The purpose of this action research study was to investigate and improve the school choice experience for students in a large urban school district on the East Coast. Participants in Cycle 1 were comprised of middle and high school staff, and data was collected via surveys, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. Action steps included…

Departing from mainstream accounts of the post-Katrina New Orleans state takeover and the more recent "unification" of schools under local governance, this case study utilizes the plantation (Hartman, 1997; Woods, 1998, McKittrick, 2011) as a theoretical device and the silenced archive (Trouillot, 2015) as a method of inquiry to better…

The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents' perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school…

In the current article, we examine the long-run school selection patterns of children randomly assigned to the Chicago School Readiness Project, an early childhood educational (ECE) intervention that aimed to improve the quality of Head Start classrooms serving low-income communities. Analyses suggest that adolescents who participated in the…

Eight years ago, in 2014, the Civil Rights Project issued a report that raised awareness about the dire state of segregation in New York State and, in particular, New York City schools. That report spurred substantial activism, primarily led by student groups, parents, teachers, and administrators, which has been influential in the current…

Multiple studies have shown the potential for school choice policies to benefit middle-class families, often to the detriment of lower income students in the same district. Yet, there is limited research examining the role of policies in promoting inequality by encouraging exclusionary behaviors. In this article, we utilize the concept of…

Scholars have long acknowledged that the information parents have about schools is the "Achilles' heel" of school choice. Although much has been written about school choice, far less is known about the information disseminated to help families make choices. I construct a case study of the dissemination and accessibility of choice…

Students with disabilities are entitled to attend a school of their choice. In order for the rights of students with disabilities to be honored during the high school choice process, principals must create school structures and systems that are alignment to federal policies to lead in the best interest of students. This mixed methods, qualitative…

Existing research highlights that families face geographic, social, and psychological constraints that may limit the extent to which competition can take hold in school choice programs. In this paper, we address the implications of such findings by creating a network of student flows from 11 cohorts of eighth-grade students in the Chicago Public…

The Success Project was a multi-year effort that aimed to better prepare middle grade students for the transition to and success in high school and beyond. Underlying this initiative was a belief that many urban public middle grades students in the United States enter high school without sufficient social supports and academic skills to succeed in…

In "A Single Garment", Genevieve Siegel-Hawley explores the leadership, policies, and practices that support contemporary school integration. Drawing on a wide range of sources, as well as her own experience as a parent, former student, and teacher, Siegel-Hawley provides a richly layered account of four Richmond, Virginia schools, each…

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…

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…

Social scientists have begun to document the stratifying effects of over a decade of unprecedented charter growth in urban districts. An exodus of students from traditional neighborhood schools to charter schools has attended this growth, creating troubling numbers of vacant seats in neighborhood schools as well as concentrating larger percentages…

Research points to sections of the middle-class repopulating the "ordinary" urban public school and whilst there are key differences in how they are navigating public school choices, from "seeking a critical mass" to resisting traditional methods of choice and going "against-the-grain", or collectively campaigning for…