an original data set of nearly 500 American public Montessori schools called the
Montessori Census. I subsequently updated and merged this data with three other datasets and
my historical research to derive national public Montessori school historical and demographic
data, information I present in Chapter 3 and in Debs (2016). I ultimately wrote several articles
and briefs for NCMPS, and Whitescarver and Cossentino provided numerous introductions to
national Montessori educators. Although NCMPS functions as an advocacy group for public
Montessori schools, Whitescarver and Cossentino, both education scholars, provided a
thoughtful sounding board throughout the process, even if they did not agree with my findings.
Working for NCMPS helped me connect to national Montessori educators, many of whom
agreed to be interviewed for this project and dig in deep to the public Montessori data, enriching
my insights and understanding of complex topics.
At my first Montessori conference, the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI)
quadrennial global summit in Portland, I observed the dynamic audience response to talks about
Montessori education for underserved populations. These events were few and far between,
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however, in a conference dominated by private educators. A more passive participant observer
might have noted the lack of connection between public Montessori programs around the
country, but as an observing participant, I got up at the end of one talk and proposed the creation
of a list-serv and Facebook group as a way of connecting public Montessorians around the
country. I spontaneously called the group Montessori for Social Justice, inspired by one of the
Hartford principals who talked about Montessori as “social justice.” At the time, I had little
understanding of what the term meant. The response to my proposal was immediate. Around 20
people came over wrote down their names and email addresses, and Annie Frazer, a Montessori
educator from Atlanta, organized a spontaneous Public Montessori Roundtable the following day
to which 50 people turned up. As the person who had made the initial announcement to form the
group, I found myself as the designated organizer and convener, an ironic position given my own
lack of Montessori experience.
Initially the online group connected public Montessori educators in order to ask questions
and share information. It might have stayed a modest endeavor without the urging of Daniel
Petter-Lipstein, a Montessori parent and one of the Montessori Madmen, who encouraged us to
bring our virtual community together through a conference. I met Christie Huck and Nicole
Evans of City Garden Montessori School in St. Louis who generously offered to host our first
gathering. We called it a public Montessori “Unconference,” because we used the open space
format of spontaneously organized sessions. Two months later, 25 Montessori educators met in
June 2014 at their school. At the time, Christie and Nicole were talking about “ABAR,” antibias/anti-racist education, something few of us had ever heard of before that event.
Two months later, Michael Brown was killed by police in nearby Ferguson, Missouri,
and the Saint Louis region became a flashpoint for civil rights demonstrations and the emergence
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of the Black Lives Matter movement. The work of City Garden Montessori and its commitment
to creating interracial dialogue around race through community “Colorbrave” gatherings, started
to become less of an outlier than a model many were interested in emulating. The link of
inequality and race was also a topic daily in the news. These events influenced Montessori for
Social Justice educators and myself as a researcher. As I worked with a group of Montessori
educators planning each subsequent annual conference, the organizers went from a position
where having a group called “Montessori for Social Justice” felt like a radical act in itself (one
participant from the South worried that her connection to the group would scare off supporters),
to a developing group consensus that it wasn’t enough to talk about expanding public Montessori
schools without also having conversations about race and equity in these schools.
This evolution was particularly apparent in the third conference that we organized at
Tobin public Montessori school in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2016. Organizers worked to
intentionally ensure our group was as racially diverse as possible by offering scholarships for
Montessorians of color, and as a result, a quarter of attendees identified as people of color. The
conference also hosted a daylong workshop led by Crossroads Anti-Racism called an
“Introduction to Structural Racism.” When we started planning the event, we doubted that we
would get more than 30 people to attend the Crossroads workshop. We were therefore surprised
when the American Montessori Society fully sponsored the Crossroads workshop and over 100
people attended.
After the 2016 conference, events in the news and our group’s conversations continued to
converge. The police shooting of Philando Castile, a cafeteria worker at J.J. Hill public
Montessori in St. Paul, Minnesota hit particularly close to home to the Montessori community. In
the weeks following the event, the Montessori for Social Justice community on Facebook
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doubled in size from 600 to 1200 participants and group members posting on topics of race,
white privilege and education increased dramatically.
