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 study investigated student experiences of teaching practices in grade 9 at 2003, 2008 and 2014 after the Swedish education reforms of the 1990s. Teaching practices in both municipal and independent schools were related to student achievement and family background. Data from three nationally representative cohorts within the ongoing Swedish…

School choice is associated with increased educational inequality and across-school segregation. This article documents the organisational practices and logics affecting school segregation and inequality. Through an institutional ethnographic study of principals' responses to school choice within the context of immigration in Malmö, Sweden, I find…

The paper explores factors of importance for young people's choice of upper secondary education and for their future life, from a student perspective. The paper builds on data from a questionnaire study, answered by 1,414 students in grade 9 (age 15-16) in Sweden, prior to their choice of upper secondary school. In addition, data from earlier…

This paper aims to explore educational markets literarily -- in situ -- at quite unique 'real' market places, where buyers and sellers of educational commodities meet and negotiate values and preferences. Thus, the place we chose for this study was some of the 'school fairs' held in huge exhibition halls all over Sweden every year. At these fairs…

Pressing questions about the merits of full-fledged market accountability in K-12 education, and more limited choice programs, have spawned a large scholarly literature. This article assesses what we know from the most prominent studies and the importance of those findings to school system reform discussions. The studies most widely cited in the…

The paper approaches the issue of school choice in an indirect manner by investigating the effectiveness of public, private government-dependent and private independent schools in 19 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries selected from the PISA 2000 survey for this purpose. In a multilevel approach we estimate these…

We consider the question whether pupils from the lower social strata perform better in private government-dependent schools than in public or private-independent schools, using the PISA 2000 data on European high schools. In the eighty's, Coleman and Hoffer (1987) found in the USA that the performance of these pupils was better at religious…