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Advocates often predict that school choice policies will expand access to high-quality schools, particularly for marginalized communities. To interrogate this assumption, we employed a sequential mixed-methods analysis examining the state of charter reform in the District of Columbia. We observed that stakeholders consistently defined equity as uniform processes, evident in data distribution and enrollment practices. We also uncovered persistent disparities in where students live versus learn. We conclude that race-neutral conceptions of equity may hinder attempts to improve school access by ignoring structural inequalities tied to race, place, and income and by overlooking privileged households' efforts to remain separate.

In this interview study, we utilize a theoretical framework that combines Bell's theory of choice sets with DisCrit to explore how parents of students with IEPs (SIEPs) experienced a forced school choice embedded with the 2013 mass school closures in Chicago. We find that a child's disability was a primary factor in parent's choices. Further, all parents in our sample had conceptions of ideal schools, but a child's IEP and other barriers--including safety and transportation--could prevent parents from enrolling their child in an otherwise desired school. In this way a child's IEP could provide access to needed services while also denying families from desired learning environments. These findings point to the ableist nature of school choice and contribute to the growing body of research that questions the theoretical underpinnings of school choice as an education reform strategy.

The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents' perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school choice system in New York City. We find that parents' critique the choice policies and the unfair burdens they place on low-income and immigrant families while engaging in opportunity hoarding to ensure their children's privileged access to the most competitive schools, all while dismissing claims that school choice is meritocratic. Ultimately, advantaged parents' suggest returning to neighborhood zoning which would preserve their access to exclusive, high performing schools and avoid the stress and inequities of school choice policies. This study offers further examples of the powerful influence of contradictory White discourse in the context of education policy and reform.

Departing from mainstream accounts of the post-Katrina New Orleans state takeover and the more recent "unification" of schools under local governance, this case study utilizes the plantation (Hartman, 1997; Woods, 1998, McKittrick, 2011) as a theoretical device and the silenced archive (Trouillot, 2015) as a method of inquiry to better understand why and how a Black public high school was obliterated. Data analysis indicates that despite the takeover and the damning of John McDonogh Senior High, this school was a lynchpin of struggle for democratic public schooling. Additionally, findings suggest that the charter school movement deployed community engagement, an evolving technology, to obliterate a collective vision that fell beyond the parameters of "choice." In closing, the article points to an absence of empirical evidence on the all-charter structure, the ever-present use of the city as a laboratory for restructuring efforts elsewhere, and a pressing need for building and sustaining researchers who are accountable to African American communities in New Orleans.

The linking of school choice and charter schools to the legacy of Black alternative education and civil rights initiatives is a central discursive galvanizing and organizing tool for charter proponents, as it aims to provide legitimacy to the charter movement, while simultaneously coopting Black critiques of the institution of education to advance neoliberal restructurings of the state. In this paper, I posit there exists a conceptual and political distinction between school choice and efforts of Black educational self-determination, an approach to challenge white dominance and supremacy. The paper engages in a historical analysis exploring the history of school choice and Black educational self-determination.

New York City offers an example of the national trend to expand dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs, yet only a small proportion of multilingual learners are enrolled in these programs in city schools. Our examination of new DLBE programs in three city schools builds on research about the "gentrification" of DLBE. Specifically, our findings show how school leaders opened DLBE programs to re-engineer the demographics of their student population by enrolling more White, privileged students in the name of "school turnaround"--namely, to increase enrollment and popularity in a school choice context and improve performance on accountability measures.

This critical ethnography utilizes critical policy analysis and a theoretical understanding of neoliberal racism to examine the practiced reality of school choice in a public, under-resourced, and historically underperforming neighborhood elementary school attended predominantly by Latina/o/x students. Despite improvement initiatives that resulted in performance distinctions, the school under study experienced substantial enrollment decline amidst the poaching of students by charter schools within the attendance zone. Moreover, the competitive school choice market within the school's district resulted in the reshuffling of teachers, reinforcement of neoliberal improvement discourses, and even the exploitation of dual language students to raise the school's market profile. The study provides a unique, up-close representation of marketization in public schools and the residualizing effects that school choice policies can have on public education writ large.

