义务教育阶段择校行为与教育机会分布公平性研究——基于中国18个城市居民家庭教育选择支出的实证分析

比较我国城市地区义务教育阶段家庭社会经济地位与子女就读学校水平之间的对应性的实证研究发现:相对于不择校家庭,择校家庭的社会经济地位与子女就读学校水平之间的正相关关系更强;在其他条件相同的情况下,择校家庭的社会经济地位对子女就读学校水平的正向影响更强。说明家庭社会经济地位与子女就读学校水平之间的一致性增强,义务教育阶段的择校行为在一定程度上强化了社会分层与教育分层之间的对应性,从而进一步引发教育机会分布的不公平性。     

Race,Social Background,and School Choice Options 1

This research contributes to discussions about social inequality in school choices in two ways. First, educational choices include the multitude of options families may consider, including choosing a home in a particular area and home-schooling. Decision-making is considered not at a single point in time, but over children's educational careers. Second, this research explores school choices across school district boundaries to include school choices in suburban and rural, as well as urban districts. I use data from a random sample of families with school-aged children living in the Philadelphia Metropolitan area (including some counties in New Jersey) and other counties throughout Pennsylvania to explore the options that families consider for their children's schooling. The data paint a picture of two constellations of families: those who are white, suburban, and middle-income (who primarily select schools based on their neighborhoods and residences), and those composed of lower-income and urban families of color (who rely more on non-neighborhood school options). The differences between these predispositions toward choice suggest that the expanded school choice policies of urban school districts will have little influence on overall school inequality because of the tendency of white, suburban middle-class families to choose public schools in their relatively privileged, suburban neighborhoods.     

School educational project as a criterion of school choice: discourses and practices in the city of Barcelona

In its advancement towards an education quasi-market, Catalonia has recently been driving the development of school educational projects in all schools (both public and private) as a tool to facilitate school autonomy and family choices. A school educational project is a formal document in which schools identify their pedagogical goals, missions and orientations, their academic resources and organisational structures. Through the analysis of 60 in-depth interviews with parents of children at the age of commencing universal pre-primary education (three years old) and data collected from surveys completed by a representative sample made up of 3245 families, this article explores the impact of this policy on discourses and practices of school choice amongst families in the city of Barcelona. On the one hand, we observe that interest in educational projects has penetrated the discourses of the most educated parents, even though, at the same time, we detect a generalised lack of knowledge of the content of such projects. On the other hand, we note that the social composition of schools is still a prominent factor in choice practices. Such findings question the ideal of the autonomous and rational citizen-consumer that underlies the policy of establishing educational projects.     

Educational tracking and sense of futility: a matter of stigma consciousness?

During the past decade, both qualitative and quantitative research have documented strong feelings of fatalism amongst pupils enrolled in technical and vocational tracks in secondary education. Whereas those feelings have been shown to predict decreased school involvement and school misconduct, relatively little is known about their exact origins. In this paper, we explore to what extent they should be considered a stigma consciousness caused by the demeaning impact of perceived contempt to which pupils from technical and vocational tracks are exposed. Data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study from Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, N: 1967) were used to explore the distribution and consequences of perceived contempt with regard to one’s choice of study. About 20% of the pupils enrolled in technical and vocational education reported that some people looked down on them due to their studies. Moreover, even after taking into account different ability measures and social background characteristics, a strong direct relationship remained between perceived contempt and feelings of futility. In the conclusion, we elaborate on the implications of our findings.     

Seeking a ‘critical mass’: middle-class parents’ collective engagement in city public schooling

A growing body of literature has begun to explore the individual identities, motivations, and school choices of middle-class, typically white, parents who choose to reside in socioeconomically and racially mixed central city neighborhoods. Drawing on qualitative research in three US cities, we argue that a focus on middle-class parents’ collective engagement in schooling is particularly important in under-resourced urban contexts. In these environments, we show, middle-class parents’ use of social networks often extends beyond basic information-sharing about school quality to encompass a range of activities undertaken with other families ‘like them’ who have also chosen to enroll their children in an urban public school. We find that, in some instances, middle-class parents’ collective actions can benefit an entire class or school. Yet in other instances, their activation of social capital can contribute to processes of social reproduction in urban schooling by excluding or marginalizing low-income students and their families.     

