But middle-class, white parents tend to make assumptions otherwise—and research suggests that those assumptions are the result of racial biases. A recent study in the journal City & Community based on survey data out of eight metropolitan areas in the U.S. suggests that residents—including, presumably, parents—frequently harbor negative associations with the term urban and, by extension, “inner-city” communities and institutions, such as schools. To them, these words may connote scenes of educational dysfunction—rows of decrepit classrooms, for example, each stocked with an overworked teacher and a cluster of indignant teens, almost all of them poor students of color.

By contrast, the study pointed to evidence that the term suburban tends to elicit images of productivity and well-being among white parents. Of course, these stereotypes that white, middle-class parents harbor aren’t simply about population density, but about race, with urban standing in for predominantly black or Latino. A number of studies have shown that white parents tend to select schools with lower proportions of black students, regardless of school quality.

“We know that these terms, which might seem like they are neutral descriptions of physical spaces, are not neutral,” says Shelley Kimelberg, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo who co-authored the study with the Wichita State University sociology professor Chase Billingham. “They reflect people’s lived experiences and the social environment.” According to Kimelberg, the influence an individual’s personal experiences have in shaping how she defines the term urban contributes to a feedback loop, cementing “the idea that urban equals bad school and suburban equals good school.”

Read: The urban-school stigma

In their study, Kimelberg and Billingham analyzed data from a survey of residents in metropolitan areas across the U.S. When controlling for other factors, every one-point increase in whites’ perception of their neighborhood’s school quality was associated with a 15 percent decrease in the odds that they would describe their area as “urban.” The same effect was not evident among people of color.

Jack Schneider, a historian who studies education, has described this as “a gap in perceptions,” pointing as one example to public-opinion polls finding that while parents consistently give high marks to their own neighborhood schools, they also tend to report a lack of confidence in U.S. public education as a whole.