Like many predominantly Black urban cities, Detroit, Michigan, has experienced significant out-migration among Black residents over the past 30 years. This situation has altered families' relationships to the communities and schools where they have been nurtured or call home. Therefore, this paper examines how seven Black families' place…

Using a critical phenomenological methodology (Salamon, 2018; van Manen, 1990), this study aims to better understand how Black families' perceptions of place shape their physical movement in pursuit of quality schools and educational opportunity in Metro Detroit. By perceptions of place, I refer to the ways in which families think about, feel…

Too often, Black families' educational agency has been marginalized in discourse on racial and spatial divides in US education. Indeed, Black families have persistently employed a range of tactics to access and create the educational resources their children deserve. Drawing from scholarship on spatial imaginaries, in this article, I track how…

Providing improved educational options for low-income African American families has been one of the primary objectives of the charter school movement. However, among demographically similar families, school choosers may possess subtle advantages compared to nonchoosers, leading to biased estimates of charter school performance in nonexperimental…