Determinants of Primary School Choice in Malaysia: School Proximity and Ethnicity-Related Reasons

The study examined determinants of primary school choice among parents in Malaysia, and the decision maker and social influences in the school choice. It draws on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 43 middle-class parents from three ethnic groups (Chinese, Malay, and Indigenous). Results showed that school proximity and ethnicity-related reasons are leading factors influencing parental school choice. Medium of instruction, school academic reputation, and feeder to a preferred secondary school appear to be separate reasons but act as a proxy to ethnicity as the primary factor determining the choice of Chinese- or Malay-medium primary school by parents. The results also showed that mothers are more likely to make school choice decisions than fathers, but the reasons for school choice are similar. The primary social influences on their school choice come from friends and education personnel in preschools and schools. The Indigenous parents tend to be more subject to social pressure in making school choices than the Chinese and Malay parents, who mostly enroll their children in Chinese- and Malay-medium primary schools, respectively. However, these findings on school choice and ethnic segregation are limited to this sample and constrained by the socio-political context of the education system.     

农民工家长择校影响因素分析

农民工家长择校问题是在中国人口迁移与流动趋于家庭化后出现的新问题。不同于以往研究对家庭经济因素的强调,研究的结果显示了家庭社会资本与文化资本是对农民工家长教育选择的重要性,从个体特征看,农民工家长的受教育程度,流人地居住时间是影响其选择学校的主要因素;从家庭影响因素看,家庭结构和教育期望是影响农民工家长择校的重要原因。择校信息的获取和判断的差异是农民工家长择校的关键原因。     

Class,honour and reputation: gendered school choice practices in a migrant community

In this paper, I draw on a qualitative study of Iraqi-born Muslim mothers in Australia exploring how they navigate choosing secondary schools for their daughters. While the mothers interviewed for this study agreed on the importance of education and its role in facilitating upward social mobility for all their children, they articulated a specific and more complex set of concerns in relation to selecting schools for their daughters. This article suggests that families’ positions in the Australian diasporic Iraqi community are tied to girls’ schooling and, therefore, school choices are heavily gendered and contribute to a gendered structuring of family and community life. By analysing the narratives of Iraqi-born mothers, a deeper understanding emerges of the complex and varied outlooks of migrant Muslim parents on education and gender in their everyday practices of raising and educating their daughters.     

Special support and neighbourhood school allocation in Finland: a study on parental school choice

Although freedom of parental school choice has expanded to the Finnish education system, the government has maintained the principle of neighbourhood school allocation. Moreover, the Finnish education system has recently undergone a reform of its special needs education; all pupils are entitled to receive support in three categories of general, intensified or special. The focus of this article is to examine parental positions on school choices in relation to the parents’ social class and their children’s support needs in basic education. The results of the study are based on a quantitative questionnaire, which collected responses from 208 participants drawn primarily from four different municipalities in Finland. The study found that the category of a child’s support, rather than the socio-economic class of the parents, determined the child’s school allocations. Furthermore, the more support the parents felt their children needed, the more importance they placed on special education practices and less on the neighbourhood school allocation. In addition, the parents’ opinions were found to differ based on social class, rather than category of support. In conclusion, we argue that the social segregation of students with special educational needs can be avoided, if the principle of neighbourhood school allocation is preserved.     

The effects of a free school choice policy on parents’ school choice behaviour

Recently, European school systems have seen various attempts to ‘modernise’ their governance. Market and competition oriented reforms have not been central to governance innovation strategies in German speaking countries, however, their number and relevance is rising in recent years. A free school choice policy which abolishes “school districts” which legally define fixed school catchment areas was introduced in the school year of 2007/2008 in the Austrian city of Linz.The effects of the implementation of this policy on the primary school sector were studied by a standardised questionnaire administered to a representative sample of 3425 parents of five age groups of primary school children. The return rate was about 55%. By special measures during data collection a satisfactory representation of parents with migrant background was achieved.Three questions are discussed in the paper: (1) Is there a rise in segregation in schools as a result of free choice policy? (2) Is there a change in the composition of the student population in different schools as a result of free choice policy? (3) Is there a change in parent school choice behaviour of as a result of free choice policy?Our data indicates that segregation in primary schools with respect to ethnic and social family characteristics increases after the policy implementation, but the sample size is too small to find significant results. In addition, no significant change is observed in the social composition of schools. In accordance with the previous findings no significant modifications of choice behaviour occur for different ethnic or social groups after free choice. However changes in choice motives can be observed.     