Decades after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling banned mandatory race-based separation of students to different schools, school segregation, and inequality in the United States are rapidly increasing. In this research synthesis, I propose a model for explaining how segregation and inequality are formed in urban and suburban school systems and exacerbated even in the absence of formal segregation policy. The model describes segregation as a component in a triangle of discriminatory education policy processes: segregation, discrimination, and signaling. Connecting these three seemingly distinct policy practices could provide a better explanation for the growing inequality in the U.S. school system.

School choice is expanding, but the majority of students in countries like the United States still attend the school associated with their residential address. We study assignment policies and reassignments of students, where students apply to attend a magnet school or request to transfer to another school within the public school system. Policymakers and researchers have expressed concerns that these type of reassignment programs could increase racial and socioeconomic stratification and cause an imbalance of resources across schools. We provide evidence from the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina. Our focus is on changes in racial and socioeconomic stratification across schools relative to the existing degree of stratification that exists in the district through its assignment via schools' attendance boundaries. The reassignment programs available in this district reduce stratification in terms of race, socioeconomic status, student need, and student ability. To place our results in context, we conduct several simulations to compare the observed changes in stratification to what changes are possible. The effects on stratification are similar to what would be expected if students move between schools without regard to school composition, and the effects are small relative to the largest increases or decreases in stratification that could be expected given the volume of reassignments observed in these data. Thus, the reassignment programs we study do not increase stratification in terms of race, socioeconomic status, or student need/ability, but they also do not reduce stratification to a particularly large degree. Our results speak to school choice programs that can be characterized as controlled choice programs in which the district places constraints on moves between schools.

In this introduction, we outline the scholarly context and research questions that motivate this special issue: In what ways do racialized constructions of school quality open up or foreclose educational opportunity? How do understandings of school quality differ across local social, political, and demographic contexts? And lastly, at what points and in what ways is the school choice process itself racialized? We then introduce the five papers in this issue, each of which challenges us to think critically about taken-for-granted notions of school quality by interrogating factors that influence "choice" beyond the usual paradigm of test scores and parental decision-making.

Families indicate that fit and safety are priorities in school selections. It is not clear, however, whether school racial composition shapes families' perceptions of anticipated school belonging. Using a survey experiment with students and parents actively choosing NYC schools, I find that families expressed racialized judgments of belonging. Among schools that were otherwise similar, respondents anticipated feeling most welcome in schools with the highest proportion of their racial group and least welcome in schools with the lowest portions of their ingroup. Families' race-based assessments of school quality could be a key mechanism to explain racial segregation in school choice programs.

School discipline is a salient challenge in K-12 districts nationwide. The majority of prior studies have focused on suspensions with relatively little attention paid to other forms of exclusionary discipline. This mixed-methods study provides a descriptive analysis of overlooked disciplinary consequences, namely, assignment to alternative schools, expulsions, and referrals to hearing. The findings from the quantitative analysis indicate that possession of drugs, student and staff assault, and weapons-related incidents account for the majority of infractions leading to the most severe forms of exclusionary discipline. Black male students account for the largest proportion of students receiving the harshest exclusionary disciplinary consequences. The findings from the qualitative analysis reveal several challenges that policymakers in urban districts navigate regarding alternative schools, including (a) staffing and the development of professional capacity, (b) the length of the school day, (c) transportation, and (d) the choice between in-district versus third-party operation of alternative schools.

School-choice policies are expected to generate healthy competition between schools, leading to improvements in school quality and better outcomes for students. However, the empirical literature testing this assumption yields mixed findings. This systematic review and meta-analysis tests this theory by synthesizing the empirical literature on the competitive effects of school choice on student achievement. Overall, we found small positive effects of competition on student achievement. We also found some evidence that the type of school-choice policy and student demographics moderated the effects of competition on student achievement. By examining whether school competition improves outcomes, our findings can inform decisions of state and local policymakers who have adopted or are considering adopting school-choice reforms.

