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

In this article, we introduce a special collection of research articles that consider the processes and consequences of school choice across different social and spatial contexts in order to better...

Over the past three decades, urban sociologists have shed light on the intensifying social inequality between the wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods in global cities; yet limited research has bee...

The series of responses in this article were gathered as part of an online mini conference held in September 2021 that sought to explore different ideas and articulations of school autonomy reform across the world (Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, the USA, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand). It centred upon an important question: what needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of education? There was consensus across the group that school autonomy reform creates further inequities at school and system levels when driven by the logics of marketisation, competition, economic efficiency and public accountability. Against the backdrop of these themes, the conference generated discussion and debate where provocations and points of agreement and disagreement about issues of social justice and the mobilisation of school autonomy reform were raised. As an important output of this discussion, we asked participants to write a short response to the guiding conference question. The following are these responses which range from philosophical considerations, systems and governance perspectives, national particularities and teacher and principal perspectives.

In this article, we introduce the special issue, entitled ‘Private Partners and Profits in Public Schools: New Challenges,’ that illuminates emerging and established cases of education privatisatio...

This study examines the changing style, scale, and scope of raising private funds to provide resources for public schools. In particular, we focus on school fundraising, especially the role of disc...

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.

The introduction to the Yearbook provides an overview of the global context of school choice policies and practices, trends in research and reform, and extant knowledge about research on school choice that draw upon the sociology of education. The article also highlights the contributions of the papers included in the Yearbook. The co-editors explain how the studies engage, complement, and extend existing streams of literature by bringing together a collection of contemporary sociological studies from the United States and other countries that illuminate understudied aspects of school choice reform policies, practices, and politics from across the globe. The Yearbook aims to raise the international profile of sociological research on school choice, and document how school choice policies and programs can be understood through a sociological lens, with a focus on how stakeholders perceive, experience, and respond to these reforms in local settings. This Yearbook also offers directions for future studies.

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.

This paper suggests that synergies can be produced by using geospatial analyses as a bridge between traditional qualitative-quantitative distinctions in education research. While mapping tools have been effective for informing education policy studies, especially in terms of educational access and choice, they have also been underutilized and underdeveloped. This paper focuses on the potential benefits of expanding geospatial analysis, which has traditionally been heavily quantitative in its orientation, by incorporating qualitative research, including the accounts of lived experiences and perceptions that guide and shape institutional and individual behaviors and decisions. To that end, the paper proposes an agenda for mixed-methods research by drawing on new advances in the fields of human and critical geography.

This analysis aims to measure the impact of school choice policy on secondary school students’ enrolment patterns within the social geography of Vancouver, an increasingly polarized global city. Th...

This paper explores the impact of urban social divisions and changing race relations on the experiences of disadvantaged youth living on the periphery of two Canadian cities: Vancouver and Toronto....

Critical racial studies of school choice elucidate the worsening effects of school choice policy on racial segregation in diversifying cities around the world. This paper contributes to this scholarship by illuminating how a neoliberal education policy of school choice has created racial divisions in new ways in a settler-colonial city. It focuses on how neoliberal education reform of school choice reconfigures and reifies race as a socially and spatially constructed category, fixing the racial identities of youths. I apply critical theories of race, space and youth to examine how diverse youths make sense of, and negotiate, race within and between schools in making “choices” in the local context of a historically racialized urban geography. This paper shows that neoliberal reforms of education do not erase, but rather reconstruct, racial identities and divisions by shedding light on 59 students’ (ages 11–19) accounts of racial exclusion and their constructions of new racial stereotypes in the processes and outcomes of school choice.

There has been a growing concentration of high-achieving students attending selective public schools of choice as part of the neoliberal reforms of education. While this growth has had an eroding e...

This paper draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and habitus to examine the learning and enculturation of alumni of a Canadian PhD programme in the discipline of Education. We introduce the concept of doctoral capital to help explain how and why some PhD graduates go on to secure faculty positions and others do not. Our research suggests that certain existing and acquired academic practices, attributes, dispositions and behaviours collectively form a type of doctoral capital that alumni can then use in the academic marketplace.

A critical geography of school choice illuminates how parental school choice reproduces unequal urban conditions. This paper contributes to this scholarship by arguing that the reproduction of urban spaces is reinforced by the ways the dominant urban imaginary shapes how youths imagine and organise their school options. I draw from the fields of critical geography, school choice, and sociology of moral panic to theorise how children's geographies are informed by the dominant urban imaginary and reconstituted reiteratively by moral anxiety. Through this lens, I analyse ethnographic data collected on school choice policy, along with interviews with 59 youth (ages 11–19) in Vancouver, Canada. My analysis demonstrates that the dominant forms of classed stigmatisation of marginalised urban schools are important to young people's rejection of those schools. My analysis also shows that moral panic and rising fears of violence underwrite the spatial patterns of youth participation in school choice.

