The psychological determinants of classroom preferences: Implicit and explicit racial attitudes and racial composition of classrooms

Abstract

AbstractThe opportunity for parents to select their children's school is both increasingly common and linked to school segregation in the U.S. Here, we investigate how race and racial attitudes shape parents' classroom preferences, which have direct implications for school choices. We measured the implicit and explicit racial attitudes of both White and Black parents (Study 1: N = 201; mean age = 35.46; 173 women, 28 men; 37 Black, 147 White) of preschool‐aged children who themselves were about to choose educational settings for their children, as well as those parents' preferences for classrooms varying in racial composition. Both implicit and explicit racial attitudes separately predicted classroom preferences, suggesting that both overt and covert racial prejudice play roles in the related decision of school enrollment. Results were replicated in a follow‐up study using a sample of college students (Study 2: N = 357; mean age = 18.90; 183 women, 169 men, 2 transgender, 2 non‐binary, 1 unreported; 144 Black, 213 White). Racially biased parents tend to prefer classrooms with fewer Black students, an effect that occurs even for implicit measures of bias and varies to some extent based on parental race. These effects have direct implications for patterns of segregation in American schools. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.