Students often make school choice decisions with inadequate information. We present results from delivering information to randomly selected students (and some randomly selected parents) across 900 junior high schools in Ghana, a country with universal secondary school choice. We provided guidance on application strategies and reported the…

Parents compare the costs of sending their children to private Christian schools with the benefits of their children attending the schools. Christian school leaders benefit from understanding the factors influencing parents' decisions to enroll their children in Christian private schools. In this qualitative study, the researcher interviewed nine…

Choosing a specialty school involves huge challenges for families. This research aims to understand the behavioral process that leads families to choose among various specialty school programs. Discrete choice models, based on revealed preferences data from middle school applications in a large school district in Florida, are estimated using both,…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the reasons of school choices of middle-class families and their children within the context of the neoliberal education policies in Turkish education system. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive research approach. The data were collected via semi-structured interviews. The first study group…

School choice has been actively exercised by mostly middle class parents and "key" schools in many places in China, each obtaining what they want: school places and funds, respectively. The aims of this study were to explore the impact of positional competition in school choice and explore the effect of market mechanisms in the resulting…

Background: In contrast to the top-down government-designated school choice programmes in many countries, e.g. in the UK and USA in particular, school choice in the Chinese context is a bottom-up movement initiated by parents and is characterised by the payment of a substantial "choice fee" to the preferred school, and by competition by…

This study uses data from the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09). Parent responses to the Parent Involvement survey, given as part of the NCES study were considered, along with their child's socio-economic status and self-reported level of mathematics course enrollment during their…

Research into parents' secondary-school choices suggests that many middle-class parents are keen to secure a middle-class peer group for their children. This article reports the findings of a small-scale, qualitative study into whether a similar phenomenon exists at primary-school level and, if so, why. In-depth interviews were conducted with 56…

One of the underlying premises of the charter school movement is that quality drives consumer choice. As educational consumers, parents are viewed as rational actors who, if given the choice, will select better performing school. In examining the choice processes of charter school parents, however, this study calls into question the extent to…

In this paper we analyze the link between people's "subjective" expectations of returns to schooling and their decision to invest into schooling. We use data from a household survey on Mexican junior and senior high school graduates that elicits their own and their parents' beliefs about future earnings for different scenarios of…

Since their creation over two centuries ago, public schools have been coupled with students via geographical zones. Bolstered by compulsory attendance laws, public schools have a very consistent clientele. Based solely on where they resided, students were required to attend specific schools between Kindergarten and Grade 12. Schools have, in…