I argue that lottery-based school choice programs offer the opportunity to study a unique group of students: those who want to attend or are very interested in attending private school but simply cannot, even when given the chance. The differences between these students and those who choose private school are compelling education outcomes in their…

This article documents evidence of nonrandom gender sorting across K-12 schools in the United States. The sorting exists among coed schools and at all grade levels, and it is highest in the secondary school grades. We observe some gender sorting across school sectors and types: for instance, males are slightly underrepresented in private schools…

There has been a great deal of research into school choice and the education quasi-market that has dominated compulsory school provision in the United Kingdom since the early 1980s. Much of this research fails to address the context in which processes of choice exist alongside the patterns and outcomes of choice and competition, leading to…

Increased school choice is leading to enrollment patterns that do not reflect attendance in the neighborhood school. The impact of this increased mobility on scholastic achievement is still undecided, in part because of the difficulty in untangling compositional and contextual effects on educational outcomes. This article uses data from the Los…

Competition sparked by school choice is expected to generate greater educational opportunities, particularly for disadvantaged students. The premise is that competitive incentives will change the organizational behavior of schools (and districts, dioceses, etc.) in ways that will lead to more equitable access for students across varied and often…

If we are to fully understand the demand side of school choice, we have to understand geography. But geography is not simply distance and commute time. It is also neighborhood and community. Using two conceptions of geography--space and place--I investigate how and when geography factored into parents' thinking. Drawing on spatial analyses of…

Home buyers exercise school choice when shopping for a private residence due to its location in a public school district or attendance area. In this quantitative study of one Connecticut suburban district, we measure the effect of elementary school test scores and racial composition on home buyers' willingness to purchase single-family homes over…

The growing popularity of school choice is typically linked to the spread of neoliberal ideology. Identifying four components of this ideology, we examine the rationales of providers in an emerging private school market. Data come from interviews and site visits at 45 "third-sector" private schools in Toronto, Canada. We find that only…

Jerry Paquette, in his article "Public Funding for "Private" Education: The Equity Challenge of Enhanced Choice" (in this issue, 568), properly urges everyone to ponder, then to reject, various hypothetical schemes for school choice whose design might worsen the plight of the poor. Among these devices, his chief bugbear is a largely unregulated…

This article links the demand for private tutoring to mounting desires for school choice. The number of private tutoring businesses is rapidly growing in Canada, even though its educational system lacks characteristics that spark a demand for those services in other countries. Testing ideas derived from the school choice literature, I examine…

This article explores from a broadly philosophical perspective a range of complexities of normative judgment relating to "school choice" in a liberal democratic society. It is argued that "heavy" conceptions of public education in such societies play an important role in philosophical discussions of school choice by indicating…

By opening the system to competition, popular school choice reforms seek to remake public education into a more consumer-oriented endeavor. While the underlying theory holds that competitive pressures will induce change and improvement in educational processes, research indicates that organizations often respond instead by developing promotional…

Uses an economic model of the provision of educational services to evaluate the efficiency of an urban educational system. Concludes that a voucher system would not promote efficiency and would increase racial and social segregation, but minischools and competitive contracting-out might aid the promotion of common social values. (FMW)

This article features the author's reply to John Coons's "Dodging Democracy: The Educator's Flight from the Specter of Choice." First, he wants to thank Coons for his thoughtful and thought-provoking reply to "Public Funding for 'Private' Education: The Equity Challenge of Enhanced Choice." So thought provoking, in fact, did the author find…

Analyzes a nationwide graduate student survey to examine the influence of social class, sex, race, undergraduate achievement, and rank of undergraduate institution attended on rank or prestige of their graduate school. The results represent a contradictory picture of stratification in the academic hierarchy and reflect specific mechanisms that…