公办学校和打工子弟学校中流动儿童城市适应过程对比研究

本研究采用流动儿童城市适应量表作为研究工具,对公办学校和打工子弟学校中的流动儿童城市适应过程进行研究。结果发现,公办学校的各种学校因素对流动儿童城市适应中探索与顺应、整合与融入两个阶段都有积极促进作用,除学校安置因素外,流动儿童的个人因素、家庭因素同样影响家长对两类学校的选择,也影响着流动儿童在两类学校的城市适应。     

What comes after compulsory education? A follow‐up study on parental expectations of their child’s future education

This paper examines the contribution of parents’ education and children’s gender on parental expectations of their children’s future education and the role of parental perceptions of their child’s competencies in the formation of their expectations. A group of university and vocationally educated parents (N = 418) were asked to estimate the probability of their child entering gymnasium (high school) or vocational education and assess the child’s competencies, first in preschool, and then at the end of the third school year. It was found that the education and gender‐bound differences in the parental expectations were established before the child entered school, and by the end of the third school year the relationships between expectations and competence assessments strengthened and were more uniform among the parents. The findings suggested that the parental assessments of their child’s abilities can be regarded as a potentially important social‐psychological process through which social differences are transformed into the individualized interpretations of the child’s educational prospects.     

Policy on ethnic segregation in a system of choice: the case of The Netherlands

This paper examines the implications of the uneven distribution of minority pupils and the Dutch system of choice for policies on ethnic segregation at both the local and school level. The analysis is based on a sample of 27 municipalities serving 23% of all Dutch primary school pupils. Segregation to a large extent can be found in The Netherlands as elsewhere, and the constitutional freedom of education is precisely the factor that places important restrictions on solving this problem adequately. At the local level more than one‐third of all municipalities, for various reasons, do not take any action. Of the others that do take action the majority saddles the schools with the responsibility since the problems are mainly seen as of an educational nature. According to the school principals a percentage of minority pupils exceeding 50‐60% causes ‘white’ parents to leave and they are given every opportunity to do so by the Dutch system of free parental choice. Therefore a radical reorientation is required in the Dutch system of choice in order to address the challenges of ethnic segregation.     

School choice and parents’ preferences for school attributes in Chile

A key assumption of school choice and competition policies is that parents’ most important (if not only) priority when choosing a school is its quality. However, evidence about which of a school's attributes really drives parental choice is still scarce. We use census data from a parent questionnaire in Chile, a country with a national school choice and competition system, to describe the attributes most commonly considered by parents when choosing a school, and to assess how the probability of prioritizing those attributes varies with the parents’ socioeconomic characteristics, while controlling for other characteristics of the family. We find that parents choosing a school prioritize its proximity, its quality, and whether it provides religious education. Furthermore, the probability of parents prioritizing proximity is higher for parents of low socioeconomic status, while the probability of them prioritizing quality and religious education is higher for parents of high socioeconomic status. These findings show that only advantaged families choose schools based on their quality, and therefore school choice and competition policies may offer a limited benefit for disadvantaged pupils, possibly maintaining or reinforcing socioeconomic segregation in the education system.     

论近代宁夏回族经堂教育的演变及特点

经堂教育产生于明清时期,是我国回族穆斯林接受教育的基本形式。近代以来,宁夏回族经堂教育由以往单一的宗教教育形式逐渐演变为回民小学、中阿学校、阿訇教义国文讲习所、伊斯兰教讲习所等多种形式,呈现出了种类繁多、办学方式多元,课程内容丰富、全面并与伊斯兰教积极互动的特点。近代社会思潮广泛传播的影响、回族的民族觉醒、崇尚求知的民族文化传统、上层人士的努力以及宁夏地方政府的推动作用等是造成近代宁夏回族经堂教育演变的社会、历史性原因。     

