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In this article, the author explores the impacts of Wisconsin’s public school Open Enrollment (OE) program. The article uses data from 2013 to 2022 to explain the factors driving in- and out-migration of students under OE, and the impact of OE flows on district-level achievement. The results indicate students are more likely to leave districts with higher percentages of minority pupils, and more likely to enter districts with higher achievement indicators and higher per-pupil funding. There is no evidence that in-flows of students under OE impact district-level achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study offers a comparative examination of desegregation policy reforms in Belgium, Chile, and the Netherlands, addressing equity reforms to universal school choice systems. Through an analysis of the reform trajectories, we explore the evolution of policies, the causal mechanisms of change, efforts to institutionalize policies, and the sources of resistance to reform. We then undertake a cross-national comparison to discern trends and confirm or disconfirm theorized causes. Policy strategies from each context included nondiscrimination policies, fiscal incentives, and eventually reform of admissions procedures. Causal mechanisms facilitating equity reforms included shifts in political context, grassroots mobilization, generated focusing events through scholarly work and reports of civil society and transnational actors, and effective framing. Oppositional forces from non-state school networks and middle-class/white parents emerged in each context, affecting reform design and the path to institutionalization, but were unable to block reforms. The resulting reforms in each context were the products of compromise that retreated from deeper structural changes, likely mitigating the effects of reforms on school-based segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of ideologically driven inquiry and advocacy, debates about school choice and public-private-partnerships in education have produced more "light than heat." Although scholars have recently emphasized the need for a greater focus on the particulars of policy design, limitations of existing frameworks have inhibited rigorous policy research capable of enhancing understanding of the effects of different policy designs, particularly when considering cross-national and comparative experiences. This article critically analyzes a set of prominent frameworks from the field before proposing a new Framework for Comparative Educational Pluralism that could inform a more design-sensitive and evidence-rooted approach to policy analysis and design pertaining to the role of non-state actors in education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational success is central to the life chances of young people, but increasing differences in student achievement between schools are commonly attributed to increasing school segregation. The aim of the study was to examine the trends in socioeconomic, ethnic, and academic segregation in compulsory and upper secondary education in the Gothenburg school market between 1998 and 2020. Utilizing register data from the Gothenburg Longitudinal Database (n = 1 662 166), the study showed that school segregation intensified over time and across education levels, particularly in the Gothenburg municipality and upper secondary education. The geography of upper secondary education becomes more clustered after stricter upper secondary qualifications are implemented. These findings are discussed in relation to the Swedish school reforms that resulted in the materialization and expansion of the school market with a significant increase in school provisions, leading to the (re-)production of unjust geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides empirical insights into the perceptions and agency of navigators who provide school selection assistance and this NGO’s unique insider–outsider status. As semi-private actors, navigators offer an important bridge between two kinds of social capital: the informal types of trust and legitimacy that families rely on, and the skills, knowledge, and networks necessary to access higher-quality schools in choice policy contexts. Data for this study are derived from an exploratory case study, including 13 in-depth interviews, documentary and social media analysis, and informal conversations. The findings illustrate the benefits and shortcomings of NGO information support in choice policy contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The School Admission System (SAE, the Spanish acronym for “Sistema de Admisión Escolar”) was recently implemented in Chile to mitigate the market logic in school admission. This system represents a drastic change in how families select schools. The following study analyzes the relationship between the sociodemographic characteristics of parents, their consumption of information, and their attitudes toward the SAE. A latent class analysis and a multinomial logistic regression model used data from a survey administered to parents. Three attitudes toward the SAE were identified: positive, neutral, and hostile; those attitudes have been influenced by several factors, including region of residence, socioeconomic group, and the quantity and objectivity of consumed information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Black parents' school choice, particularly through homeschooling, intersects with the racialized educational terrain. Challenging the view of homeschooling as solely market-driven, the literature review emphasizes race, class, and gender's roles in this decision-making. Unlike Averett and Stewart, who focus on gendered and racial dynamics in school choice, this study proposes Diamond's racialized educational terrain and Cooper's motherwork as frameworks to understand Black homeschooling. This paper aims to shift theoretical perspectives on Black homeschooling, advocating for a more nuanced, intersectional approach to studying school choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private school choice programs are publicly-funded programs that provide families with funding to attend a private school of their choice. Since 2021, 15 states have enacted or expanded choice legislation, even making homeschoolers eligible to participate. However, homeschoolers are often reluctant to participate due to proposed regulations. We survey a national sample of hybrid school leaders, a sector that shares similarities with homeschoolers in modality, and randomly assign hypothetical