Open enrollment in public schools is a form of school choice that allows students to attend schools other than the one assigned to them by their school district. Though often less visible than policies such as charter schools, vouchers, and education savings accounts, K-12 open enrollment is rising in popularity across the nation, and 73 percent…

In this introduction, we outline the scholarly context and research questions that motivate this special issue: In what ways do racialized constructions of school quality open up or foreclose educational opportunity? How do understandings of school quality differ across local social, political, and demographic contexts? And lastly, at what points…

The German school system is known for its stratified secondary school system following the four-year elementary school. While access to grammar schools was strictly regulated in German school history, most federal states have now strengthened the will of parents and abolished the tradition of binding elementary school recommendations. New in the…

This article explores the institutional dynamics that contribute to educational inequality within Nordic cities. The persistent issue of social inequality in education remains a prominent challenge for the Nordic welfare states. By investigating the gaps between educational policies and their practical implementation, this study sheds light on the…

Since it emerged in the mid-1980s, the school choice phenomenon in China has been the target of severe criticism from all levels of government and the general public. The current nationwide movement of rotating teachers and principals (RTP) is a new attempt to control and eventually eliminate the practice of school choice. Using data from…

This article investigates educational preferences in the bilingual education system that reinforce the salience of both socio-economic and socio-cultural issues. We ask, first, how many distinct groups of educational preferences exist and whether these differ by ethnic nationality. Second, we investigate the extent to which economic self-interest…

Marketization is the development of quasi-markets on the systemic level, which promote choice, competition, accountability, and devolution in public schooling. Marketing is a strategy that individual school leaders employ to respond to these logics. This paper argues that education marketization has led to an increase in school-based marketing…

School choice is often utilized in school districts for access and opportunity. Researchers have found that school choice does not inherently provide access to students. The goal of this mixed methods study was to determine if implementing a new platform for families to use in applying to magnet programs in an urban district would mitigate…

School-choice policies are expected to generate healthy competition between schools, leading to improvements in school quality and better outcomes for students. However, the empirical literature testing this assumption yields mixed findings. This systematic review and meta-analysis tests this theory by synthesizing the empirical literature on the…

School districts in the US and around the world are increasingly moving away from traditional neighborhood school assignment, in which pupils attend closest schools to their homes. Instead, they allow families to choose from schools within district boundaries. This creates a market with parental demand over publicly-supplied school seats. More…

Arthur Seldon (1916-2005) was a significant British neo-liberal economist in the second half of the twentieth century. From 1957 to 1988, as the "engine room" of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Seldon had been advocating the reform of "free" state education. He vigorously argued for education vouchers, by which each parent…

Nearly 70 years after Milton Friedman first proposed K-12 education vouchers, students in Arizona, Iowa, Utah, West Virginia, and other states can customize their education using education savings accounts (ESAs). ESAs allow parents to spend public education funding on expenses such as private school tuition, tutoring, and homeschooling curricula.…

Growing global debates surrounding parental school choice underscore the relevance of school place allocation. While there is much research on school choice, the enactment of such allocation policy is rarely analysed. Responding to this research gap, this article investigates how local politicians in Berlin put public primary school place…

Due to the recent wave of momentum behind universal vouchers and education savings accounts, charter schools have become an afterthought for some conservative school choice advocates. There is a progressive and a conservative vision for charter schooling. The progressive approach to charter school authorization fails to achieve its stated goals…

This paper starts with the increasing discussions on juridification in education. Concerning theorizing on such processes, we examine the poor implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD (2008) in the school sector of Germany. The paper considers the…