一个现实问题的理论关照——流动人口子女教育问题的特征分析及其策略探索

流动人口子女教育问题已经“升级”为一个社会问题。流动人口子女教育包括流动子女教育和留守子女教育两个方面，其问题的焦点分别集中于教育公平和教育质量上。解决流动人口子女教育问题必须坚持“两条腿走路”，即必须依赖学校教育外部力量支持和学校教育内部各环节改革。作为一类社会性教育问题，流动人口子女教育在最大程度上依赖于教育外部力量的支持，但与任何教育问题一样，其深度解决的关键依然在于学校教育内部各环节的改革。     

Middle-class parents’ educational work in an academically selective public high school

This article reports the findings of a study on the nature of parent–school engagement at an academically selective public high school in New South Wales, Australia. Such research is pertinent given recent policies of ‘choice’ and decentralization, making a study of local stakeholders timely. The research comprised a set of interviews with parents and teachers (n = 15), through which parents – all members of the school’s Parents’ and Citizens’ group – theorized and explained their involvement with the school, and teachers spoke about their views on this involvement. Results are organized around three themes: ‘how parents worked to nurture their children’s schooling’, ‘reasons behind parents’ involvement with the school’, and ‘communication and use of parental resources by the school’. Overall it was found that while parents were making significant efforts to involve themselves in the education of their children and with the school more broadly, the reasons for their involvement were not always consistent, but instead revealed a range of motivations for and conceptions of parents’ roles within schools, which at times were at odds with the teachers’. Through this, the study contributes to our understanding of middle-class parent engagement at an unusual and particular type of school.     

Meritocracy,deficit thinking and the invisibility of the system: Discourses on educational success and failure

Socio‐ethnic stratification and segregation processes present in Flemish society are reflected in the everyday school environment. Pupils with a different socio‐ethnic background than the dominant majority and middle class seem to be confronted with a lot of difficulties in this school system. The dominant meritocratic discourse frequently applies a deficit thinking perspective to frame educational success and failure, focusing on deficiencies originating outside of the school. In this paper we analyse newly collected survey data (N = 11,015 pupils) and a large amount of qualitative data (from pupils, parents, teachers, principals) to answer our two main research questions: (i) how is educational success/failure defined, and (ii) how is educational success/failure explained? The factor analyses as well as the qualitative analyses illustrate how the idea of meritocracy relates to individualistic features such as effort, merit and competence. However, the findings also reveal that this individualistic approach goes hand‐in‐hand with a focus on the family environment and ‘culture’ which seems to limit individual agency to a large extent. In these discourses, pupils, parents and even teachers are presented as being largely determined by their direct social environment with almost no regard for social inequalities within the educational system. The paper ends with a discussion on how processes of victimization and the denial of systemic bias, influence educational trajectories and proposes a different approach to multiculturalism and the appreciation of cultural background and specific family resources as positive elements in these trajectories.     

From access to quality: migrant children’s education in urban China

An increasing number of migrant children are involved in public education due largely to the policy for migrant children education outlined by the Government of China from the late 1990s. In this article, we describe the unique and often difficult situation rural migrant children face after they enter urban public schools. Drawing from the Theory of Inclusive Education and data collected at two public junior high schools in Beijing, we provide an in-depth analysis on migrant children’s education from their own viewpoint and from the perspectives of their parents, teachers, and school administrators. Our survey results identify the need for further adjustments of the existing education system which can help improve migrant children’s education in China. Findings also highlight the dilemmas regarding how to best meet the needs for teachers, migrant parents, and migrant children who attend public schools. In order to provide a quality education for migrant children, we conclude by arguing that there must be a three-pronged partnership to best accommodate the unique education needs of migrant children in urban China.     

Choosing schools,choosing selves: exploring the influence of parental identity and biography on the school choice process in Delhi,India

Drawing on qualitative interview data from a group of lower income parents in Delhi, India, this paper focuses on the dynamic relationship between parental choice of a particular school and parents’ own identity construction. The data indicate that choice of school is for some parents a symbolic expression of identity, influenced by family dynamics and parents’ educational biographies. The paper outlines the concept of ‘forging solidarities’ and proposes it as an alternative way of understanding school enrolment decisions that recognises the social significance of such choices for the wider family unit. More generally, as school choice mechanisms in various forms become an increasingly important part of the educational landscape in many countries, the findings draw attention to the sociocultural nature of choice in real-world market settings and the contribution of schooling choices to processes of social and educational segregation.     

