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In the introduction to the special issue on school choice in Europe, we explain the purpose of this special issue and summariize the individual articles, stressing the lessons learned from European experience.

We investigate the effect of being in the high track for secondary school students on cognitive and non-cognitive skill outcomes. Dutch students are assigned to tracks at the end of elementary school based on a test score. We use this test score in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to exploit the discontinuity in the probability to be assigned to the high track. Our results show that track placement influences cognitive outcomes positively, but leaves students with worse non-cognitive skills. Marginal students therefore face a tradeoff if they could choose the high track over the lower track.

Language immersion education uses a non-English language for a significant portion of instruction. One goal is to develop bilingual students, which many argue provides cognitive benefits. Using data from school choice lotteries, I estimate the effect of random assignment to a language immersion school on achievement in math and reading. Winning the lottery has a statistically significant positive effect on math scores, and a positive but statistically insignificant effect on reading. Several peer and school characteristics are ruled out as non-language based alternative explanations for the higher math scores of lottery winners.

This study assesses the extent to which public high schools become more or less socially mixed after families are allowed to choose schools outside their designated catchment areas in a mid-sized C...

This paper explores how special educational needs (SEN) and social class can become intertwined in post-primary school choice in Ireland. The paper draws on data generated during a three-year ethnographic study of a DEIS school. Data are analysed using Holland et al.’s (1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press) positional identities, authored selves and figured worlds in order to examine how learner identities and school choice processes can become informed by emergent school cultures being formed and re-formed by neoliberal marketisation of education and how these actions are taken up in the identity work of young people and their families. Soft barriers and their contribution to aspects of school stratification by social class and SEN in this setting are explored. Finally, the paper calls for recognition of the responsibilities of every school to own diversity in their own settings.

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) offers publicly funded vouchers to moderate- and low-income students in low-performing public schools to enroll in participating private schools. Established...

Marketization is the development of quasi-markets on the systemic level, which promote choice, competition, accountability, and devolution in public schooling. Marketing is a strategy that individual school leaders employ to respond to these logics. This paper argues that education marketization has led to an increase in school-based marketing within the Australian public school system. The eight public school principals we report on here, perceived marketing as a key technique in shaping school choice but paradoxically, felt that they shouldn’t have to market to prospective families. In addition, some participants no longer felt like they operated as public schools, but rather, existed somewhere in the “grey zone” between public and private. We use Bateson’s concept of the double bind to argue that marketization is creating a system of performative pressures for public school principals that contradict with their ethical values and beliefs. This double bind is not representative of a simple contradiction of individual conflict, but of school leaders caught up in an ongoing system of marketization that produces conflicting definitions of “publicness” and understanding of what public schools are and ought to be.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is considered the nation’s first private school voucher program and a landmark policy for the contemporary school choice movement. Less well-known is th...

Charter schools are one of the fastest-growing forms of school choice. However, concerns have been raised about the quality of special education provided to students with disabilities. Results of a...

The aim of the article is to use survey evidence of school choice and educational attitudes in Sweden to explore how spatial polarization and liberal school reforms have affected the way parents, p...

Parents around the globe are increasingly understood to contribute to educational inequality through their choice of schools. This important critique risks minimising the way choice systems may fav...

While many school choice studies focus on individual parents’ preferences, we simultaneously address the structural context within which families make decisions and the strategies they develop in r...

This study examines how access to the academic curriculum creates patterns of inequality in Australian schools. Examining students’ access to the academic curriculum gives an indication of how scho...

The University-Model school incorporates private school and homeschool methods within a Christian school experience. Parents receive the title of co-instructors as they partner with teachers in edu...

School choice has been accompanied by an increase in student mobility. Although changing schools can benefit students, mobility is often associated with negative student and school outcomes. This s...

School voucher programs are scholarship initiatives – frequently government funded or incentivized – that pay for students to attend private schools of their choice. This study is the first formal ...

Although there exists a large body of literature concerning the impacts of school choice policies, few studies focus on the choices of rural students. Using a unique dataset that includes administr...

Under neoliberalism, parents as consumers are expected to provide their children with opportunities to get ahead. Governments defend elite schools on the grounds that ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’ are i...

