The paper investigates public and private primary school choice criteria in urban settings by taking an unconventional and supplementing perspective which scarcely has been taken up by research, despite being interconnected with the topic at hand. Instead of analyzing parents' criteria for schools deemed good, which would be the conventional way,…

A diverse education market has formed in Kazakhstan since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Previous studies of educational choice in Central Asia have laid a general foundation, but greater insight into class differences has not been studied in Central Asia. We utilize data collected in 2015 from over 300 households in six cities in Kazakhstan to…

In this report, the author explains the small-schools environment in New York City. Prior to the pandemic, the Big Apple had a small but growing microschool and learning pod community. New York City's frequent school closures throughout 2020 and 2021 caused many families to look more closely at these education options. New York State's stifling…

Historically, debates about educational choice have wrestled with big, unresolved tensions that lie at the heart of American life, having to do with individual rights, community obligations, public and private interests, religious freedoms, and more. But in recent years, school reformers have tended to talk about choice as though it referred only…

Few evaluations have focused on the supply and demand within the education marketplace in a school choice environment. Because traditional public schools are not subject to the same level of competitive pressures as private schools, we expect that measures of school quality--enrollment, academic achievement, and safety--will be more likely to…

Drawing from an ethnography, this paper evaluates the motivations of Black American and Black immigrant parents when selecting high schools for their millennial teenage children in a segregated city and suburbs of New York. Black middle class parents encounter racial exclusion in the areas of work and residence. However, more research is needed to…

New York City has the largest public school district in the U.S., but the city's diverse educational landscape also includes charter, private, and religious schools, all of which have undergone a major transformation in the two years since the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last two school years, overall school enrollment in the city was down by…

Student performance on standardized tests in Louisiana has trailed national averages for decades. In the 2017 8th-grade reading results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Louisiana public schools tied for 42nd in the nation and rated significantly higher than only one jurisdiction, the District of Columbia. Only 25 percent of…

Do market-based policies, like school vouchers, that provide an exit option enhance or diminish parental involvement? I examine this question using original survey data from parents participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the nation's oldest urban voucher program. Voucher students were matched to a set of public school students…

To follow up on research conducted in several countries, in this paper, we look at the dilemmas middle-class parents face of being "good parents" by choosing the "best" school with a milieu-related environment for their child versus being "good citizens" by choosing a "local" public school with a large…

We examine the role of ideas in the politics of school choice policy and situate our study within scholarship that understands frames and logics as types of ideas operating in the foreground and background of policy debates. Our data are from a case study of political contention over portfolio management reform (in which a central office oversees…

In this article we review the substantial literature on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the U.S.'s oldest and largest urban school voucher program, and use the review to propose an agenda for second generation school voucher research. We review research on student-level impacts, public school response, parental decision-making,…

Principals from 76 urban public charter and private (Catholic) schools located in three midsized cities participated in a sequential explanatory investigation measuring perceptions of key elements related to school administration. Topics include students, selves, and elements related to the job of principal. Findings indicate that most principals…

In this article, Linn Posey-Maddox, Maxine McKinney de Royston, Alea R. Holman, Raquel M. Rall, and Rachel A. Johnson examine Black parents' educational decision-making in the racial and educational contexts of predominantly white suburban districts, majority-Black urban schools with an Afrocentric focus, and racially diverse urban public and…

By law, a student's admission to one of New York City's eight elite high schools is determined by his or her score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Only a very small number of black and Hispanic students make the cut, a fact that has led Mayor Bill de Blasio to engineer what he regards as a more equitable racial distribution…