Students’ Research-Informed Socio-scientific Activism: Re/Visions for a Sustainable Future

In many educational contexts throughout the world, increasing focus has been placed on socio-scientific issues; that is, disagreements about potential personal, social and/or environmental problems associated with fields of science and technology. Some suggest (as do we) that many of these potential problems, such as those associated with climate change, are so serious that education needs to be oriented towards encouraging and enabling students to become citizen activists, ready and willing to take personal and social actions to reduce risks associated with the issues. Towards this outcome, teachers we studied encouraged and enabled students to direct open-ended primary (e.g., correlational studies), as well as secondary (e.g., internet searches), research as sources of motivation and direction for their activist projects. In this paper, we concluded, based on constant comparative analyses of qualitative data, that school students’ tendencies towards socio-political activism appeared to depend on myriad, possibly interacting, factors. We focused, though, on curriculum policy statements, school culture, teacher characteristics and student-generated research findings. Our conclusions may be useful to those promoting education for sustainability, generally, and, more specifically, to those encouraging activism on such issues informed by student-led research.     

My So-Called Choice: The Trappings of School Choice for Non-Admits

Exploratory research investigates how students in a neighborhood high school navigate the complex school choice admissions process in New York City. Four years of in-depth, longitudinal interviews with thirty minority youth explores how their status as non-admits (students rejected from all schools) shapes their perceptions of peers and experiences in school. Non-admits feel duped into attending stigmatized neighborhood schools and believe their peers cannot be trusted. Analysis suggests school choice research and policy can be improved by: (1) considering students’ participation in the decision-making process; (2) investigating students who only receive the trappings of choice; (3) integrating the social consequences of school choice into current policy discussions and; (4) analyzing how the quality of officially published information about schools influences decision-making.     

School choice with Chinese characteristics

This paper explores the major characteristics of school choice in the Chinese context. It highlights the involvement of cultural and economic capital, such as choice fees, donations, prize-winning certificates and awards in gaining school admission, as well as the use of social capital in the form of guanxi. The requirement for these resources in order to be successful in the positional competition for admission to key schools has greatly advantaged children from middle class families. Schools and local governments cash in on school choice fever in order to obtain significant economic returns. The current school choice process creates winners among some of the parties involved: school places for selected students, and additional funds for schools and local governments. However, the practice exacerbates the educational inequality that already exists in society.     

Markets in education: the impact of school choice policies in one market context in New Zealand

The publication of Trading in Futures and When Schools Compete helped give empirical support to the view that choice policies increased differences between schools. However, dispute about this research and changes in policy mean that our understanding of the impact of school choice policies in New Zealand remains partial. This paper aims to address continued uncertainty about the impact of school choice policies in New Zealand. It presents the results of a study that drew upon qualitative data gathered in interviews with school principals and on administrative data on the enrolment patterns in the same competition space explored by the Trading in Futures research. The data show that periods of greatest instability in enrolments occurred around the time of change in regulations.     

Is Research Possible? A rejoinder to Tooley's ‘On School Choice and Social Class‘

This paper presents a response to some criticisms by James Tooley of our research on parental choice. The paper argues that many of Tooley's criticisms are based on systematic misinterpretations and misreadings of our work, ignorance of the procedures of qualitative research and the use of untenable speculations about sampling, data collection and the interpretation of data. It is suggested that Tooley's criticisms are ideologically driven and that if taken seriously would make qualitative social research impossible.     

School Choice and the Politics of Parenthood: Exploring Parent Mobilization As a Catalyst for the Common Good

A substantial body of research has shown how white, middle-class parents in urban school districts use school choice as a tool to pursue educational advantages for their children. The purpose of this qualitative research was to examine the debate over neighborhood schools and school choice among a diverse group of parents in a gentrifying, yet highly diverse New York City neighborhood that I call “Prospect Point.” My central focus was studying a parent advocacy group that supports neighborhood schools. Findings show that about one third of families living in Prospect Point choose to send their children to charter or gifted and talented (G&T) schools located outside of the neighborhood. Given this outflow of parents and resources via school choice, most of the gentrifier parents in the sample who opted in to the local schools viewed their choice as a politically charged decision, and they credited the parent advocacy group as having influenced it. As a group, they rejected the consumer model of school choice, which they believed put the local schools at a disadvantage and was the norm for their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic demographic. Opt-in parents in this context recognized their privilege, and their children’s privilege, in the school-choice process and actively sought to diminish it through their choice to opt in. This research has important implications for the transformative role that parent mobilization can play in the future of diverse, high-quality public education and our democratic society.     

