Schooling in Crisis: How New York City Families and Organizations Reconfigured K-12 Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

How do organizations and stakeholders handle extreme uncertainty and institutional instability? Using an in-depth study of parental and organizational sensemaking and decision-making from 2020 to 2023, I examine how private educational organizations and parents navigated constant disruptions and changes to the educational field during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City when schools shifted to emergency remote learning. Combining strategic action fields theory (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012), relational inequality theory (Tomaskovic-Devey & Avent-Holt, 2019), and the cultural logic of intensive parenting (Hays, 1998), the study bridges micro-level parenting practices with meso-level organizational strategies and macro-level field transformations. Findings show that the pandemic served as a major exogenous shock that intensified preexisting inequalities and accelerated the privatization of education. When dealing with uncertainty about daily operations, shifting enrollments, and new competitors, elite private schools reinforced their dominance, mid-tier schools experienced divergent paths of adaptation or failure, and lower-cost schools suffered widespread closures. Although the crisis briefly opened space for innovation and new hybrid models, structural, legal, and financial constraints prevented systemic transformation. Given changing policies and concerns about whether school sessions could meet their needs, parents across social classes engaged in constant sensemaking and decision-making to secure their children’s learning, well-being, and stability. Affluent families leveraged their resources to access elite private schools or create alternatives such as pods, microschools, and private tutoring. Meanwhile, working- and middle-class families absorbed institutional breakdowns through intensified caregiving, teaching, and emotional labor; these responsibilities were disproportionately assumed by mothers. The study argues that the pandemic individualized collective risks by shifting public responsibilities for education onto private families and markets, producing a self-reinforcing cycle of inequality. It concludes that the ideology of intensive parenting, combined with the heightened anxiety about children’s future, continues to legitimate privatization and obscure the structural roots of educational inequality. By tracing how social actors navigated uncertainty and reshaped the market, this study also shows how organizations enable inequalities, particularly in markets for complex human services such as education.