regulations to them. We find that 65% are willing to encourage participation in the absence of regulations, but regulations reduce leaders' willingness to encourage participation by about 31 points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite upwards of 100,000 gifted students possibly being educated at home, research regarding this population is limited. The literature on gifted homeschooling includes topics such as motivations for homeschooling, modalities of instruction, and student achievement and social-emotional wellness. Recommendations for expanding the literature and providing better insight into these students' experiences include determining the demographics of gifted homeschool students, surveying methods and costs of instruction, and measuring educational outcomes. It is imperative to collect and make this information publicly available, and to prioritize research on this population. Doing so will ensure that policy better serves the needs of these unique learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on school choice within the public school system in Queensland, Australia. While school choice has typically been framed as a logic of economic rationalism (for middle-class families), in this paper we use Ahmed's concept of the cultural politics of emotion to describe a more complex dimension of choice through gendered community. We argue that mothers become responsibilized for school choice, and in the process become emotionally invested in school choosing. In managing their soft bodily desires and hard cognitive rationalities, they are responding to the emotional histories that stick to schools. The problem we frame through our empirical case is that there is a clash of cultures between the type of school mothers desire, and the reality of what schools are, and could ever be. This is the double-bind or 'cruel optimism' of mothering school-aged children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central part of the private school choice coalition in the U.S. has been the participation of Catholic school stakeholders. The purpose of this article is to examine how Catholic school advocacy became linked to private school choice advocacy by highlighting the institutional and organizational crises facing Catholic elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. that led to sector-wide policy responses favoring choice. However, through an analysis of emerging trends in private school choice policy implementation, this paper raises questions about the efficacy of continued advocacy for private school choice policy within the Catholic sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the pandemic, a number of states instituted hold-harmless funding policies to protect school district financially from declining enrollments. In addition, some school choice policies have protected traditional public schools financially from declining enrollments. Together, these policies raise the question of whether competitive effects can exist in a policy environment of reduced financial pressure. Theoretically, despite the lack of financial pressure, schools could feel competitive pressure in other ways including a loss of reputation as students move to schools of choice. To provide insights on whether schools can improve without the threat of financial loss, we examine the Seoul school choice program which introduced autonomous private high schools (APHSs) in the context in which there is equalized funding across schools. More specifically, we examine whether competition induced by APHSs affects the achievement of students attending traditional public and private schools. The effect of APHSs is identified by exploiting plausible exogenous APHSs' entry through the random assignment of students. We find a small and positive effect of APHS penetration on the Korean and English achievement of private school students while finding no effects for traditional public schools, which have limited ability to respond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of state laws creating private school vouchers and charter schools has mounting and alarming ramifications for students' rights, and those ramifications are shaped by a complex and shifting set of legal rules. This article explains the interplay between the increase of these school-choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court's recent free-exercise decisions, long-standing antidiscrimination laws, and the now-tenuous applicability of those legal protections for choice students. It concludes by considering the political ramifications of these changes, which will likely be very different in "blue" and "red" states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the extent to which school choice in the Toronto Catholic District School Board impacts equity and segregation. This examination is important because full public funding for the Board should adhere to the goals of public education, namely, equity and inclusion of all students. A critical policy geography perspective is applied to illuminate the dynamics of school choice as a neoliberal reform in the context of a global city where residential polarization and occupational bifurcation along racialized social class lines have intensified. Guided by critical space analysis, this research uses student enrollment data (Grades 9–12), Canadian Census data, school website information, and secondary literature. The findings suggest that school choice increases spatial inequity by giving those who are already socially and racially advantaged easier access to prestigious academic programs of choice. School segregation according to students' economic backgrounds thereby increases. This study calls for implementing sociospatially conscious education policies that can undo rather than reinforce global city inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue offers a critical opportunity to reflect on an enduring question in education: Should religious schools be state-funded? To facilitate this reflection, this issue offers six studies from Canada, Spain, and the United States. Each delves into the unique relationships between state-funded schooling and religion in their respective contexts. In particular, these studies examine how the relationships have shifted due to numerous factors, including changing legal rulings, political ideology, demographic shifts, global migration, and education privatization. The authors carefully integrate (and interrogate) the histories and places where they conducted their analyses. Taken together, these studies offer invaluable and timely insights