In a recent review of Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality, published in Social Forces, Dr. Hailey engages scholarship on parental anxiety, school choice, and inequality, connecting to her broader research agenda on how families navigate educational options within systems that are not equally structured for all students. Most recently, her article in Social Science Research, uses a national survey experiment to demonstrate that non-Black parents believe Black schools are less supportive, more violent, and academically weaker than otherwise similar White, Asian, and Latine schools. Importantly, providing additional information about schools, on average, does not alter parents’ anti-Black beliefs about schools nor their desires to avoid Black schools.  Her co-authored article in The Urban Review, “Racial Disparities and Black Parents’ School Preferences: Evidence from a Survey Experiment,” examines how Black parents weigh school quality alongside racialized school climates, showing that racial disparities in test scores and suspensions deter Black families from enrolling in otherwise high-quality schools 

Her co-authored article in Science Advances builds on this attention to racialized educational contexts by examining how shifts in neighborhood racial composition are related to changes in school discipline disparities, underscoring the importance of looking beyond schools alone to understand how broader neighborhood conditions shape students’ experiences.

Dr. Hailey’s publications reflect an ongoing attention to the relationship between individual decision-making and structural inequality, reminding us that educational opportunity is shaped not only by formal policies, but also by the racialized contexts in which families, schools, and communities make decisions.