School Choice Among Latinx Families: How Experiential Knowledge Informs Choice Over Time

Across the United States, school choice options continue to grow, and Latinx families represent a large and growing share of those opting into choice schools. Yet research on school choice has primarily focused on Black and White families. In this article, we examine how Latinx families select schools for their children and highlight how these choices vary by immigrant generation and change over time. Using in-depth interviews with 35 families, we illustrate how experiential knowledge shapes engagement with school choice and argue that choice based on experiential knowledge of schools is a form of positioned choice. We find that US-born Latinx parents were more likely than immigrant parents to engage in school choice for their first school-enrollment decisions, drawing on their knowledge of and lived experience in US public schools. However, as immigrant parents and their children gained experience in local schools, the secondary school choices of immigrant and US-born parents grew more similar, with parents in both groups activating positioned choice strategies based on this new experiential knowledge.