Before You Show Up: Eight Things to Know About Black Families and School Choice

Black families were building their own schools long before “school choice” became a policy term. After emancipation, freedmen founded their own schools. The Rosenwald Fund helped Black communities build one-room schoolhouses across the South. Black colleges and universities opened because white institutions refused black students.. 

That work didn’t end with history. Black parents today are still looking hard for schools that serve their children well. In the National School Choice Awareness Foundation’s (NSCAF) January 2025 survey, 68 percent of Black parents had considered, searched for, or chosen a new school for their child in the past year, the highest share of any group. Among Black parents under 30, the figure was 75 percent. 

Yet, though searching is high, enrollment is low. 

In the same survey, only 28 percent of Black parents had enrolled their child in a new school. This is the navigation gap in action, and what Black parents need is more support getting from searching to enrolling. Historical factors like redlining, exclusionary zone, and decades of underinvestment still shape which schools are within reach. Meanwhile the paperwork of school choice, including deadlines, eligibility rules, and applications, varies from school to school, which makes the process fragmented and hard to coordinate. For many Black families, this is a double burden: the schools nearby are more likely to fall short, so more of them must navigate a process built to reward time, flexibility, and insider knowledge they are less likely to have. 

Navigation, meaning trusted, hands-on help from the first search through enrollment, can help close that gap, but only if the organizations providing the service understand the families they serve.The eight points below draw on research into how families experience school choice, reporting on the disparities that shape Black families’ options, and from the work of the InPower Network, NSCAF’s initiative to equip Black-led, family-facing organizations.

1. The language you use will shape how the family hears your message. “Freedom” and other terms common in school choice advocacy can tell a Black family that you care more about a policy agenda that about their child.. So can  “government schools,” a phrase some advocates use to cast traditional public schools in a bad light. . Language centered on empowerment, agency, and fit tends to land differently. Compare a flyer promising  the “freedom to escape” a school with one that asks, “What does your child need to thrive, and how can we help you find it?” The first assumes the family shares your politics. The second starts a conversation.

2. Families’ history with schools shapes how they approach new programs. Redlining, segregation, underfunded majority-Black schools, and discipline applied unevenly by race have all shaped how Black families view public institutions, including schools. In Texas, for example, recent reporting found that majority-Black campuses are far less likely than other schools to receive the state’s top academic rating and far more likely to receive a D or F. Researchers and parents trace that gap to decades of unequal investment rather than to the students or their educators. If your organization ignores this history, or seems surprised when a family doubts a new program, you’ve started a step behind. 

3. Black families are active decision-makers in their children’s education. Black families already value education and know how to advocate for it. Roughly 65 percent of Black women 25 and older have attended some college, and Black women have long led every race-gender group in college enrollment. When a family hasn’t enrolled in a new school, assume the process got in the way before you assume a lack of interest. Ask what stalled them: a deadline, unreliable transportation, a missing document, a call that was never returned. Then help with that.

4. Families weigh much more than a school’s letter grade. A school’s rating rarely captures what a family is weighing. Research on how Black families choose schools finds parents balancing academics against school climate, discipline practices, teacher diversity, and whether their child will be seen and supported. One Texas mother in recent reporting passed over a closer, F-rated school for one with a specialized program. Yet she and her neighbors also described low-rated schools where teachers know their children and push them to succeed. A ratings sheet shows families only part of what they need. 

5. Families often trust a message when it comes from someone they know. Research consistently finds that families lean on people in their own networks, more than official guides or ratings, to make sense of their options. The InPower Network builds on that finding by treating community knowledge and lived experience as seriously as academic data. A university researcher and a respected parent leader from the neighborhood can share the same facts, and families may hear them very differently. 

6. Churches, barbershops, and community groups can be strong partners in this work. Churches, barbershops, sorority and fraternity chapters, parent networks, and long-standing community groups already have families’ trust. Partnering with them, and with the people who lead them, will earn you more credibility. This is why Black-led organizations are often best placed to do this work, and why national groups do more good as their partners than as their replacements. 

7. Families respond best when choice is framed around fit and opportunity.Messages about “failing schools” and “saving your child” can read as an accusation against the family and the school their child attends now. Messages about fit, opportunity, and what a family already does well land better. When choice is framed as a tool, families don’t have to hear it as a verdict on their past decisions. 

8. Real partnership means families help shape the work from the start. Paternalism in this work usually arrives with good intentions. It looks like a national organization showing up with funding  and materials but no real partnership, treating families as consumers of options, or assuming parents need lessons in advocating for their own children. The InPower Network was built to position Black families and Black-led organizations as decision-makers and system-shapers. Before you launch an initiative, ask who designed it and whether the families it serves had a hand in it. 

None of these points are complicated on their own. Taken together, they describe a simple shift: from delivering information to families, to building real partnership with them. Organizations that get this right tend to see it in the relationships they build, not just the numbers they report.

The InPower Network was created to help Black-led, family-facing organizations put these principles into practice, through shared resources, leadership development, and a network of peers doing this work across the country. If your organization supports Black families navigating school choice and you would like to learn more about joining, reach out to our team.