“The Scarcity Loop is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why school choice policies so often fail to deliver on their promise. With a rare combination of meticulous research and genuine readability, Jennings shows that a policy conversation focused on who gets access to too few ‘good schools’ is one that has already conceded too much.”
—JON VALANT, director, Brown Center on Education Policy, and senior fellow, Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution

“Jennings provides a definitive answer to one of the most vital policy questions of our time: What to do when there aren’t enough good schools? School choice is not the answer or a golden ticket to a good education. Encompassing in breadth and penetrating in depth, this is a ground-up view of the nation’s largest school choice system as it is experienced by the students, parents, counselors, teachers, and principals who inhabit it. The Scarcity Loop should be required reading for educational researchers, practitioners, and educators, and anyone who cares about fairness in our schools.”
—KATHRYN J. EDIN, William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University

“How do families and students select schools? Cutting through the political noise around the subject, Jennings has produced our first sophisticated, historically grounded account of the ways school choice actually happens in urban America. In the guise of enhancing opportunities, it reinforces disparities. And it defers the hard conversations we need about who gets access to quality education, and why. Anyone who wants to understand inequality in our schools—or in our country— will have to read this bold and incisive book.”
—JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN, Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education and professor of history of education, University of Pennsylvania

School choice promises to free families from the limits of where they live. The Scarcity Loop asks what happens when that promise is made in school systems where more children seek desirable schools than those schools can serve. Focused on New York City’s high school admissions system, sociologist Jennifer L. Jennings argues that choice becomes another way to ration scarce educational opportunity, shifting where rationing happens, who must manage it, and how families understand the outcomes that follow.

Jennings begins with the admissions process itself. New York City asks every eighth grader to choose from hundreds of options. On paper, the system offers extraordinary possibility. But that possibility still has to be converted into a seat. Someone has to learn the rules, compare schools, manage deadlines, make trips, and decide how much risk a thirteen-year-old can bear. Jennings calls this the work of getting in and shows that the capacity to do that work is not evenly distributed. Some families enter choice systems with the flu-ency and flexibility to turn options into opportunity. Others confront these systems with fewer supports and far less room for error. Some teenagers shoulder decisions with little adult help. Counselors trans-late complicated rules under impossible constraints. Principals are not passive actors: Jennings shows how they recruit and adapt as they try to build, manage demand for, and maintain the reputation of schools that families will choose.

Jennings contends that reforms meant to expand access can reorganize the very competition they aim to resolve. As one barrier recedes, another becomes more consequential. Residence matters less, but advantage does not disappear; it travels through information, timing, and familiarity with the rules. Inequality persists, not because nothing changes, but because advantage finds new points of entry as reforms change rules. As the work of securing opportunity shifts, so do understandings of inequality. Unequal outcomes can come to look less like consequences of how educational opportunities are organized and more like reflections of how families navigate the system.

Drawing on more than 450 interviews, participant observation, administrative data, and archival research, The Scarcity Loop follows students, parents, counselors, and principals as they navigate school choice at scale. Jennings traces who must do the work of making choice real, clarifying what is at stake when public education becomes something families must know how to secure.

"In this sweeping overview, The Motherlode breaks new ground by focusing careful attention on the important, but poorly understood rise of breadwinning mothers. Jennifer Glass’s comprehensive and insightful examination tells us the reasons for this shift, the forms it is taking, and the consequences for women, their families, and the social fabric of contemporary America. The breadth and depth of her analysis make it irrefutably clear that mothers’ increasing responsibility for their children’s economic welfare constitutes nothing less than a revolutionary demographic transformation that we ignore at our peril."
—KATHLEEN GERSON, professor of sociology and collegiate professor of arts and science, New York University

"In her sharp, well-argued, and surprising new book, Jennifer Glass lays out with precision just why a majority of mothers in the United States have assumed the impossible role of primary breadwinner for their families while at the same time shouldering the bulk of the unpaid work of care and home. The Motherlode is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand our modern, unequal, high-stress, and overwhelming age, and the actions the government and business leaders most responsible for getting us here need to take to get us out."
—BRIGID SCHULTE, award-winning journalist and director, Better Life Lab at New America

"Jennifer Glass, one of the country’s leading scholars of women and work, presents a fresh portrait of the extent to which mothers in the United States support their children, via both labor market earnings and nonmonetary provisions. Relying on careful data analysis, she covers a remarkable amount of terrain—analyzing pathways through which mothers become financial providers, historical patterns and structural drivers of change, contemporary disparities by race/ethnicity and class, and an array of social and economic consequences for mothers and their families. Glass’s impressive volume makes a valuable contribution to empirical scholarship on the persistently gendered nature of work, both paid and unpaid."
—JANET C. GORNICK, professor of political science and sociology, and, director, Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Despite cultural scripts that continue to view fathers as the primary breadwinners in their families, there has been a striking escalation of mothers’ assumption of that role. Over the last twenty years, the rate at which mothers have become the primary bread-winner has increased by almost 50 percent, and an astonishing 70 percent of American mothers can expect to become the primary earner for their household for at least a year before their first child turns eighteen. In The Motherlode, sociologist Jennifer L. Glass traces the rise of mothers as the primary financial providers for their children, investigates the causes of this increase, and evaluates the consequences of this shift for mothers and families.

Glass finds the swift increase of fiscal responsibility for children by their mothers is occurring in households of all racial backgrounds and across the educational spectrum. This increase is not due to more divorces or relationship breakups. In fact, the most rapid growth in mothers’ financial responsibility for the household has come from married mothers, not single mothers, and about half of contemporary mom-breadwinners have spouses or romantic partners living in the home. Nor is it due to a narrowing of the gender pay gap or mothers’ ability to out-earn their partners: The bulk of breadwinning mothers see large financial losses or are better off financially but still living in poverty when they become the primary earner. Instead, this rise is due to broader, long-term changes in the economy, which have led to wage stagnation and less job security for all workers.

The increase in mothers’ financial obligations to their children has occurred at the same time that nonfinancial responsibilities for children have increased: More time is dedicated to identifying, evaluating, and obtaining goods and services for children, including health care and schooling. There has not been a corresponding increase in support for mothers by their employers, the government, or fathers. This leaves mothers with greater burdens of both financial support and nonmonetary care for their children, which increases the number of children that are dependent on their mothers’ earnings and vulnerable to intermittent poverty. While this rise in maternal breadwinning is unlikely to decline anytime soon, Glass suggests policies that could provide mothers with more support, such as enacting labor protections for care occupations dominated by women, legislating federal paid family and medical leave, and providing federally funded, wraparound, non-means-tested systems of childcare.

The Motherlode is an illuminating and in-depth examination of the surprisingly pervasive phenomenon of maternal breadwinning in American society.