Little is known about the school choice practices of Aboriginal families in settler-colonial societies, where they have been removed from their ancestral lands and/or have been subjected to discriminatory educational policies. Through the lens of settler-colonial theory, this study elucidates the "spatially positioned" school choice practices of Aboriginal families in a Canadian city. It explores their desires to choose schools and identifies their sociospatial constraints that result from historical marginalization and racism. It delineates how racial segregation in schools increased, as Aboriginal families' school choice has been limited primarily to low-income, racialized parts of the city that face school closure due to low enrollment. In addition, this article analyzes the exclusion of Aboriginal students from prestigious schools-of-choice programs in the public education system. The study concludes that the neoliberal policy of school choice offers limited options to Aboriginal families, especially given the settler-colonial context of the city where they reside.

School choice research is abundant, but rarely incorporates students' experiences or perspectives. This study investigates a diverse group of students' school choice experiences as they applied to, gained admission to and enrolled in high school in Chicago Public Schools, which offers over 130 options. Adapting Ball and colleagues' (2012) concept of policy actor positionality, we analyzed the role of students' developmental and social statuses in students' school choice experiences. Students' policy encounters were developmentally consistent, but their admissions results and subsequent academic trajectories diverged by their socioeconomic status. We discuss these findings' developmental and equity implications for school choice policy.

School choice has emerged as the linchpin of President Trump's urban education reform plan, but it remains unclear how school choice policies will shape the educational experiences of the most underserved student groups, particularly English learners (ELs). Using quantitative data from one large urban school district, we examine EL participation in a system of school choice. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which never, current, and former ELs enroll in a nonzoned school. We find significant differences in the likelihood that students across these groups engage in school choice, raising important questions about whether school choice reforms are accessible to current ELs.

Multiple studies have shown the potential for school choice policies to benefit middle-class families, often to the detriment of lower income students in the same district. Yet, there is limited research examining the role of policies in promoting inequality by encouraging exclusionary behaviors. In this article, we utilize the concept of opportunity hoarding to analyze the specific policy provisions built into New York City's elementary and high school choice plans that prompt middle-class parents to act in ways that secure advantages for their children. We find that parents' anxiety about scarcity of high-quality educational options combined with the design of the choice policies facilitated pervasive opportunity hoarding that functioned as a collective strategy of class preservation.

This article presents the findings of research focused on schools' responses to competitive environments. Using the Chilean education market as a case study, the article analyzes not only the responses developed by schools in different domains in the face of competitive incentives but also their diversity, as well as motivations, rationalities, and objectives behind these responses. The findings also show how different mediating factors at the school and local levels are essential to any understanding of the capacity of market-oriented policies to alter the behavior of schools and obtain the expected results in terms of equity.

Educational public-private partnerships (EPPP) have been widely implemented in the Philippines, primarily through the Education Service Contracting (ESC) voucher. Yet, the effects of this voucher on privatization of education, school choice, and competition dynamics remain largely understudied. This article addresses this gap through an investigation of families' school choice patterns and schools' logics of action in the Philippines' education. Paradoxically, despite the pro-private sector impetus of the Philippine government and the implementation of the voucher scheme, the privatization of school provision in the Philippines is diminishing, and the schools receiving the voucher are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the poor families to whom the voucher was initially targeted. In parallel, despite its initial equity focus, the voucher has led to different patterns of school choice among families and to an array of responses by schools, both of which have combined to accentuate school segregation and stratification dynamics--between and within schools.

This article uses edvertising as a vehicle through which to examine autonomy and control for key agents in education when market-like reforms are combined with privately led management of schools. We begin by outlining the philosophical foundations of school choice from the perspective of autonomy and control, and then lay out the case of edvertising. Guided by Cribb and Gewirtz's theoretical discussion of autonomy and control, we explore degrees and types of autonomy and control for various agents in schools. We then examine the differences between levels of autonomy for key agents--schools, principals, teachers, parents, and the State--as idealized in the philosophical underpinning of market-based policies with the actual autonomy exhibited with the introduction of edvertising.