The Montessori for Social Justice conference participants, the listserv and Facebook
community have continually provided a sounding board to my research and a place for gaining
insights into the daily experiences of public Montessori educators. I’ve learned about the fragility
of public Montessori programs to outside district pressure because a principal called me one day
asking for data to help her make the case for Montessori and students of color to a skeptical
superintendent. Educators have shown me how successful Montessori schools could be part of a
gentrification process in neighborhoods, an important component of my argument in Chapter 3.
Board Members applying to create charter Montessori schools have contacted me for advice in
recruiting and supporting a diverse student body. The growth of Montessori for Social Justice
and the transformation of the group’s conversation to focus specifically on issues of race, bias
and Montessori has given me confidence that my research is not only relevant to sociologists and
education scholars, but that it represents an important and increasingly visible conversation in the
broader Montessori community.
Analysis & Assuring internal validity
As I conducted my research, I developed a long list of in-vivo codes out of field notes
and interview transcripts using grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014; Glaser and Strauss, 1967), and
I gradually consolidated the long list of codes into buckets of broader themes that formed the
basis of my arguments. I also did not use data if I could not verify it from more than one source.
I used several methods to verify my results. Interviewing 51 parents helped me reach a
saturation of themes (Small 2013). I compared school observations with parent interviews in
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order to triangulate data and consulted key parent informants to comment on my initial findings.
Though I argue that my parent interviews are a set “unique cases” (Small 2009b) that are not
necessarily generalizable to the broader school community, public Montessori or school choice
more broadly, I did attempt to observe if patterns at the public Montessori school level were
repeated nationally. I confirmed the existence of patterns of marginalization among families of
color through informal sampling of 20 public Montessori educators. I also observed similar
tensions around the access of students of color and low-income students through historical and
contemporary stories of Montessori in the news media. In trying to understand how parents at
Birch and Vine made identities around Montessori, I also considered alternate hypotheses for
how parents grouped themselves, examining variation along a range of axes: by school, by home
location parents, by length of enrollment, by racial/ethnic background, by education and income
level before arriving at the groups presented in Chapter 5.
Though I was unable to present my findings to the broader parent community at Birch
and Vine as I will explain in the next section, I shared drafts of my dissertation with several
Montessori educators around the country, presented my research findings at three national
Montessori conferences, and shared Chapters 5, 6 and 7 with several parents at Birch and Vine
for comments and feedback. I would have liked to reach out to more parents to share drafts, but I
was hesitant to cause greater tensions at the schools by doing so, concerns highlighted by other
school-based ethnographic researchers (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013, Lareau 2011).
Confidentiality
I am particularly grateful to both school principals for their willingness to have me at
their school as a researcher. Recognizing the particular vulnerability of children and families,
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many school researchers opt to assign pseudonyms to participants, schools and the surrounding
cities of their research. Initially, designing this project in consultation with Birch and Vine’s
principals Andrea and Theo, I planned to name both schools, but keep the identities of staff and
parents anonymous. As I began my fieldwork and began to observe a few contentious
interactions at the schools, I decided that each school needed a pseudonym for greater protection.
I met with the principals again, and suggested this change, to which they agreed.
I gave considerable thought to using a pseudonym for Hartford, but ultimately concluded
that the broader context of the Sheff desegregation initiative and the interdistrict magnet program
combining city and suburban students was an important part of how parents participated and
understood their school choice. Leaving out the city context would omit a critical factor of
analysis. In this model, I was guided by the work of Maia Cucchiara (2014) examining a
gentrifying neighborhood school in the broader context of revitalization efforts in Philadelphia
and Madeline Pérez’s study of school choice at two public high schools in New York City (2011)
and the work of urban ethnographers whose studies are explicitly set in city contexts (Anderson
1990, Desmond 2016, Pattillo 2007, Wherry 2011).
As my research proceeded, I recognized that naming the city of research created
challenges to protecting the confidentiality of research participants. As a result, I changed or
omitted specific details about the schools, staff, parents and their specific roles on the PTO. The
result is an ethnography with less richly drawn characters, but one that attempts to answer the
call to accurately represent the local context (Duneier 1999) and is subject to the greater scrutiny
of verifiability by future researchers.