White Middle-Class Families and Sociocultural Diversity in Schools: A Literature Review

School choice parental practices have been extensively researched worldwide. Recently, an emergent line of studies has focused on the case of mostly white middle-class parents, who, in contrast to the dominant trend identified by sociological research, choose or are willing to choose a socially, racially and/or ethnically diverse school for their children. The purpose of this article is to review the literature published between 2000 and 2017 on this nascent field, exploring the characteristics of families’ ‘against the grain’ choice processes, the parental practices deployed for managing school diversity, and their consequences for intra-school integration. Results highlight (a) the tensions underlying parental choices for diversity, (b) the multiple individual and collective practices that families implement to confront sociocultural school mix, and (c) the implications for the emergence of social and racial/ethnic intra-school segregation and power dynamics within communities. Based on the findings presented, the article discusses suggestions for further research.

     

Parental preferences in school choice: comparing reputational hierarchies of schools in Chile and Finland

Parents evaluate the reputations of the schools when making judgements about their desirability. They try to approximate the quality of schools and the social environment and contrast those with their hopes and fears concerning their child’s education. We aim to clarify how the reputations of schools are constructed in Finland and Chile and what sorts of reputational categories, hierarchies and preferences of schools and classes families form when making a choice. Bernstein’s instrumental and expressive orders are applied as tools to analyse these reputations from qualitative interview data. The amount and type of expressive order turned out to be the crucial factor when comparing schools’ reputations and in the making of choices. While in Chile the expressive-social order in terms of contributing to habitus was seen as the most important factor in constructing school reputations and shaping preferences, in Finland the expressive-personal order in the form of school contentment was highlighted.     

Analyzing Mathematical Tasks: A Catalyst for Change?

In this study we investigate a strategy for engaging high school mathematics teachers in an initial examination of their teaching in a way that is non-threatening and at the same time effectively supports the development of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge [Shulman (1986). Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14]. Based on the work undertaken by the QUASAR project with middle school mathematics teachers, we engaged a group of seven high school mathematics teachers in learning about the Levels of Cognitive Demand, a set of criteria that can be used to examine mathematical tasks critically. Using qualitative methods of data collection and analysis, we sought to understand how focusing the teachers on critically examining mathematical tasks influenced their thinking about the nature of mathematical tasks as well as their choice of tasks to use in their classrooms. Our research indicates that the teachers showed growth in the ways that they consider tasks, and that some of the teachers changed their patterns of task choice. Further, this study provides a new research instrument for measuring teachers’ growth in pedagogical content knowledge. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, April 2002.     

A Qualitative Study of Juvenile Offenders,Student Engagement,and Interpersonal Relationships: Implications for Research Directions and Preventionist Approaches

Background factors that correlate with juvenile delinquency are consistent across the interdisciplinary literature base. Yet, information about the process of how risks relate to outcomes, especially within school settings, is limited. Researchers used qualitative methods to examine school and interpersonal experiences from the perspective of juvenile offenders and their families. Sixteen families were recruited from juvenile probation facilities in 2 different geographic regions. Consensual Qualitative Research methods yielded consistent themes, including the central role of advocacy to obtain appropriate school services, the importance of flexibility in discipline policies, classroom experiences that shaped outcomes, and the importance of nonjudgmental social support for the adolescents and their parents. The findings and recommendations for school consultants are presented from a preventionist standpoint, and self-determination theory is discussed in relation to future juvenile delinquency research.     

