Purpose: Research on privileged parents, defined here as those with the economic, social, and educational resources to navigate school choice processes to their advantage, often depicts such parents as anxious about maintaining social mobility, leading them to "opportunity hoard" desirable or academically competitive schools in ways that…

Purpose: We describe charter school leaders' beliefs and practices as they relate to student transportation in three choice-rich cities. Research Methods/Approach: Data come from a multiple comparative case study of district and charter school leaders' perceptions and implementation of transportation policies in three choice-rich cities with…

School districts' racial/ethnic and economic compositions are strongly related to average student achievement. Relationships between districts' demographic compositions and average student growth are much weaker, and many believe growth measures are a more accurate indicator of student learning. We seek to understand if the dissemination of growth…

Purpose: We examine policy influencers' perceptions of the targets of school-choice policy across five states, exploring how constructions varied for White and racially minoritized families, whether policy actors conceived of the "target" of policy as the child or the parent, and how these racialized constructions varied across different…

Education researchers and political scientists have long raised theoretical objections to market-based reforms like school choice on the grounds that these policies may undermine public participation in democratic politics and erode public support for public institutions like schools. Little work, however, has empirically tested this claim.…

The structure of US public education is changing. Rather than exclusive district management of schools with standardized programs, new types of systems have emerged. In the case of "portfolio" systems, advocates argue that choice, performance-based accountability, and autonomy challenge traditional schooling and foster a diversity of…

Towns that border American Indian reservations provide important contexts for studying relationships between educational institutions and marginalized communities. This study applies critical discourse methodologies to evaluate policies from districts bordering reservations, districts geographically distant from reservations, and districts located…

We investigate student mobility in a choice-based system that has gone to scale, New Orleans, to gain insight into an underlying improvement mechanism of choice-based reform and its potential equity-related consequences. In contrast to typical analyses of mobility, this study distinguishes incumbent school characteristics that can cause students…

An analysis from 2002 to 2014, aligning media reporting of the effectiveness of the fully online K-12 cyber charter school model with data on enrollment flows to cyber charter schools and expenditure and demographic indicators across all 500 residential public school districts in Pennsylvania, finds a three-part geospatial-social process. Initial…

School choice is expected to place pressure on schools to improve to attract and retain students. However, little research has examined how competition for students actually operates in socially embedded education markets. Economic approaches tend to emphasize individual actors' choices and agency, an undersocialized perspective, whereas…

In recent decades, changes to the education policy landscape have made local public engagement more difficult. Among these changes are increased centralization of policy making, the rise of school choice, and mayoral and state takeovers of urban school districts. Philadelphia is at the vanguard of these changes. We discuss how community-based…

A growing body of school choice research has shown that when school choice policies are not designed to racially or socioeconomically integrate schools, that is, are "colorblind" policies, they generally manage to do the opposite, leading to greater stratification and separation of students by race and ethnicity across schools and…

There has been a long-standing concern among education researchers and policy makers that public school choice may lead to increased racial isolation. Improving on aggregate comparisons, I examine the sorting of students into charter schools by tracking individual students from their charter school of enrollment back to the school they were…

School choice policy, especially as embedded in No Child Left Behind, assumes that empowering parents with choice will improve education by holding schools accountable and will reenergize democratic participation in public education. While parents are seen as critical change agents, little research documents how engaging in school choice affects…

The compatibility of school choice policies and educational equity goals is one of the most hotly debated issues in education today. Yet, despite the growing population of children of immigrants in US schools, limited research exists on the relationship between parental nativity and participation in school choice from an equity perspective. This…