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Ethnographic Dilemmas as an Observing Participant
My role as an observing participant led to a number of challenges, a few of which I will
briefly mention. I was on the hiring committee when three different staff from Birch and Vine
applied to jobs at the newly created Elm City Montessori School that opened in the fall of 2014,
in the middle of my fieldwork. I had anticipated this issue, indicating in my Institutional Review
Board application that I would not vote on any staff applying from my research sites. These
overlaps also required honest conversations between myself, the applicants and Theo and Andrea
so that they did not feel that our new school was poaching their staff. In the end, we made offers
to one staff member who did not accept the position and also subsequently left Birch. We did not
hire the other two applicants, and my contact with them at my research sites continued
professionally as before.
Having my feet actively in the field with Elm City Montessori also helped to make me
sympathetic to the staff perspective, particularly in the school choice process. For example, at the
opening celebration of Elm City Montessori School in October 2014, a New Haven school
official asked me why Latino students were underrepresented by 10% in comparison to the New
Haven student population. As the person who had led our all-volunteer team of community
outreach for the first year, I knew that our efforts had been limited, and I acknowledged as much.
We had made translated all flyers into Spanish and had translators available at Open House
events, but we had not done significant outreach in the Latino community. I felt the paradox of
being in complete support of a student body that represented New Haven demographics while
being accused of creating an exclusionary institution. Experiences like this one helped to give me
strong sympathies for parents and administrators, and temper my academic critique in light of
what I’ve learned about the challenges of being a practitioner.
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Sharing Findings
Being an observing participant also complicated writing and sharing my findings,
particularly parts that were critical of Birch and Vine. I spent and continue to spend a
considerable amount of time worrying about the reception to my research. As part of my
agreement with Principals Andrea and Theo, I shared a short brief of my research findings and
Chapter 6 with them at the end of my fieldwork and offered to come and present my findings to
parents. Andrea thanked me for my insights but politely declined my offer. She also commented
that I had become too close to parents at the school, compromising a position of marginality and
detachment. I’ve reflected a great deal on this comment. As Lareau (2011) found in her study of
parents and children, the principals and I had different expectations for ethnographic research.
For a Montessorian, the critical practice of adults in the Montessori community is detached
observation. Outside observers who enter a Montessori classroom are expected to be as invisible
as possible, including rebuffing attempts at engagement from the students. While I made sure to
conform to these guidelines when I was observing students and teachers in Montessori
classrooms, both principals helped me to create a research design that involved attending parent
events, speaking with parents informally and through formal interviews. Moreover, the central
work of an ethnographer is building rapport with as many community members as possible,
spending time with them and going where they go in order to understand their worldview. As I
mentioned earlier, I wish I had developed more close relationships with working class and lowincome parents, particularly the parents who did not respond to my request for an interview. The
difference in expectations between the principals, and myself however, makes me reflect on the
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importance of not only gaining informed consent, but also giving educators a sample chapter of
ethnographic research to have a better sense of what to expect.
I also worked hard at Birch and Vine to observe without intervening, with several
exceptions. As I mentioned in Chapter 7, I was so bothered to observe Lena sitting for six hours
every day at school that I asked staff and then another parent to give her rides home for the
remaining two months of the year. I bought two pies as part of a PTO fundraiser. And when the
district proposed moving Vine from a Latino neighborhood to a largely white neighborhood in
the region, I continued to observe at several contentious PTO meetings, but worked hard to resist
being enlisted in a dispute among the parents over moving versus staying. This involved
intervening when a parent wanted to publicly cite my research at the school in a petition. In
another one instance, a parent asked for my research-based advice on the importance of school
location, and we both copied Theo on the exchange. Despite these efforts to be transparent about
my ongoing research, my presence during a year of contentious debate was something Theo had
not anticipated when he invited me to do research at the school, and made interactions tense
between us. Due to the rawness of this dispute for the school community, I have held off
including it in more detail in this study.