In recent decades, under the mutually constitutive processes of neoliberal urbanization and globalization, Vancouver has radically transformed and become a serious contender for the title of ‘world-class city’. Against the background of this socio-spatial force reconfiguring the city, I explore how the city's unique development of mini schools – small and selective public schools within larger urban public secondary schools – has been transforming the meanings, practices, projects and imaginaries of the city's communities. I conducted a multi-sited ethnography using an interdisciplinary methodological framework to critically examine how such transformation is carried out. My ethnography focused on the dismantling of long-standing connections between the school and the neighbourhood within the context of the emerging local education market, and how this process unfolds in young people's lives and self formation. This paper draws from Raymond Williams' socio-cultural theories, and Nikolas Rose's theory of t...

This paper examines the links between language, social difference and political domination in the practices of parental school choice at the heart of a global city, Vancouver. Vancouver is a highly diverse city, especially in terms of language. Its inner city is replete with multiple languages whose exchange values are not equal. In this context, our case study of two elementary schools observes that white middle‐class parents choose a predominantly white school – whose students are non‐ESL and have a second language choice of French – in a socially and ethnically mixed inner city neighbourhood, creating a stark imbalance in the student population of local neighbourhood schools. This paper examines parents' accounts of their choices, which they rationalise on the basis of linguistic competency and differentiation from multilingual others. We draw from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of language and symbolic power and Ghassan Hage's spatial theory of nationalist practice to understand the linguistic dimension of ...

In this article, we map the expansion of geographic approaches in education policy scholarship in the last two decades. Our main objective is to trace key contributions, illuminating moments and turns from multiple epistemological perspectives within the scholarship of education policy and from the field of (human) geography. In doing so, we discuss how different types of methodological frameworks have developed, contributing to new and innovative geospatial methodologies in recent years. Following that, we note the extent to which the reassertion of critical perspectives into geospatial analyses has affected and could affect education policy and scholarship.

The authors employ a unique longitudinal data set of British Columbia high school graduates that followed respondents 1, 5, and 10 years after graduation to examine the extent to which educational expectations change over time in relation to parental socioeconomic status and eventual postsecondary attainment. Using the method of correspondence analysis, they demonstrate that graduates leave high school with educational expectations that change minimally from that point onward. Moreover, their findings reveal that there is a strong correspondence among gender, socioeconomic background of parents, and educational attainment. They conclude with direct implications for K-12 and postsecondary policy and practice.

The normalization of school choice in the education system is purported to provide more schooling options for all families, particularly those who do not have the means to move into affluent areas with ‘better’ schools. Nonetheless, it is still unclear to what extent the policy of school choice has been effective in achieving the goal of providing more choices for marginalized families. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the K-12 school choice practices and patterns of marginalized urban families, with a focus on their spatial positions and dispositions, in what is arguably one of the most rapidly diversifying and polarizing cities in the world, Vancouver, Canada. An innovative mixed-methods critical geographic approach is used to better understand the families’ school choice participation and related mobility patterns geo-spatially, while exploring their choices phenomenologically.

In this article, we introduce the special issue that illuminates issues in school choice and education marketization in contemporary Canada. We begin with a discussion of the proliferation of market models across the globe and the kind of questions that have arisen as public policymakers, philanthropists, and other private interests have embraced and advanced market-oriented reforms. Then we turn to Canada, and briefly discuss the scholarly literature on education privatization and school choice in the past two decades. After that, we present the five articles, highlighting how each piece contributes to a deeper understanding of the changing landscape of choice and competition, as well as how these changes impact schools and communities in a diverse, multicultural country. We conclude by discussing the importance of continuing empirical research in order to inform important debates about how to best meet the needs of the students in a democratic society.

Over the last three decades, the political project of school choice policy, promoted by the Vancouver School District and the BC Ministry of Education, has been contentious. Many have contended that school choice further contributes to the fragmentation and associated hierarchies of the education system and of social structures in the urban context of Vancouver, a major city with rapidly rising ethnic diversity and socio-economically polarizing urban redevelopment. To shed further light on these concerns about school choice, in this study I investigate the ways in which young people, ages 11–19, positioned at various social, racial, and geographic locations and with varied social experiences, make sense of school choice policy. Here I focus particularly on the ways in which young people imagine, experience, and form certain modes of social, spatial, and racial identification and groups, as well as on the relationships between these groups under the mechanism of school choice. Between 2009 and 2010, I carried out a multi-sited ethnographic study from a critical socio-phenomenological perspective. I conducted 59 semi-structured interviews with students in transition (Grades 7, 8, and 12), observed 16 school information evenings and two secondary schools over a six-month period, and analyzed media discourses and policy texts as they pertained to broader social, urban, and political changes. I drew upon an interdisciplinary analytical framework of critical policy studies and youth studies and focused on three theoretical concepts: the imaginary, the imagination, and imaginary capital. These three concepts provide a key analytical framework for understanding the ways in which school choice complicates young people’s classification struggles and distinction-making (Bourdieu, 1984) within the widely circulating dominant social, urban, and national imaginary. I conclude that while current local policies of school choice can provide enriched alternative programs, they do so for only highly selective and competitive groups of students. Overall, my research findings point to the reality that school choice deepens existing social, spatial, and racial divisions, aggravates tensions, and ultimately worsens existing inequalities while producing new forms of social and educational stratification in the rapidly diversifying global city of Vancouver.