We utilize original survey data to examine factors influencing parental assessment of schools. When asked a series of questions about their evaluation of hypothetical schools in a survey experiment, respondents were given the option to select "don't know" and explain in their own words what additional information they would want to know…

Like many predominantly Black urban cities, Detroit, Michigan, has experienced significant out-migration among Black residents over the past 30 years. This situation has altered families' relationships to the communities and schools where they have been nurtured or call home. Therefore, this paper examines how seven Black families' place…

We examine the effects of disseminating school-level academic performance data--achievement status, achievement growth, or both--on parents' school choices and their implications for racial, ethnic, and economic segregation. Many researchers consider growth to be a superior (if still imperfect) measure of school effectiveness relative to status.…

The purpose of this study is to advance our thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice policy. To do so, we present a critical race spatial analysis of Detroit students' suburban school choices. To frame our study, we describe the racial and spatial dynamics of school choice, drawing in particular on the concepts of…

The debate over race-conscious admissions has gained prominence, notably in cases such as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. In debates on race-conscious admissions, the question is often not whether a student will go to college, but which college the student will attend. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we…

Research in sociology demonstrates the way social connections shape access to information about job opportunities. In education, we understand less about how social networks impact the job process for marginalized teachers and teachers in nontraditional labor markets. This study examines how teachers in New Orleans and Detroit, cities with high…

School choice research has provided some initial understandings of how parents choose schools. Parents' school options are bounded to differentiated choice sets--the menu of school options that parents construct when making school selections. The geographical location where families live and schools are located and families' race and class…

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, families have faced a difficult decision between online and in-person instruction. In many school districts, a higher proportion of non-White families selected online instruction for fall 2020, but the factors influencing these patterns are unclear. Using a case study approach, I focus on the experiences of 21…

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…

Parents often select schools by relying on subjective assessments of quality made by other parents, which are increasingly becoming available through written reviews on school ratings websites. To identify relationships between review content and school quality, we apply recent advances in natural language processing to nearly half a million…

Universal public prekindergarten programs have been expanding in recent years, but not all eligible families apply to these programs, for reasons that are not well understood. Using two cohorts of students (N = 8,391) enrolled in Boston Public Schools, we use geographic information systems to combine administrative records with census data to…

In this article, we focus on a statewide system of interdistrict open enrollment in Michigan, known as Schools of Choice. Our previous work indicated that students who take advantage of this program are disproportionately lower performing on state exams, come from lower-income families, and are more likely to be minority students. We estimated…

Despite the strong relationship between geography and education policy, educational research tends to draw from other fields of inquiry such as economics, political science, and history. This special topics collection centers the usefulness of geography and place in educational policy research. The introduction explains the rationale for the…

Parents' decision making about whether to send their children to a traditional public or charter schools has been studied mostly in urban, low-income areas. Few studies have focused on the decisions of high-income, suburban families. In a sample of Core Knowledge charter schools in a predominantly White and socioeconomically advantaged set of…

In this article, I discuss the promise of geospatial techniques for education policy research and how increased attention to the historical context of spatial data can enhance that work. While scholarship utilizing geographic information systems has added considerable breadth to our understanding of education policy, recent geospatial studies in…