We examine the role of ideas in the politics of school choice policy and situate our study within scholarship that understands frames and logics as types of ideas operating in the foreground and background of policy debates. Our data are from a case study of political contention over portfolio management reform (in which a central office oversees a network of schools operating under varying forms of governance) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We find that frames and counterframes deployed by stakeholders are resonant with societal-level logics of community localism, market transaction, and state bureaucratic administration. For proponents of portfolio reform, diagnostic frames are drawn from logics of community and state, while prognostic frames are resonant with a market logic. For opponents, the association is flipped: diagnostic counterframes challenge a market logic, and logics of community and state inform prognostic counterframes. Our study demonstrates how ideational processes shape political contention in education reform.

This paper on the political sociology of school choice policies has been written as a supplement to the essays in the 2020 Politics of Education Association Yearbook and locates them in cognate literatures. In addition, the papers are situated against the changing political and global contexts of such policies, as global pressures, discourses, and policyscapes have been recently challenged to some extent by the rise of new nationalisms and ethno-nationalism in many nations across the globe. School choice policies are linked with practices of marketization, privatization, and commercialization and some conceptual clarification is proffered. Policy is defined as referring to processes, framing discourses, and specific texts. Statecraft (logics and working of the state) has been reconstituted by these changes, with one important often over-looked element of this craft being scalecraft (work creating the scales of policies), that is, policy work on constituting local, national, regional, and global relationships and scales.

This study treats Indiana (2010-2018) as a case in which to examine media-based coverage, deliberation, and ethical and empirical framings as school choice reforms were being taken up and as they evolved and accelerated. Within this time-frame, Indiana transformed into a leading state in school choice reforms. Both repetitive and shifting justifications were noted, with these patterning roughly into three main phases. Arguments were much more frequently ideological than empirical in nature, and advocates generally (and especially in the first two phases) were observed as holding the upper hand, successfully using the media to frame the debate using their terms.

Drawing on interviews with 88 middle school counselors tasked with implementing New York City's high school choice policy, we show that counselors largely question the policy's legitimacy and the equity of the high school assignments it produces. By highlighting issues of transparency and procedural fairness that threaten counselors' acceptance of school choice policy, we offer lessons for policymakers and practitioners about how policy design and communication affect policy legitimacy and, as a result, implementation.

Sociological research on school choice has mostly been dominated by studies analyzing the experiences of middle-class families rather than marginalized or minority populations. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic case study research, this article explores the school choice experiences of disadvantaged families accessing publicly subsidized low-fee private schools (S-LFPSs) in Buenos Aires. We built a bounded-rationality framework to understand how disadvantaged families deal with structural constraints and negotiate their preferences to produce different, but predominantly reflexive rationalities of school preferences. In detailing our findings, we intend to provide "a realistic look at the cognitive and social processes of choice making" while addressing the equity implications of these dynamics--that is, whether S-LFPSs increase educational opportunities for students in economically disadvantaged areas or not--and problematizing the gaps, ambiguities, and enforcement shortcomings of the public subsidy for private schools' policy.

I introduce the concept of parental accountability by examining how parents understand and cope with what I characterize are pressures fostered by the long-standing public-school choice market in Arizona. Parental accountability refers to the sensemaking, experiences, and consequences that are related to decision-making in a school choice environment, wherein parents' feelings about their child's schooling may be intense, emotionally stressful, malleable, cyclical, and ongoing--not static. I argue that parental accountability is a necessary concept for understanding these reforms. The analysis, based on data collected from a study using ethnographic methods, reveals contradictions between parents' perceptions of their responsibilities to public institutions and pressures to make private choices. Many parents acknowledged that socioeconomic and racial inequities may be exacerbated in some market-based, public-school choice systems. I show how school choice policies and programs can place unique pressure on parents that they experience as a distinct form of accountability.