into the intended and unintended consequences of state funding that expands school choice, marketization, and privatization, particularly with respect to religion. This issue thus aims to inform the ongoing debate about the (potential) impact that publicly funding religious schools has on equity, segregation, and discrimination. Ultimately, we hope this issue highlights the importance of a nonsectarian approach to public education so as to create an inclusive education space wherein all human identities are welcomed and affirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies investigating how the school choice paradigm shapes school segregation have found that students' ethnic school preferences drive school segregation by leading students to rank and change current schools following ethnic homophily orientations. This study investigates an intermediate moment in which these preferences contribute to the exacerbation of school segregation: students changing schools after being allocated to following admission rules but before the start of the academic year. We refer to these changes as micro-changes. Using Swedish register data on 9th-grade students applying to upper secondary education in Stockholm schools, this study evaluates how micro-changes affect school segregation. Our findings reveal that micro-changes are not neutral and increase school segregation levels because (1) students tend to reject of schools with a low share of in-group members and low representation of 9th-grade classmates, and (2) micro-changers move into schools with a high share of in-group members and 9th-grade classmates. Furthermore, our simulation model shows that micro-changes impact on school segregation have a cumulative effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to complexify the linguistic dimension of international schooling in light of the increasing diversification of the field but also as a result of the 'banalisation' of English and the growing 'added' value of multilingual competence in the knowledge economy. Drawing on data from focus groups with mobile families and institutional documents from an international school in Switzerland, we claim that the value of English-medium education to facilitate worldwide mobility is simultaneously conceived by parents as an obstacle for their children's acquisition of certain linguistic capitals in the locality. This engenders constant family (re-)evaluations of school choice and the development of strategies for children to acquire locally-available linguistic competences. The Swiss context activates the multilingual imagination of global middle-class families who demand that the school help their children maximise their chances of local linguistic capitalisation. In our case study, the current educational shift responds to parental desires for elite multilingualism with French and materialises in an optional dual-language programme to attract an increasing number of Swiss and established transnational families in a competitive eduscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people's room for autonomy and independent life choices is challenged by intensive parenting practices and ambiguous ideals underpinning the youth-parent relationship. In this article, we explore how young people make sense of and relate to parental influence as they are about to make choices of higher education. Through Foucauldian discourse analyses of interviews with 23 young men and women (19 years) in Oslo, Norway, this study sheds light on how the youth reconciled ideals of self-expression and self-determination with perceived parental influence. We demonstrate how their 'autonomous self' is portrayed as 'accountable' and 'malleable', to allow for parent's influence through their subject positions as 'advisor' and 'socialising agent'. These subject positions overlap with discourses of intensive parenting previously described as disciplining the modern parent. We discuss whether youth contribute to the cultivation of 'the intensive parent', and the potential the ideal of autonomy holds for conformity to normalizing powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study used a capability approach to investigate Saudi women's empowerment experiences and their capabilities in decision-making regarding choosing their university majors. Further, the study explored what capabilities women required to make decisions regarding their majors at university. Qualitative data were collected through interviews with 26 women, comprising graduates, students, and faculty members. Results revealed that new legislation and regulations in Saudi Arabia have positively influenced sociocultural transformation. However, in small cities and nonurban settings, women may struggle to reject traditional social norms despite their empowerment. The findings indicate that encouraging students' voluntary work and their membership in groups and organisations, as well as ensuring diverse hiring practices are in place in rural areas and small cities, could support a more general acceptance of women's empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the performative meritocracy of Singapore where academic achievement is seen as the key to success in the society, vocational education is seen as inferior in the education system. This paper examines the educational experiences of vocational youths who went through the Institute of Technical Education (ITE), an institution that is often not seen as a school of choice. We investigate the life and educational experiences of ITE graduates examining interview data collected through the Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM), which elicit lived experiences in narrative form. Through studying the graduates' biographical learning narratives, we explore the opportunities and challenges to human flourishing. This study has implications for enhancing the ecology of learning as well as VET standing in Singapore and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home-school transport is an expensive component within many education systems, and is particularly costly in countries where school choice is encouraged. Within divided societies like Northern Ireland, a combination of school choice, academic selection and a divided society results in educational divisions which pose an even larger problem for the provision of home-school travel. This paper uses a Geographical Information System to analyse and quantify the additional costs of home-school transport in Northern Ireland. The additional travel undertaken in a complex educational structure is calculated and