The Collateral Consequences of “Criminalized” School Punishment on Disadvantaged Parents and Families

The “criminalization” of school discipline has contributed to a number of negative outcomes for students and scholars have noted important racial, ethnic, and class disparities in school punishment. Yet, prior work provides little information in which to understand how the effects of criminalized school punishment may move beyond the student and impact parents and families—especially parents and families most likely to experience school discipline. By drawing upon what we know about the collateral consequences of criminal justice punishment—such as arrest and incarceration—on families more generally, the goal of this research project is to explore how school punishment affects disadvantaged parents and families. Interviews with primarily poor, single, Black mothers, reveal that as a result of school discipline, parents reported important collateral consequences including negative financial outcomes such as losing their job, negative emotional consequences including depression and emotional turmoil, and a decrease in future expectations for their child. Respondents highlighted that these consequences were largely attributable to social disadvantage and a lack of social capital.     

Choice and social class of medical school students in Greece

A growing body of literature focuses on choice of studies in the context of policies on widening participation in higher education and graduates' difficulties in the labour market. Drawing on research findings showing a relationship between social class and choice of studies, we conducted a qualitative study on first‐year medical students in a Greek university. The research aim was to examine the seemingly paradoxical choice of medical school, given the contradiction between the great investment in time, effort and money required, and inflation of medical graduates and high unemployment levels. Apart from the impact of social class, findings suggest that choice is also strongly influenced by the broader context of the social and financial relations, and the education system. We argue that any attempts to analyse choice processes need to accommodate the specific national characteristics and peculiarities.     

The Chimera of Choice: Gentrification,School Choice,and Community

This study investigates school choice in a gentrified urban context and examines the ways in which school choice as rhetoric creates false perceptions, how school-choice policies can betray the very principle they espouse, and how choice (while sought after by many) can undermine community. As school choice continues to expand and gain traction politically, it is increasingly important to understand the effects it has on a variety of populations and how the rhetoric surrounding the policy does not correspond with the lived realities on the ground. This research borrows the concept from psychology and economics of “the paradox of choice” (Schwartz, 2004 Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. New York, NY: Ecco. [Google Scholar]) and applies it to school choice to demonstrate some of the negative influences of choice on parents and their views of schooling. This research calls into question one of the major arguments for the expansion of school choice—that it provides all parents the opportunity to choose the best fit for their child—by demonstrating that in actual practice choice does not meet parents’ expectation that they are in control of their child’s educational options, regardless of their class background. In this case study the choice system results in a lack of agency, anger and hostility, discontent with schooling options, and an undermining of community connections. Although a number of families do believe they had a choice and were satisfied with their child's school options, or became staunch advocates for their local district schools, the choice landscape still creates tensions.     

Where policy meets the pavement: Stages of public involvement in the prevention of school violence

Based on qualitative research on school and city violence, this article examines three forms of partnerships between community organizations and schools, including youth interventions by social services; community activism; and school liaisons with the police. The article examines how violence-prevention strategies are conceived within a context that includes the formation of policy directed at communities, youths, and schools; social science theories of delinquency; public rhetoric about youth and families; and efforts on the part of community residents, city departments, and social services. The underlying theory-base behind the research can be associated with cultural studies, since it combines cultural and structural interpretations of the topic and analyzes policies according to their processes, in light of their constructions, and in connection with the theories that guide them. It becomes obvious by the end of the article that community-based violence-prevention organizations collaborating with schools are sometimes blocked from doing good work by poor funding, power struggles, and a deficit model of youth. While the partnerships can, at times, help to initiate positive involvement of disenfranchised people, they can also become instruments of city power structures. For their positive and productive work to come out, the interagency and school collaborations must solve the problems that are discussed in the article.     

Making Poor Choices? Demand Rationalities and School Choice in a Chilean Local Education Market

Although the literature on school choice rationalities is extensive, different authors interpret the processes of school choice for poor families in different ways. Positions vary between those that consider that poor families have the same capacity to choose as middle class families and those that value structural factors as constraints for choice. The objective of this article is to identify different school choice rationalities of low income families in the context of a highly marketized education system such as Chile. Beyond the restrictions of a different nature that poor families face, this social group mostly expresses high levels of reflexivity and complex sets of preferences when it comes to choosing schools for their children. This article tries to overcome the dualistic division that prevails in school choice literature between choice as an outcome of utility maximization for all, and choice as a denial for deprived groups.