Various sociological perspectives have been applied to facilitate school choice research over the past two decades, as showcased in this "2020 Yearbook of Politics of Education Association." Among them, Pierre Bourdieu's concepts and theories stand out as a catalyst for the field's sociological development. My first objective in this article is, thus, to assess the contributions of Bourdieu's sociological theory to school choice scholarship to date. I review the established and emerging research studies to highlight the significance of Bourdieu's conceptual system in illuminating the social dynamics of school choice. My second objective in this article is to discuss how Bourdieu's geographical concerns and concepts have been underutilized in the field. Ultimately, I argue that Bourdieu's sociospatial concepts can unlock new areas of research and politics by elucidating why and how school choice functions as a mechanism that accentuates social inequality, which is reproduced geographically.

This article examines parent engagement in a Los Angeles portfolio district reform. Based on data from a 3-year study, we use the lens of democratic theory to examine the design and implementation of mechanisms seeking parent input in the selection of plans to operate low-performing and new schools. We find that despite significant efforts to move toward a more deliberative model over time, the process remained primarily interest-based in most cases, due in large part to structural constraints, limited access to information, and mistrust. The article concludes with implications for policy, practice, and research.

The economic logic of urban school reform holds that giving parents school choice options in an educational marketplace will lead to systemic improvements that will both resolve historical inequalities in American public schooling and will politically empower parents and urban communities. This article explores the economic logic of urban school reform policies that conceptualize parents as rational consumers of educational services and that seek normative justification for school choice as a mechanism to resolve educational inequalities and as a form of political empowerment. We do so through a qualitative research synthesis of five studies investigating the lived experiences of predominantly working-class parents of color as they navigate urban school choice. The findings from this synthesis suggest that the economic logic at work in the new politics of education obfuscates the complexity of the lived experiences of parents in urban communities. Parents hold nuanced views of urban school choice that reflect their positionality, report a limited or circumscribed form of empowerment, and express a preference for equitable learning opportunities in their locally zoned public schools.

We consider situations in which public charter school lotteries are neither universally conducted nor consistently documented. Such lotteries produce "broken" Randomized Control Trials, but provide opportunities to assess the internal validity of quasi-experimental research designs. Here, we present the results of a statewide charter school evaluation using a broad-based student matching evaluation design, and run two additional analyses using the charter application waitlists as robustness checks. Our additional models, which address concerns of self-selection by using only charter applicants as matched comparison students, yield similar effect estimates and thus provide support for the use of matching designs in charter school evaluations.

This article problematizes the lottery as a taken-for-granted concept, which is normatively understood as a neutral process rewarding its participant based on luck. The article adopts a policy problematization frame that interrogates the limits of normative concepts. To problematize the lottery system, this article engages with the two movies on school choice, "The Lottery" and "Waiting for 'Superman'", as "instances" through the conceptual lens of a quasi-market. The main argument is that the lottery is a particular discursive practice co-constituting the competitive frame of education quasi-markets. In identifying how the spirit of competitiveness underlies a competition, and by extension the lottery system, the article posits that in a competitive setting, competitors are primarily concerned with maximizing inequality among each other.

Gentrification and the displacement of low-income residents of color from neighborhoods where they have long resided has accelerated over the last 20 years. In some cities, this process has begun to impact school demographics. Although research shows that school districts experiencing gentrification are responding in ways that fuel segregation and inequality, in some contexts gentrification is viewed by administrators as an opportunity to seek racial and economic integration. In our exploratory comparative case study, we examined districts in gentrifying cities pursuing integration in the face of rapid gentrification. Our critical policy analysis illustrates how district leaders' diversity efforts can be overshadowed by their desire to appease and attract gentrifying families. Although districts are maintaining or increasing diversity in gentrifying contexts, our study raises broader equity questions that call for further inquiry of within-district equity and the displacement of students.

