Career track or college bound? Parental incarceration, race, and teachers’ career or college program referrals

ABSTRACT Parental incarceration is a common childhood experience with potential consequences for education, yet causal evidence of its effect in classrooms remains scarce. Using a vignette experiment with 1419 U.S. secondary teachers, I examine how parental incarceration, student race, and the interaction between the two shape teachers’ perceptions and referrals for college bound programs. While parental incarceration has little effect on teachers’ perceptions of programs, student race does—teachers rate college programs as less and career programs as more appropriate when the student has a Black associated name relative to that of a White associated name. When examining stated referral decisions, evidence of teachers’ differential behavior due to parental incarceration emerges. If the student has a White associated name, the college track program referral rate drops by over 50 percent when the student has an incarcerated parent relative to not having one. When the student has a Black associated name, the odds of college program referral remain low regardless of parental incarceration. Moreover, teachers are just as likely to refer the White student with an incarcerated parent to college as the Black student without an incarcerated parent. Students with incarcerated parents face differential treatment, the effect is racialized, and it should be considered a factor contributing to educational inequity.