The complicated duality of being a researcher and a participant
Being an observing participant brought with it a complicated duality that challenged me
throughout analysis and writing this study. After spending several years in the world of
Montessori, I know how much the group hopes for both good publicity and academic legitimacy.
As a marginal community in the broader landscape of education, Montessori educators and
parents were excited about being studied, and particularly the interest of someone from Yale. “I
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can’t wait to read your report,” a parent said to me at a fall meeting after I had interviewed her
that summer. Others continue to write me, encouraging me to spread Montessori to the world
(and any influential people I may know) or join boards of other Montessori organizations.
Though I see much promise in the Montessori model in its history of diversity in the public
sector and its tradition of respecting children, I still see a clear separation between conducting
Montessori research and becoming a true believer.
I hope Montessori readers who read my results will be willing to engage with a project
that is not uniformly celebratory of the movement, but comes from a place of deep respect and
appreciation. I hope this study contributes to efforts to make public Montessori schools, and all
public schools, more equitable and welcoming places to students and families of all
backgrounds.
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Appendix C
List of Interviews by Category and Title
Birch and Vine Montessori School Interviews (Level 1)
Interviewee (all pseudonyms)
1. Anna, a white mother at Vine
2. Dante, a black father at Vine
3. Tara, Dante’s wife, a black mother at Vine (interviewed 4
times)
4. Sara, a black mother at Vine
5. Adrian, Sara’s husband, a black father at Vine
6. Evelyn, a black mother at Vine
7. Grace, a Latina mother at Vine
8. Jacqueline, a black mother at Vine (interviewed 2 times)
9. Christopher, a Latino father at Vine
10. Anatacia, Christopher’s wife, a Latina mother at Vine
11. Ascuncion, a Latina mother at Vine
12. Cynthia, a black mother at Vine
13. Dominic, Cynthia’s husband, a black father at Vine
14. Natalie, a Latina mother at Vine
15. Grace, a Latina mother at Vine
16. Nathaniel, a white father at Vine
17. Cara, Nathaniel’s wife, a white mother at Vine
18. Gwen, a white mother at Vine
19. William, a white father at Vine
20. Marina, William’s wife, a white mother at Vine
21. Ram, an Asian father at Vine
22. Soumya, Ram’s wife, an Asian mother at Vine
23. Curtis, a white mother at Vine
24. Lionel, Curtis’ husband, a black father at Vine
25. Lucinda, a white mother at Vine
26. Oliver, a black father at Vine
27. Marie, Oliver’s wife, a black mother at Vine
28. Eva, a white mother at Vine
29. George, a Latino father at Vine
30. Maria, George’s wife and a Latina mother at Vine
31. Selva, an Asian mother at Vine
32. Vidhya, Selva’s husband and an Asian father at Vine
33. Deirdre, a white mother at Vine
34. Shawn, a black father at Birch
Research Level
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35. Pam, a black mother at Birch
36. Heather, a black mother at Birch
37. Lena, a black grandmother at Birch
38. Stacy, Lena’s daughter and a black mother at Birch
39. Simone, a black mother at Birch
40. Alexandra, a white mother at Birch
41. Grant, Alexandra’s husband, and a white father at Birch
42. Elisabeth, a white mother at Birch
43. Bella, a white mother at Birch
44. Rita, a black mother at Birch (interviewed 2 times)
45. Daniela, a white mother at Birch
46. Karen, a white mother at Birch
47. Dawn, a white mother at Birch
48. Jill, a black mother at Birch
49. Anuradha, an Asian mother at Birch
50. Elena, a white mother at Birch
51. Selena, a Latina mother at Birch
Hartford Formal and Informal Interviews (Level 2)
Interviewee (real names)
1. Glenn Peterson, RSCO Choice Office
2. Enid Rey, HPS Choice Office (interviewed 2 times)
3. Terry Schmidt, CREC Board of Education
4. Robert Cotto, HPS Board of Education
5. Philip Tegeler, Sheff Movement Coalition
6. Paul Holzer, Director, Achieve Hartford
7. Aricelly Cruz (pseudonym), staff member, Vine
8. Jennifer Grimm (pseudonym), staff member, Vine
Research Level
Public Montessori Formal and Informal Interviews (Level 3)
Interviewee (real names)
1. Ginny Riga, Montessori consultant, researcher and former
Coordinator of Montessori public school programs, South
Carolina State Department of Education
2. David Kahn, President, North American Montessori Teacher’s