A growing body of research examines the role of elite networks, power, and race in the advocacy for market-based reforms and their ultimate effects on students, teachers, and communities of color. Yet, less research explores how such reforms interact with gender in the workplace, especially how policies such as school choice, competition, and incentive-based pay impact female actors within K-12 schools (e.g., teachers, school leaders). The current research on marketization and privatization in education has largely overlooked the potential impact on women in schools. We review the literature on women in K-12 education and in the economy more generally, and organize it conceptually to identify areas for future inquiry. After synthesizing and summarizing themes across diverse bodies of literature, we contend that as schools privatize, we may see greater gender disparities in education leadership and teaching.

Desegregated schools are linked to educational and social advantages whereas myriad harms are connected to segregated schools, yet the emphasis on school desegregation has recently receded in two North Carolina city-suburban school districts historically touted for their far-reaching efforts: Charlotte and Raleigh. In this article, we use cross-case analysis to explore segregation outcomes associated with policy changes by analyzing enrollment and segregation trends from 1989 to 2010 in metro Charlotte and metro Raleigh. Both Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County school systems are experiencing a growing share of intensely segregated schools, decreasing exposure of Black and Latino students to White students, disproportionately large exposure of Black and Latino students to poor students, and an increase in segregated charters. Segregation in the districts surrounding Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County is less extreme. An understanding of how policies have contributed to segregation patterns in both metros informs future education reform efforts.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election marked a time of deep political divide for the nation and resulted in an administrative transition that represented a drastic shift in values and opinions on several matters, including immigration. This article explores the implications of this political transition for immigrants' K-16 educational experiences during President Trump's administration. We revisit literature on school choice and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)--two policy areas where the most significant changes are expected to occur--as it pertains to immigrant students in the United States. We identify areas where there is limited scholarship, such as the unique educational experiences of various minority immigrant subgroups, the interplay between race and immigration status, and immigrant students in rural areas. Recommendations are made for policy and research.

This article examines how student movements between traditional public schools (TPSs) and charters--both brick and mortar and cyber--may be associated with both racial isolation and poverty concentration. Using student-level data from the universe of Pennsylvania public schools, this study builds upon previous research by specifically examining student transfers into charter schools, disaggregating findings by geography. We find that, on average, the transfers of African American and Latino students from TPSs to charter schools were segregative. White students transferring within urban areas transferred to more racially segregated schools. Students from all three racial groups attended urban charters with lower poverty concentration.

Given the increasingly global nature of marketized school choice policies, this makes it even more crucial to investigate how the multiple scales, forms, and emphases of school choice in different countries are influenced by particular political, economic, and cultural conditions. While much of the critical research on school choice policies has focused on examining the complex processes of school choice in the education market in Western contexts, this essay review of "School Choice in China" applies Bourdieu's concepts of capital and conversion strategies to demonstrate the practices of market-based parental choice in China.The essay highlights the importance of the recontextualization of school choice within the Chinese historical, political, economic, and social landscape in order to better understand how choice policy is interpreted differently in the Chinese context. Such historical and social specificities include, but are not limited to, the Chinese government's insufficient investment in education, the existing key school system, and significant social class changes in contemporary China.

In this article, we examine the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as an example of a unique node within larger policy networks composed of new policy entrepreneurs (e.g., venture philanthropists, think tanks, private "edubusinesses" and their lobbyists, advocacy organizations, and social entrepreneurs). These new policy networks, through an array of new modalities of governance and political and discursive strategies, have come to exert an impressive level of influence on public policy in the last 30 years in the United States. We describe and analyze several model education bills that ALEC has promoted and describe the political and discursive strategies ALEC employs. We found that these strategies, which are employed by corporate leaders and largely Republican legislators, are aimed at a strategic alliance of neoliberal, neoconservative, libertarian, and liberal constituencies with the goal of privatizing and marketizing public education.

