In this article, we introduce a special collection of research articles that consider the processes and consequences of school choice across different social and spatial contexts in order to better understand the relationship between school choice and stratification in educational opportunity. This special issue presents a wide range of studies…

As US public education enrolment grows increasingly diverse, school choice policies create opportunities to break the link between residential and school segregation. They also create new pathways for families to self-segregate into ever more racially isolated schools. This study explores student enrolment patterns in Metro Detroit over a ten-year…

Research has demonstrated that families are consistently willing to pay more for homes situated in catchments with better quality schools. However, few have considered whether other school characteristics are capable of capitalizing home values in this way. Using data from the city of Chicago, we investigate whether traditional magnet schools may…

Intra-district open enrollment policies are increasingly implemented as a means of expanding children's educational opportunities and promoting greater racial integration in urban schools. However, racial segregation continues to endure in many choice-oriented urban school districts, to the extent that schools are often more segregated than their…

This dissertation consists of three papers that explore the open enrollment process in a large urban school district that has a mandatory choice open enrollment policy. The first paper examines patterns of school selection in this district after the introduction of a "strategy-proof" deferred acceptance student assignment algorithm.…

This paper examines thirty major American cities to determine how "choice-friendly" they are today. Selected for their size and geographic diversity, the cities reveal both the best and worst conditions for school choice to take root and grow. "School choice" is defined broadly to incorporate a wide range of public and private…

Increased school choice is leading to enrollment patterns that do not reflect attendance in the neighborhood school. The impact of this increased mobility on scholastic achievement is still undecided, in part because of the difficulty in untangling compositional and contextual effects on educational outcomes. This article uses data from the Los…

Student mobility is the phenomenon of students in grades K-12 changing schools for reasons other than customary promotion from elementary school to middle school or from middle school to high school. This non-promotional school change can occur during the school year or in the summer between school years. It may involve residential change, school…

This article describes a study of enrollment patterns under the Massachusetts open enrollment law as of fall 1992. Results from 33, districts with 20 or more school-choice transfers, show that families generally enroll children in schools with higher indicators of performance and higher socioeconomic status. (SLD)

This paper presents findings of a study that analyzed participation patterns and the movement of students and state funds in Ohio during the 1993-94 school year, the first year during which Ohio's interdistrict open-enrollment law was fully implemented. The theoretical framework for the study was drawn from economics and business theories of…

This catalog, an outcome of the Project To Access Choice in Education (PACE), lists examples of public schools throughout the nation offering choices in education. "Schools of Choice" are defined as those offering one or more of the following three dynamics: (1) open enrollment, the freedom for families to choose the elementary or secondary…