Does school racial composition influence where parents choose to send their children to school? This paper contributes to the literature on school racial composition and parental choice by examinin...

This paper illustrates the influence of a new national assignment system (NSAS) on Chilean middle-class advantage. This system was designed to increase educational equity by changing the previous s...

This paper examines the persistent, growing popularity of Canadian French immersion (FI) programmes. Critics charge that FI programmes are elitist, diverting already limited resources from other ar...

In this paper the authors study 19 Global Middle Class (GMC) families currently residing in four global cities: Hong Kong; London; Buenos Aires; and Tel Aviv. Through qualitative in-depth interviews, they sought to gather insights about GMC parenting strategies, specifically drawing attention to the decision-making processes of school choice. To facilitate their analysis, they draw on Bourdieu’s theory on types of capital and Ben-Porath’s notion of bounded rationality. From the inductive analysis of their interview data with mobile GMC parents, they identified a subtype of cultural capital they called ‘cosmopolitan start-up capital’. The overall argument in the paper is that the accumulation of cosmopolitan start-up capital is a specific strategy guiding the GMC families’ school choice practices, set within a frame of mobilities. Given the growing number of mobile families who continuously enter and exit local education systems, focusing on this group is pertinent for policy makers and practitioners around the world.

In modern times, loyalty to the nation state, particularly a relatively universal nation-state able to assimilate diverse groups like the U.S., what Amy Chua (2018) calls a “super-group,” tended to...

I use the definition of populism as a discursive frame to consider the extent to which the politics of school choice in the United States have been populist. This analysis offers a novel way to und...

In this article, we explore why American populists may be attracted to the educational choice. Though populist factions may support either elitist institutions and policies or institutions and poli...

In 2019, the right-wing Government of Chile was expected to implement a substantial reform regarding student assignment to schools that had been passed by the previous administration (the School In...

This article examines the determinants of private school choice for elementary school students in India with emphasis on school characteristics. We also analyze the gender differences in the demand...

Research has documented the complexity of parent decision-making within school choice marketplaces, including the ways in which individual preferences, social networks, and geography influence wher...

Despite increasing consensus around strengthening school choice regulations to reduce its segregating effects, policy changes and research in this direction are scarce. In that context, this articl...

School choice allows families to choose schools that are more suited to their children. These choices may affect non-academic outcomes, including students’ mental health. We empirically examine the...

What drives parents to decide to send their children to a particular type or stream of schooling over another? Existing literature suggests that parents take several factors into account while maki...

Assessment in education occurs for different purposes – formative, summative, diagnostic, and each with different focus on educational process, education outcomes, and developmental reasons. Resear...

The COVID-19 pandemic forced America’s public schools to close in the latter half of the 2019–20 school year. Schools’ reopening plans vary for 2020–21. We reviewed the reopening plans for all 50 s...

This study examines the effects of school choice on students and public education using the case of the application-based random assignment system prevailing in Seoul, South Korea. I find little ev...

We examine the literature linking private and charter schooling to perceptions of student safety in United States schools. The results are generally positive for student, parent, and principal repo...

This paper analyses, from the perspective of the political sociology of policy instruments, the adoption and re-contextualisation of School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA) reforms in Spain, with a particular focus on the region of Madrid. Over the last few decades, Madrid has adopted a wide range of education policies that have contributed to consolidate a market-oriented approach in the governance of the educational system. This paper analyses the instrumentation and complex interaction between standardised tests, test-based accountability, school choice and school autonomy in advancing this governance shift. The main objective of the paper is twofold: first, to trace the policy trajectory of SAWA reforms in Spain and Madrid, and second, to identify the rationale of the reform and its related policy ontology in relation to the selection and articulation of different policy instruments as well as the governance implications of these choices. Methodologically, we have conducted a policy analysis case study, analysing data from a set of 35 original interviews with education policymakers and key policy actors, combined with document analysis. The results of our research show how the policy preferences of domestic political actors and the legacies of the politico-administrative regimes mediate the final form and uses of the SAWA policy instruments. These policy instruments can be conceptualised as ‘life objects’ whose development and uses are attached to context specific – and sometimes contradictory – political objectives and rationales.