Interdistrict open enrollment is the nation's largest and most widespread school choice program, but our knowledge of these programs is limited. Drawing on 5 years of student-level data from the universe of public school attendees in Colorado, we perform a three-stage analysis to examine the dynamics of student participation in the state's interdistrict open enrollment program. First, we explore the characteristics of students who open enroll in a defined baseline year. Second, we analyze the characteristics of students who continue to participate in the program in subsequent years. Finally, we examine the characteristics of students who--conditional on not open enrolling in the defined-baseline year--choose to participate in the program in one or more subsequent years.

As charter schools continue to attract lots of political and policy attention, research has emerged suggesting that these schools enroll fewer students with disabilities than public schools. Given that the success of the movement is based on charters being more effective than public schools as determined by test scores, it is not entirely surprising that we see exclusionary practices taking place. Responding to this issue, many states have increased oversight to ensure inclusion and equity. At the same time, other charters have opened specifically for students with special needs. Using a disability studies lens, this article asks questions of the charter movement and the policy responses by problematizing the perpetuation of both normative school practices and constructions of ability.

The rise in the influence of and spending by educational philanthropists and foundations over the past two decades, especially in the area of market-based reforms, such as charter schools, vouchers, and merit pay, is evident across the United States. Largely due to philanthropic investments, relatively new educational intermediary organizations (IOs) have also been growing in size, scope, and influence. These new IOs have sought to implement market-based reforms in key urban school districts, frequently based on ideological stances and/or evidence of their efficacy. As yet, researchers have not conceptualized the unique position of foundations in the landscape of intermediary organizations, market-based reforms, and evidence production and utilization. Drawing from a 3-year (2011-2014) study of IOs, research utilization, and policymaking in the case of "incentivist" reforms, we find that foundations are uniquely situated in the reform landscape as a central actor, at the "hub" of intermediary activity as a funder of IOs, but also as a "spoke" in the wheel that helps to mobilize and, in many ways, direct the activities of the IOs. We discuss the implications of the role of foundations in research production, promotion, and utilization for research and policymaking.

This article contributes to the analysis of the global spread of support for school choice and to the understanding of how a particular form of policy development reflects and cements this support. It maps the growing dominance of school choice within a reconfiguration of politics, policy making, and research. To establish the nature of this reconfiguration, a comparison is made between the Karmel Review, which established systematic federal government intervention in Australian schooling, and the Gonski Review. The analysis traces a move away from a social-democratic model built around an autonomous and representative government authority in which educational research was broadly writ, to a neoliberal model under direct government control, drawing selectively on a cast of corporate consultants and technocrats. I conclude with a consideration of the wider implications of the dominance of school choice as a paradigm for funding reform.

This article begins to unpack the complex effects of the policies of both the small schools and choice on students with special needs. Drawing on qualitative data collected throughout the 2008-2009 academic year and a range of quantitative data from New York City's public high schools, the author shows that while small schools and choice are intended to expand schooling options for all, students with special needs often find that when entering the public high school choice process, their selection set is narrowed. For families of students with special needs, the lack of adequate special needs resources can preclude schools from being considered as viable options. In addition, schools of choice engage in practices to deter higher need students from applying. The combined influences of parent decision and school choice processes result in between-school sorting, with larger institutions receiving the bulk of the higher need population of students, which is reflected in the city's enrollment data. The findings raise questions about not only the effects of the small school reforms, but also about the role of choice policies in the public educational system. (Contains 4 notes, 2 figures, and 2 tables.)

This article investigates how Michigan's charter school policy influences the composition of students by race and socioeconomic status in urban traditional public schools. Using 2 years of student-level data in Michigan' urban elementary and middle schools, the dynamic student transfers between charter schools and TPSs are analyzed through a series of hierarchical generalized linear models. The two-way transfer analysis shows that the student sorting under the charter school program tends to intensify the isolation of disadvantaged students in less effective urban schools serving a high concentration of similarly disadvantaged students. The findings imply that a challenge for the state policy makers is to help disadvantaged students who are left behind in the most disadvantaged schools, without significantly reducing the benefits to students who take advantage of school choice. (Contains 5 tables and 4 notes.)