the pressing economic and environmental costs are estimated, alongside the less easily quantified social impact. The impact is considerable on all of these measures, strengthening the case for a radical review of educational provision in Northern Ireland. Removing duplication and reducing unnecessary choice would produce a more efficient and less costly system of education, while also contributing to increased social cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many parents use social media to gather word-of-mouth regarding schools’ performance, subsequently influencing their school choice decisions. Yet, it’s unclear how well online opinions reflect schools’ actual academic performance. To address this gap, this study uses machine learning to examine whether the online evaluations of students’ learning can match schools’ test scores and their improvements. Findings indicate that while online evaluations don’t perfectly align with test scores, the association between online word-of-mouth and test scores remains stronger than that of test score gains. Consequently, online word-of-mouth tends to recommend schools with higher test scores over higher value-added scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charter schools can serve as “laboratories of innovation,” generating evidence about effective educational practices via their random admissions lotteries. This paper synthesizes findings from charter school lottery-based studies and identifies future research priorities. Evidence shows charter schools can boost academic achievement and long-term outcomes, especially for lower-performing, nonwhite, low-income students and those with disabilities. However, these findings are limited to oversubscribed schools in urban areas. Future research should expand geographic coverage, update K-12 academic outcomes, and explore non-test-score outcomes, college, and earnings. Addressing these areas would strengthen evidence and inform education policymaking in the charter sector and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores information gathering work undertaken by immigrant parents before choosing their children’s high school in Montreal. Rooted in an interpretive sociology, it explores the experiences, challenges, and specific needs as they gather information and their agency and proactiveness to mitigate feelings of ignorance and lack of referents by leveraging their skills, advantages, or privileges. It also examines similarities in participants’ experience and variations explained by reconfigured academic capital and/or acquired local social capital and pathways in the host society. By focusing on a seldom-studied category in information gathering work, this article sheds light on experiences as yet rarely explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While middle-class professionals have historically supported progressive education ideals, it has been argued that this group often fails to practice what they preach, focusing instead on securing advantages for their children. Nevertheless, progressive education remains a resilient phenomenon and appears to be gaining traction. This study explores the motivations of 35 white middle-class parents in Ghent, Belgium, who chose a public, ethnically mixed progressive school for their children. The results suggest that such a choice should not be interpreted as a parental attempt to find an alternative to traditional success-driven education but rather as an alternative way to achieve success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sizeable literature – spanning education, sociology and economics – has investigated the issue of parental school preferences and school choice. A notable gap in the existing evidence base is an exploration of how such preferences differ between mothers and fathers. We present new cross-national findings on this matter, drawing on survey data collected from more than 300,000 parents across 25 countries. Our findings suggest that mothers rate the school environment – whether the school is safe and has a pleasant atmosphere – to be more important than fathers. Differences are also observed with respect to the school's reputation and whether it has a high level of achievement. Clearer evidence of such differences emerges for industrialised Western nations than for countries that are not members of the OECD. In most countries, mothers' and fathers' preferences do not vary substantially between sons and daughters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, the Chilean Ministry of Education implemented the new School Admission System (SAS) designed with the goal of equalizing access to schools for the most disadvantaged families and reduce educational segregation. Yet it is not clear if the SAS is sensitive to socio-cultural minorities and their particular conditions. Hence, in this article we explore the school choice experiences of parents from three socio-cultural minorities under the new SAS: Mapuche – indigenous families, Latin American migrant parents, and parents with children with disabilities. Using an intersectional theoretical approach and a qualitative research design, we show that while in some cases the implementation of SAS impedes previous discriminatory processes, in others this new system alone has not yet overcome long-established and inherent educational inequalities in Chilean education. Besides, SAS has also resulted in new challenges in the school choice processes of these parents. Their experiences with the SAS express the intersection of different axis of inequality, according to the conditions and historicities of each group of families. Finally, we reflect on the challenges that the policy faces in regard to develop an educational policy that is fairer to all families, in the context of the unequal and marketized Chilean educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a market leader in international education however, research suggests that it predominantly serves elite populations (Bunnell, T., M. Donnelly, H. Lauder, and S. Whewall. 2020. "International Mindedness as a Platform for Class Solidarity." Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. Published online: 24 August 2020. doi:). Drawing on data from the IB and the Australian government, we explore the growth of the IB in Australia for a period of 11 years (2008 to 2019). Data analysis highlights the narrow growth of the IB amongst relatively homogenous schools, suggesting a period of 'distinction and expansion' that represents a troubling contradiction of the IB's stated goal to increase diversity in IB schools and contributes to the reproduction of class disparity in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a new trend of high school choice in China – parental choice of emerging international high-school curriculum programs (IHSCPs) recently established by Chinese elite public high schools. We add to the existing critical literature on school choice by providing a detailed empirical analysis of why, how, and under what conditions Chinese parents with high socio-economic status choose a particular IHSCP. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's conceptual triad of practice – capital, habitus, and field, the article points out that Chinese upper-middle- and upper-class parents engage in complicated conversion strategies surrounding their individual and collective struggles for elite education in both national and international fields of power. The study foregrounds the role of neoliberalism in articulating local and global education markets that allows privileged Chinese to transcend structural constraints in China and seek out opportunities in the international education field for their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant research on the effect of education system characteristics on school socio-economic segregation does not consider education as a complex system. This paper's contribution lies in using agent-based modelling to simulate the effect of the interaction between families' strategies for school selection and two education system characteristics: tracking – a system where students of different academic abilities are separated in different schools – and school accountability – the public availability of information on school quality. The model shows that school tracking and accountability tend to at the same time attenuate and increase school socio-economic segregation, but overall both policies tend to exacerbate segregation by eliciting competition for the best schools. The policy implications are: (i) tracking has a stronger exacerbating effect on segregation than accountability, (ii) the two polices interact to create compounding effects and (iii) by reducing residential segregation between families the segregating effect on schools of the two policies diminishes dramatically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data on incoming freshmen from 2018-2020 at the University of California, Davis, we analyze whether California students from private or charter high schools, compared to students from traditional public schools, arrive at college with a higher sense of expected belonging, more positive feelings, or higher expectations about adopting positive coping behaviors. Although outcomes differ somewhat for charter and private school students, almost all significant differences are explained by student and high school characteristics. Remaining significant differences are negligible in magnitude and not stable across the three years. Nor are the differences systematically moderated by student demographic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Milton Friedman is widely considered the intellectual father of the school choice movement. While Friedman deserves much credit, Father Virgil Blum stands out as an influential figure in the nascent school choice movement. Using archival research, this paper examines Blum's contributions to the movement. From his 1954 doctoral dissertation, which made the legal case for funding religious schools, to his 1958 book, Freedom of Choice in Education, and his decades-long career as a professor, Blum was a tireless advocate for educational freedom. While Friedman made the market argument, Blum made the legal, moral, and religious freedom arguments for school choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German school system is known for its stratified secondary school system following the four-year elementary school. While access to grammar schools was strictly regulated in German school history, most federal states have now strengthened the will of parents and abolished the tradition of binding elementary school recommendations. New in the group of Laender that do not have a binding Gymnasium recommendation are Baden-Wuerttemberg and Saxony. By analyzing parliament debates, this paper analyzes why Baden-Wuerttemberg and Saxony abolished the binding elementary school recommendation and have strengthened parental choice for secondary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study, conducted amidst the war in Ukraine in 2023, assesses the impact of schools' decisions on families' choices upon returning to the country. It involves surveying and analyzing data from interviews with parents of a Ukrainian private school. Findings highlight factors like child-centric approaches, fostering independence, and transparent school processes as crucial for parents. These trends, centered on returning to familiarity and building trust through transparent communication, offer guidance for other institutions in similar circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ensuring culture wars, the American school choice coalition has almost completely unraveled, but many school choice advocates assert that the coalition can be rebuilt. In this essay, I argue that the school choice coalition dissolved not because of politics or circumstance, but because the coalition's libertarians, progressives, and conservatives have fundamentally different first principles in politics and education – first principles that are present in the works of theorists like Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. By studying Paine and Mill, we can understand that any education-reform coalition will be a temporary aberration rather than an enduring alliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical agent-based models of residential and school choice have shown that substantial segregation can emerge as an (unintended) consequence of interactions between individual households and feedback mechanisms, despite households being relatively tolerant. However, for school choice, existing models have mostly been highly stylized, leaving open whether they are relevant for understanding school segregation in concrete empirical settings. To bridge this gap, this study develops an empirically calibrated agent-based model focusing on primary school choice in Amsterdam. Consistent with existing models, results show that substantial school segregation emerges when schools are chosen based on a trade-off between composition and distance, and also when households are relatively tolerant. Additionally, findings of (hypothetical) policy