中国的译校问题

This article examines school choice, one of the most debated issues in Chinese education beginning in the early 1990s. To start with, it depicts the origin of school choice. Secondly, the main reasons contributing to school choice are analysed: the disparity among schools, political and economic changes, the system of promotion to the next stage of school, and historical and cultural reasons. The reason why schools enrol school choice pupils is also analysed. Then, the reactions of the government to school choice, insisting on the policy of neighbourhood admissions, supporting weak schools, and encouraging the development of nongovernment schools, are analysed. Finally, the debate about school choice is discussed. To sum up, school choice in China is a completely urban phenomenon. It is a demand of social group with high social economic status. While the social gap widens, school choice is an unavoidable issue in education. Therefore, the problem faced by the government is not simply to prohibit it, but how to deal with it.     

Parental Choice and Schooling: some factors influencing Muslim mothers’ decisions about the education of their daughters

In recent years parental choice in education has become an important focus of political debate. Muslim demands for the state funding of Islamic schools have attracted a significant amount of media attention, with opposition sometimes coming from those who argue that such schools are likely to offer limited opportunities to pupils, particularly girls. This article reports on a small‐scale research project which examined the attitudes and values of Muslim women in the UK to their daughters’ education, particularly the basis on which they had selected either a private Islamic school or state primary school. It considers whether the concept of parental choice is a valid one for these women     

Will my child ever go to a university? The link between school segregation practices and Norwegian parents’ expectations for their physically disabled child

How parents perceive their children's educational prospects can reveal a great deal about how their children will progress in the educational system. The paper examines the consequences of variations in inclusive education practices by investigating determinants of parents’ educational expectations for their child. All parents included in the study had children with physical disabilities in primary school (mainly cerebral palsy and spina bifida). The empirical material includes results from a survey (Net sample = 491), in combination with information merged from a range of official registers. The results showed that the more the child is segregated from ordinary classroom education, the lower parental expectations are for their children's educational attainments. Other factors also significantly influencing parents’ educational expectations include how parents’ view their child's school performance, as well as various measures of the severity of the child's physical disability. However, these secondary factors could not account for the empirically strong association between segregation practices and parental expectations. Parental expectations were also significantly related to parental income and education. The findings indicate that the expectations of parents with higher income and education are less affected by school segregation practices.     

异地中考政策促进随迁子女选择高中教育吗

为促进义务后教育公平,国家和地方政府出台了异地中考政策。利用“中国教育追踪调查”基线数据中的1071个九年级随迁子女数据,采用多项分类logistic回归分析方法,实证检验了异地中考政策的不同入学条件对随迁子女高中教育选择的影响作用。研究发现,当异地中考政策的入学门槛为“只能报考普通高中”时,对随迁子女选择普通高中没有显著影响;当异地中考政策的入学门槛为“可报考重点高中”时,对随迁子女选择普通高中具有显著促进作用;当异地中考政策的入学门槛为“不能报考普通高中”时,对随迁子女选择职业高中没有显著促进作用。     

Book reviews

Whilst there is now clearly an expectation upon parents to become more involved in schools and to take a greater part in their children's education, there is still little attempt to address the constraints upon achieving such aims. These constraints have been shown to include social class factors, gender relations, ethnicity and power relationships. This paper will take the analysis of some of these constraints further and, in particular, will focus on the views of working‐class parents on their relationships with, and role in relation to, their children's secondary school. The paper will explore the reasons for the orientation by working‐class parents which would seem to differ markedly from that of middle‐class parents. It will be shown that working‐class parents are committed to their children achieving educational success, and that they perceive their own role as supportive in a variety of ways. However, their position in relation to schools is to view the school as separate from their everyday social and cultural world and that the parent‐teacher role comprises a division of labour. It will be argued that teachers tend to adopt the same strategies for promoting parental involvement irrespective of class, parental needs, individual circumstances, and so on. Hence, because they take no account of differences, and because their strategies are constructed essentially from a logocentric position, then they serve to reinforce the parents’ perception of teachers as the professional ‘who knows best’: as the powerful knower which thus reinforces working‐class parents’ fatalistic view of schooling and their role as passive. The paper draws on data from a three‐year research project into the parents’ relationship with their children's secondary school. The data set which formed the basis of the analysis presented here comprises interviews with 58 parents from one of the case‐study schools which will be known as Acre Lane, and 15 of the school's teachers.