The middle-classes use school choice as a strategy of class reproduction and comparative advantage. In this article, we show how middle-class parental school choice strategies are spatially dependent and how schooling preferences and final choices are bounded by the social and educational characteristics of the local education market of their…

Dual Language (DL), a bilingual program has expanded at a rapid rate in New York City. This qualitative study explores choice in three public schools (n = 42) with strand Spanish DL programs to determine the role it plays in middle- and higher-income families' decision making. Factors such as location, pedagogical style, environment, and peer…

The prevailing argument for school choice in metropolitan cities has been that children from economically disadvantaged communities need opportunities to access better quality schools than the traditional public schools assigned to them based on their address. However, as these cities experience gentrification, more economically advantaged parents…

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,…

Enrollment in school choice programs is growing, so is overall support for school choice. Many have analyzed what demographic characteristics impact attitudes towards school choice. This article adds to the literature by exploring the interaction between personal decisions regarding school choice and broader support for school choice programs.…

I review the literature on how parents select schools when participating in private choice programs in the United States. I address two sub-questions. First, do parents have the incentives and motivation needed to participate in a schooling market? Second, when selecting a school, what school characteristics do parents consider? I find three…

Does school racial composition influence where parents choose to send their children to school? This paper contributes to the literature on school racial composition and parental choice by examining the reasons parents give for enrolling their children in predominantly Black magnet schools. We use data from a survey of parental school…

Aiming to explore factors affecting Malaysian Chinese parents in sending their children to either national secondary schools or Chinese independent schools, 494 parents were surveyed using a questionnaire. Results showed that parents who sent their children to Chinese independent schools have different priorities compared to those who sent theirs…

Providing improved educational options for low-income African American families has been one of the primary objectives of the charter school movement. However, among demographically similar families, school choosers may possess subtle advantages compared to nonchoosers, leading to biased estimates of charter school performance in nonexperimental…

Today, over 80% of public school students in New Orleans attend charter schools, and just 37% of students attend school in their neighborhood (Louisiana Department of Education, 2011; Scott S. Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, 2011). This study examines school choice participation and outcomes in New Orleans by analyzing the extent…

The authors describe how Latino students are underrepresented in public schools of choice. They provide evidence to refute the claim that Latino students who choose to leave assigned public schools enroll in religious schools instead. Charter schools stand out as the type of public schools of choice where Latino students are well represented.…

Set in the context of a choice-saturated public school system, this study examines the school choice process of low-income parents who participated in Louisiana's 2008 voucher program. Based on semistructured interviews with 16 parents at 1 Catholic school, we report that spirituality, small class and school size, character/values, familiarity,…

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…

This paper considers whether high schools in competitive environments use grade inflation to attract and retain families, perhaps in addition to more constructive responses. Two measures of grade inflation are used: the cutoffs used by each school to assign a letter grade to a percent score and high school grade point average after controlling for…

Some parents choose to send their children to military-style boarding schools for a variety of reasons. Abundant scholarly literature addresses traditional boarding schools. Far less is available addressing the choice of military boarding schools as an educational option. This qualitative study investigates why parents send their sons to military…