simulations suggest that it is important to understand which preferences for school composition and distance households have and how these interact. We find that the effects of policies aiming to reduce school segregation through geographical restricting mechanisms are highly dependent on those interacting preferences. Also, we assessed the contribution of residential segregation to school segregation. Our findings may have implications for methodologies aiming to estimate school choice preferences, such as discrete choice models, as these methodologies do not explicitly control for implications of these interactions and feedback mechanisms, which might lead to incorrect inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The move to remote learning during Covid-19 school closures left children who had no access to e-learning infrastructure without options to continue their education. In this paper we present evidence from a large-scale para-teacher intervention which brought learning resources to the homes of children cut-off by school closures. Over the 6.5 months of intervention, children enrolled in the intervention saw an average increase in test scores of 1.87 SD, with greater gains for those with lower baseline assessment scores. With these gains achieved at a cost of 5.48-7.39 USD per SD, the intervention was extremely cost effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parents' happiness orientation has garnered early attention in school choice studies but has not been cautiously examined. Drawing on Aristotle's framework of Eudaimonia and Hedonia, along with Ahmed's concept of the happiness promise, this study transcends a perspec-tive of preference and examines how parents understand and pursue happiness in school choice. Based on interviews with 32 Shanghai middle-class parents, this study indicates five happiness objects: bachelor's degree, expertise, non-cognitive development, good physical and mental health, and hobby. These happiness objects shape parents' school choice preferences. In pursuing happiness objects, parents follow the philosophies of 'no sweet without sweat' and 'prioritize sweet with due consideration to sweat' and employ an authoritative approach when making choices. This study challenges the cultural stereotype that Chinese parents are solely academic-oriented and authoritarian in school choice. Instead, parents integrate happiness and academics and strive to balance children's future fulfilment and present enjoyment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the expansion of public Montessori education and its implications for student participation and outcomes. The study focuses on the state of South Carolina, which has the largest number of public Montessori programs in the United States. Through a comprehensive analysis of demographic characteristics and standardized test scores, we investigate the participation of different student groups in public Montessori programs and compare the academic achievement of public Montessori students to their peers in traditional public schools. The findings indicate that public Montessori attracts a diverse range of students, but there is an underrepresentation of less-resourced students and students of color in public Montessori programs. Using matching procedures, we find that Montessori students demonstrated higher achievement growth in ELA and math compared to similar traditional public school students. Subgroup analyses find that higher achievement growth for Montessori students is consistent across many student groups. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of public Montessori and highlights the importance of considering curriculum and educational philosophy when evaluating the impact of education policies and programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A diverse education market has formed in Kazakhstan since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Previous studies of educational choice in Central Asia have laid a general foundation, but greater insight into class differences has not been studied in Central Asia. We utilize data collected in 2015 from over 300 households in six cities in Kazakhstan to compare social class and ethnic differences in parents' choices in the educational market. We found only slight differences in school choice based on social class, as measured by wealth and parental education. Ethnic differences were also slight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common criticisms of school choice programs is that, instead of improving student achievement, they would increase school segregation. Parents may use different criteria to choose a school, such as proximity, school quality, or the school's ethnic/racial composition. As a result, the system would be segregated based on the parent's preferences. This research examines the school preferences of indigenous parents and whether ethnic discrimination influences their decision-making process. Longitudinal national-level data from Chile were analyzed using OLS with fixed effects. The results show that indigenous students, particularly those who have suffered ethnic discrimination in middle school, prefer high schools with a higher percentage of indigenous students. Furthermore, it was found that the level of acts of discrimination occurring in middle schools increases as the percentage of indigenous students rises. However, when the proportion of indigenous and non-indigenous students is similar, indigenous students are less likely to face discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In education, low-income and racially minoritized students in urban districts are often constructed as 'dependent' – weak in their social positions but deserving of educational opportunity. This social construction of 'urban' students has been central to school choice politics and policymaking in the United States. In this study, I interrogate one particular aspect of this social construction: the way low-income and racially minoritized students are represented in quantitative data. I use school choice in Detroit, Michigan as an illustrative case; I conduct a critical discourse analysis of exchanges between former United States Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and members of Congress about school choice, and the quantitative research referenced during those exchanges. The study demonstrates how dominant conceptions of 'urban' education in the United States influence the production of data and research on school choice, and in turn the role those quantifications play in school choice discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since it emerged in the mid-1980s, the school choice phenomenon in China has been the target of severe criticism from all levels of government and the general public. The current nationwide movement of rotating teachers and principals (RTP) is a new attempt to control and eventually eliminate the practice of school choice. Using data from interviews with two education officials and 42 parents, together with relevant government documents, this study applies Hirschman's concept of exit and voice to explore how parents express their dissatisfaction (voice) and exercise (or not) their choice behaviour (exit) in reaction to the government's strategic use of RTP. Findings from this study suggest that RTP and related efforts have had an impact on reshaping parents' perception of the schools and has greatly reduced the parents' school choice behaviour, which is more obvious among second- and third-tier schools than among first-tier schools, indicating that parental desire to send their children to these topmost schools remains strong. Some level of school choice can be expected to exist for the foreseeable future, given China's current exam-driven educational system and the advantages that first-tier schools enjoy, which will maintain and possibly widen the gap between themselves and lower ranked schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study critically evaluates the Swedish school system’s shift toward marketization since the early 1990s, noting that the anticipated educational gains from increased competition and innovation have not materialized significantly. We attribute major barriers to innovation in the school quasi-market to systemic institutional flaws. These include a national curriculum that lacks a clear mission for knowledge promotion, a grading system that undermines reliable measures of student knowledge, and insufficient, complicated information obstructing user choice. If these problems were remedied, the Swedish school system could harness the potential benefits of competition and the profit motive, ushering in substantial educational gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both charter schools and special education are systems designed to improve the educational experiences of a specific subset of students. However, one system was borne of the goal of increased school autonomy while the other necessarily requires compliance with myriad state and federal regulations. This article explores the resulting tension between the two and the unique challenges charters face in educating students with disabilities, including legal constraints, enrollment practices, and funding disparities. Innovative solutions to these challenges are also discussed, including pseudo-governance structures, charter-district collaborations, and state laws providing charters options in how to provide special education services to students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the K-12 education system. We surveyed 4,162 parents across five districts in rural Jharkhand to examine which K-12 service provider parents perceived to be responsive during COVID-19. We rely on parental perception, satisfaction, and aspirations to evaluate and compare the COVID-19 responsiveness of public and private education providers in rural Jharkhand’s low-income neighborhoods. We also test children on a functional literacy and numeracy tool to corroborate parental perception. We find that a higher proportion of parents perceived that private education providers were responsive during the COVID-19-induced lockdown compared to public schools. We also observe that parental perception is aligned with the learning scores of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the institutional dynamics that contribute to educational inequality within Nordic cities. The persistent issue of social inequality in education remains a prominent challenge for the Nordic welfare states. By investigating the gaps between educational policies and their practical implementation, this study sheds light on the mechanisms that drive educational inequality. Through the application of qualitative methods, the research examines the impediments to achieving educational equity within three distinct municipalities in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The study identifies several contributing factors to the prevailing educational inequality, encompassing housing policies, urban spatial segregation, diverse principles governing school choice and marketisation, and variations in organisational models intended to promote equity. The research not only offers novel insights into the gaps between educational policy formulation and implementation but also underscores their pivotal role in both generating and perpetuating educational inequality. In the subsequent discussion, the study addresses these identified gaps and outlines their potential implications for future policy-making and practical implementation in Nordic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One schooling sector that had been growing before the pandemic, hybrid schools, in which students attend physical classes fewer than five days per week and are homeschooled on the other days, has seen recent continued growth. One factor that has not been explored is the commuting patterns families follow to use these schools. Whether families drive more miles to attend these part-time schools, or fewer, or neither, is the question this study seeks to address. In this manuscript, using individual student address data, we examine the commute distances made by students at four schools: two conventional, 5-day private schools, and two hybrid schools. We find that suburban hybrid school students do commute longer distances, but fewer total miles per week. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The middle-classes use school choice as a strategy of class reproduction and comparative advantage. In this article, we show how middle-class parental school choice strategies are spatially dependent and how schooling preferences and final choices are bounded by the social and educational characteristics of the local education market of their neighborhood of residence in the city of Barcelona. Our findings reveal interesting differences relating to the search process and final decisions, which are dependent on parental preferences and risk perception in the different local education markets. Reflections on some policy implications of the analysis are considered in the conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]