Transportation equity research addresses questions of participation and planning process or the distribution of transportation’s benefits and burdens. This work largely elides issues related to youth and student travel. Existing work on school trip mode choice does not engage deeply with the equity implications of its findings. Education equity researchers identify the abstract notion of choice as equity enhancing but do not engage with the realities of disparate transportation resources and infrastructure. In this review essay, we articulate the contours of transportation equity, youth travel, and school choice research. We use emerging perspectives on “mobility justice” to frame the issues and provide vocabulary that can help bring education and transportation together in planners’ everyday work. A mobility justice framework encourages critical thought and action to address the root causes of inequities. Our conclusions make three contributions to research and practice: 1) challenging school district leaders to think about choice systems designed for access to schools, not just access to information about available options; 2) clarifying the broader implications of school choice by refusing to look away from the racial implications of forecasts; and 3) elucidating the need for a regional perspective.

Access to public charter schools could theoretically reduce school safety problems by increasing competitive pressures, improving matches between schools and students, enhancing discipline policies...

The admission policy for public compulsory schools in China is neighbourhood enrolment which entitles children to attend their assigned local school free of charge, and this policy has been rigorou...

In an article written for The Clearing House in 1974 titled, “Alternative schools: Can they survive?”, Gerald Brunetti described features of schools that served as an alternative to mainstream publ...

A key goal of school choice policies is to generate competition between schools, which should theoretically drive school leaders to improve their programs to attract and retain students. However, f...

Most research on intake focusses on the restrictions parents’ capital cause on their abilities to choose. However, the steering effect of schools in the choice-process has been neglected. We chose the Flemish context to investigate ethnic- and class-discrimination in the enrolment to kindergarten (N = 2243). The Flemish education system is known for its exceptional ‘freedom of choice’ allowing parents to enrol their children into their school of preference without restrictions. Simultaneously, the education system is highly decentralized due to the principle of ‘freedom of education’ that grants high levels of autonomy to schools in creating their school policies. Using correspondence testing, the results show that schools act as gatekeepers using subtle discriminatory strategies to keep students with an underprivileged background out.

This paper uses Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined community’ to argue that how people think about the publicness of their school system provides insight into the functioning and flourishing of communities, societies and nations. We focus on the privatisation of public schooling in Alberta, Canada and Northern England to highlight tensions between the provision of public schooling today and a romanticised, historical imagining of the public school providing equality and emancipation for all. We use data collected from 47 semi-structured interviews of education bureaucrats, union officials, school personnel and advocacy group members that asked about what constitutes ‘publicness’ within their system. Our analysis shows a tension between the realities of public systems opened up through market-oriented policies of ‘autonomous’ provision and stakeholders who still strongly believed in a public school system that was in the service of society, rather than the more individualist orientation of school choice and autonomy imaginaries.

Just ahead of the 2017 U.S. presidential inauguration the Hoover Institute convened a forum to explore policy avenues for privatizing public education. The option favoured by forum moderator and Fo...

Performance information can facilitate user choice of public services and enhance accountability. However, the public sector’s multiple performance dimensions create a potential for order effects on users’ responses to information arising from the sequence of information reporting. We assess order effects using a randomized survey experiment. In a school performance scenario, we find recency effects meaning that information late in a sequence impacts more than the same information placed earlier on. The findings suggest the potential for strategic presentation of information by providers but also a beneficial nudge to help users focus on performance dimensions most salient to them.

This study examines the supply-side decision to participate in interdistrict school choice by incorporating a district’s own characteristics, those of its neighbors and a strategic component based ...

Theory suggests that charter schools may affect neighboring traditional public schools either positively or negatively. Empirical findings are mixed, which may be due to variation in the policy con...

This article introduces a collection of papers comprising the special issue, Competing interests: Parents, Schools and Nation States. Drawing on the seven papers in the collection, and situating th...

Private school voucher programs provide government subsidies to eligible students for tuition and other education-related costs. Parents participating in choice programs benefit from a larger and m...

By case-studying a multi-route school-choice system like that of Hong Kong, this study attempts to investigate the role of district characteristics in student access to school choice under differen...