Association, Board Member, Montessori Development
Partnerships and Avanti Montessori Charter Management
Organization
3. Timothy Nee, CREC & New England Center for Montessori
Education
Research Level
2,3
4. Kathleen Guinan, Chief Executive Officer, Crossway
Community Montessori, VA
5. Jean Powell, Montessori trainer and former public Montessori
educator, Milwaukee, WI
6. Terry Ford, Executive Director, Lumin Education, Dallas, TX
7. Nicole Evans, Principal, City Garden Montessori, St. Louis,
MO
8. Christie Huck, Executive Director, City Garden Montessori,
St. Louis, MO
9. Frank Vincent, Principal, Ft. Collins Charter Montessori,
formerly worked in public Montessori in Kansas City and
Denver
10. Martha Vincent, Montessori instructional coach, formerly
worked in public Montessori in Kansas City and Denver
11. David Paull, former public Montessori educator in Prince
George’s county, MD
12. Daniel Petter-Lipstein, Montessori Mad Men and Jewish
Montessori Society
13. Sara Cotner, Executive Director, Montessori for All, TX
14. Keith Whitescarver, Director, National Center for Montessori
in the Public Sector
15. Ta Benz, Primary Teacher, Oglesby Elementary School,
Chicago
16. Elizabeth Seebeck, Oglesby Montessori Foundation, Chicago
17. Dakota Prosch, Elementary Teacher, Suder Montessori School,
Chicago
18. Virginia Varga, American Montessori Society
19. Luwannia Johnson-Martin, former public Montessori parent,
Building Blocks Montessori, Hartford
20. Natalie Danner, Special Education and Montessori Researcher
and consultant for National Center for Montessori in the Public
Sector
21. Dina Paulik, former public Montessori educator, Dallas, TX
22. Naomi Wheatly (pseudonym), former public Montessori
educator, Arizona
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2,3
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Appendix D
Interview Questions for parents
Interviews were semi-structured. I asked the main numbered questions and covered the subtopics through the course of the conversation, following the parent’s lead.
Choosing the School
1. Tell me about the process you went through in choosing a school for your child.
Who was involved?
What were your sources of information?
Did you attend open houses?
What was your experience with the magnet lottery?
Were there other schools you were considering?
What was your backup choice?
First Impressions of Montessori
2. Tell me about the first time you walked into a Montessori classroom. What was your initial
reaction?
What does it mean to have your child at a Montessori school, or a magnet school? Which
is more important?
Did you have any initial negative impressions of Montessori?
Daily Routine at school
3. What’s it like having your child at school here? Tell me about a normal day.
What is your schedule for transportation, pick-up, drop-off, before/after care
What is your school day routine?
What does your child tell you about Montessori?
Are there things you like about the school/Montessori?
What are things you don’t like about the school/Montessori?
Parent Community
4. Tell me about the parent community at this school.
Are there parents you interact with? Parents who have helped you out or who you have
helped?
Are there parents who you see outside of school?
Tell me about a recent school event you attended.
Are there events you wish the school offered for parents?
Has the parent community changed since you have been here? In what ways?
Broader context
4. How does the school fit into your life?
Are your children’s friends from the school or elsewhere?
What do your friends and neighbors think about the school?
What activities does your family participate in outside of school?
Are there any challenges to staying at the school?
279
Demographic Information
5. How many children do you have at the school?
6. How long have they attended?
7. How would you categorize your race/ethnicity on a Census form?
8. What town/neighborhood do you live in?
9. Do you live in an apartment/house? Do you own/rent?
10. What is your current job?
11. For immigrants: Did you have a different job before you immigrated?
12. What is your level of education, your partner’s level of education?
13. If you have a partner, do they work? If so, what is their job?
14. What is your combined family annual salary
15. Do you have a religious affiliation?
Closing
16. What are your hopes for your child’s education?
17. Do you have questions for me? Are there any questions you wish I had asked you?
280
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