This article examines ethnic segregation in schools as a field where policy inaction, or non-decision making, is rife. A theoretical framework rooted in historical institutionalism and combining critical junctures with path dependencies enables the study of non-decision making and policy inaction. Moving from non-decision making as a general…

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…

Despite ongoing efforts to promote ethnic, racial and socio-economic integration, segregation continues to challenge education administrators and legal scholars. Privileged parents seeking to avoid integration employ various strategies such as attending private schools or buying houses in neighbourhoods with good school. This paper offers a…

Oslo introduced a combination of school choice, per capita funding, balanced management and accountability in their public schools. Recent studies point out that this has increased segregation. In this study, teachers have been interviewed about their experiences. Bernstein's "classification" and "framing tools" have been used…

Market theory positions the consumer as a rational choice actor, making informed schooling choices on the basis of "hard" evidence of relative school effectiveness. Yet there are concerns that parents simply choose schools based on socio-demographic characteristics, thus leading to greater social segregation and undercutting the…

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the socioeconomic status (SES) school segregation in Chile, whose educational system is regarded as an extreme case of a market-oriented education. The study estimated the magnitude and evolution of the SES segregation of schools at both national and local levels, and it studied the relationship between…

Given recent budgetary gaps in public education, many civic and educational leaders have relied upon private sources of funding for US public schools, including funds raised by parents. Yet parents' role as economic actors in public education has been largely unexplored. Drawing from a qualitative study of parent engagement, fundraising, and…

This article examines the neoliberal influences on "Port City Schools" (PCS) unique district-wide extended learning time (ELT) initiative. Despite the recent popularity of ELT in urban schools, there have been few qualitative studies that question how stakeholders make sense of ELT on the ground. This research fills that gap in the…

Data from three school admissions surveys and the National Pupil Database are combined to investigate whether changes to the School Admissions Code appear to have altered the published admissions policies and the social composition of particular schools. We show that the 2003 and 2007 School Admissions Codes appear to have been at least in part…

This article shows how the Catalan government has not developed an agenda to tackle school segregation despite the growing number of migrant pupils who arrived over the course of the last decade. Education policy has explicitly disregarded the possibilities of improving the regulatory framework for tackling segregation; it has exercised…

This research note shows that secondary school segregation by poverty in England has recently started declining again. By comparing the long-term pattern of school compositions with an economic indicator, it is possible to link this decline to the recession, but only if a further, and contentious, assumption is made about what happened in the…

A policy of school choice has, in various shapes, been implemented in educational systems across the world during the last decades. Drawing on various empirical and theoretical sources, the aim of this article is to distinguish the key defining elements of the Swedish school choice policy and to present and discuss some of its outcomes in terms of…

In many countries choice of school is an increasing concern for families and governments. In Spain and Chile, it is also associated with a long-standing political cleavage on the regulation of large sectors of private-dependent schools. This article analyses both the micro- and the macro-politics of choice in these two countries, where low-status…

This paper seeks an explanation for the persistent social phenomenon of segregated schooling in England whereby children from families with broadly the same characteristics of wealth, education and social networks are more likely to be educated together and therefore separate from children from more socially distant groups. The paper outlines the…

This paper seeks to examine the ways in which school segregation plays out in a pure catchment area system and to what extent residential composition is directly mirrored in schools. The research examines the data for the districts in Berlin and, more specifically at the school level, for the district of Tempelhof-Schoneberg. The research is based…