Using a theoretical lens of democratic education, this study critically analyzes pilot schools in the Boston Public School system, a school model gaining influence and imitation around the United States. Building on theories regarding the role of democracy in schools, and especially workplace democracy, this article juxtaposes these conceptions of democracy with competing economic theories of marketization, privatization, antiunionism, and individualism, here referred to as neoliberalism, and analyzes the political terrain onto which pilot schools emerged, are debated, and understood. The Boston Teachers Union first conceptualized, and bargained for, pilot schools in the early 1990s. However, the union has since come under criticism from influential individuals and groups for resisting or slowing the expansion of this reform. This study examines the proposition that more pilot schools should be created and argues that insufficient evidence exists to warrant the current outcry for pilot school expansion. (Contains 20 notes.)

The documentary "Waiting for Superman" has become one of those rare things, a (supposed) documentary that generates a wider audience. It also is one of the more recent embodiments of what Nancy Fraser (1989) labels as the "politics of needs and needs discourses." Dominant groups listen carefully to the language and issues that come from below. They then creatively appropriate the language and issues in such a way that very real problems expressed by multiple movements are reinterpreted through the use of powerful groups' understandings of the social world and of how we are to solve "our" problems. This is exactly what is happening in education; and it is exactly what this film tries to accomplish. We critically examine the arguments and assumptions that the film makes, as well as how it makes them. In the process, we demonstrate how it elides crucial questions, contradicts many of its own claims, and acts to close off the kinds of substantive discussions that are essential for serious educational reforms.

Research has shown for decades that early childhood education contributes to long term increases in student achievement for all children, but what is motivating the current movement toward universal Pre-k? This study used a content analysis of five major print media sources to explore how the media is framing the public pre-K movement.We looked for the issues or constituencies that are pushing the movement and how the movement is being framed in the media and sold to the public. We framed our findings within Edelman's theory of political spectacle, which attributes policy formation to the active and deliberate creation of dramatic spectacle by a power elite in order to sell policy to the public (Edelman, 1988). We found that a substantial number of examples of the use of rhetorical patterns and symbolic representations consistent with political spectacle in both political statements quoted in the media and media language. We conclude with a discussion of the disconnect between the political spectacle and current policy in universal pre-K.

Scholars have recently explored the relationship between local democracy and education from two distinct perspectives. The first views local democracy as inherently good and offers suggestions for deepening the practice of democracy. The second perspective questions the merits of local democratic control of schools. Contributors to this perspective have focused on tensions between democratic governance and the pursuit of improved student outcomes. This essay assesses recent reform strategies and their implications for democratic practice. Emphasis is placed on how policy design might simultaneously support both the deepening of democracy and improved student outcomes. (Contains 21 notes.)

A number of school choice advocates claim that there is a research consensus indicating that vouchers for private schools lead to higher academic achievement. The authors review and critique these local studies of voucher programs, contrasting them with findings from larger-scale analyses of nationally representative samples of public and private schools, which illuminate patterns that appear to undercut the assumption of superior private school performance that is a premise of voucher programs. The authors note limitations inherent in different methodological approaches to this question, focusing on the shortcomings of randomization as an exclusive "gold standard" for research on the issue of achievement in school choice plans. The concluding discussion reconsiders the question of a consensus, highlighting the emerging research environment that bypasses traditional review processes and emphasizes instead the promotion of ideas to support policy agendas. (Contains 23 notes.)

Although theorists and policy makers agree that schooling should be democratic, what this exactly means often varies. This article establishes a conceptual model for analyzing education policy in democratic societies, based on the key concepts of equality, diversity, participation, choice, and cohesion. The model facilitates the design, evaluation, comparison, and analysis of education policy in democratic societies. It also facilitates analysis of the interrelationship of the five concepts and the ways in which they both complement and conflict with each other. By providing an integrated view of the five democratic values, the model can help policy makers and analysts balance competing demands on education policy. Finally, the model improves understanding of the ways in which educational systems continually adjust to changing theory and economic, political, and social forces, and therefore, it has the potential to help explain and predict educational change. (Contains 1 figure.)