Parents’ school choices and schools’ student choices: a reciprocal relationship?

Introduction: Participation in science and technology education - presenting the challenge and introducing project IRIS.- Section 1:Theoretical perspectives on educational choice.- Chapter 1: Expectancy-value perspectives on STEM choice in late-modern societies.- Chapter 2. A narrative approach to understand students' identities and choices.- Chapter 3: Gender, STEM studies and educational choices. Insights from feminist perspectives.- Section 2: Interest and participation in STEM from primary school to phD.- Chapter 4: STEM attitudes, interests and career choice.- Chapter 5: Science aspirations and gender identity: Lessons from the ASPIRES project.- Chapter 6: The impact of science curriculum content on students' subject choices in post-compulsory schooling.- Chapter 7: A place for STEM: Probing the reasons for undergraduate course choices.- Chapter 8: Short stories of educational choice - in the words of science and technology students.- Chapter 9: Understanding declining science participation in Australia: A systemic perspective.- Chapter 10: Choice patterns of PhD students: why should i pursue a PhD?.- Chapter 11: The impact of outreach and out-of-school activities on Norwegian upper secondary students' STEM motivations.- Section 3: Staying in STEM, leaving STEM?.- Chapter 12: Why do students in stem higher education programmes drop/opt out? Explanations offered from research.- Chapter 13: What makes them leave and where do they go? Non-completion and institutional departures in STEM.- Chapter 14: The first-year experience: Students' encounter with science and engineering programmes.- Chapter 15: Keeping pace. Educational choice motivations and first-year experiences in the words of Italian students.- Section 4: Applying feminist perspectives to understand STEM participation.- Chapter 16: When research challenges gender stereotypes: Exploring narratives of girls' educational choices.- Chapter 17: Italian female and male students' choices: STEM studies and motivations.- Chapter 18: Being a woman in a man's place or being a man in a women's place: insights into students' experiences of science and engineering at university.- Chapter 19: Italian students' ideas about gender and science in late modern societies. interpretations from a feminist perspective.- Section 5: Understanding and improving STEM participation: Conclusions and recommendations.- Chapter 20: Understanding student participation and choice in science and technology education: The contribution of IRIS.- Chapter 21: Improving participation in science and technology higher education: Ways forward.- Appendix: The IRIS questionnaire: Brief account of instrument development, data collection and respondents.

We apply propensity score matching to the estimation of the disparity in school effectiveness between the privately owned, privately funded school sector and the public one in a sample of 25 countries in Europe, America and Asia. This technique allows us to distinguish between school choice and school effectiveness processes and thus, to account for selectivity induced variation in school effectiveness. We find two broad patterns of private independent school choice: the choice as a social class reproduction choice; and the choice of an outsider’s for a good-equipped school. As regards school effectiveness, our results show that, after controlling for selectivity and school choice processes, the initial higher reading scores of students in private-independent schools become comparable to those public schools students in a majority of countries. However, in a few countries average reading scores remain higher in the private independent sector even after introducing controls for school choice induced selectivity. The opposite pattern, namely of higher average reading scores in the public sector has also been found in four countries.

In this document, I try to analyze the effect of free choice in education on the learning of students. By free choice in education, I mean introducing the possibility for students to choose their own curriculum. The document is divided into: a first part, in which I develop a simple model of student choice in education; a second part, in which I review some of the literature on student choice in education, I propose a classification of this literature, and I try to relate it to the model developed in the first part of the document. The contribution of this document to the academic literature is to try to review the literature on student choice and to offer an interpretative tool.

Background: In contrast to the top-down government-designated school choice programmes in many countries, e.g. in the UK and USA in particular, school choice in the Chinese context is a bottom-up movement initiated by parents and is characterised by the payment of a substantial ‘choice fee’ to the preferred school, and by competition by parents through the use of cultural, social and economic capital in order to obtain a place for their child in a preferred school. Purpose: This exploratory study aims to investigate the role of economic capital in the school choice process, i.e. how do parents realise their school choices for their children by financial means and what are the respective financial motivations and rewards of schools and the government in the school choice process? Method: This paper is a report on a case study conducted in Nanning, the capital city of a province in South China where school choice is actively taking place. Questionnaires were distributed to 450 parents from three state junior middle schools of different quality (a first-tier school, a second-tier school and a fourth-tier or below average school) with a response rate of about 80%. Follow-up, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 representative parents (10 from each school) and three administrators (the head teacher of the first-tier school, a middle manager from the second-tier school and another middle manager from the fourth-tier school). Results and conclusion: The research findings indicate that economic capital has played a vital role in helping children to accumulate sufficient cultural capital for admission to oversubscribed schools, which can in turn reduce the required extra payment for preferred schools. As a unique ‘made in China’ product, choice fees paid by parents to the school of their choice have effectively motivated schools and the local government to cooperate with parents in creating a school choice market. In such a money-oriented school choice process, school places constitute the best value for money, as they generate substantial additional income for both the schools taking choice students and the local government. To many parents, such school places are worth buying. as they believe they will increase their children’s chances of entering a first-tier school at the next level of education, and eventually find a high-paid job. However, such highly income-biased school choice tends to exclude children from the working class families and exacerbates the educational inequality that already exists in society.

In the study, the main factors influencing the artistic orientation of the students (choice of art branch and art school) and how families and teachers influence the orientation of students who pursue a career at the field of art have been analyzed. The quantitative data of the study reveal the main factors influencing students’ choice of art branch and art school. The qualitative data obtained from semi-structured interviews provide an in-depth understanding of how families mobilize their cultural, economic and social capital they possess with different degrees and structures and the functioning of this process. In addition, it highlights the various social factors such as recognition of talent by teachers, supporting and guiding talent to choose art education and the resources used in this process. In this study, family has emerged to be a significant source as the initial accumulation of every kind of useful cultural capital and a place of transmission of diverse capitals across generations in the artistic tendency. Students' familiarity with the art field, embodiment of behavior and attitudes have begun in childhood. The artistic characteristics, interests and occupations of the family members were reproduced by the next generations and this also included their school and subject choices. The cultural capital they acquired through the process of family socialization did not only affect the cultural interests, mental tendencies and preferences of the students who chose art, but also shaped their habitus. It also provided an understanding of the “rules of the game” in advance in the field of art and what they should do. In addition, discovering talent at an early age, belief in talents’ ability, supportive and guiding approach of teachers have a decisive influence on the students’ choice of art.

This chapter is concerned with the topic of student choice in higher education. In particular it focuses on ways of strengthening students’ market power and giving more scope for students to have their interests served by the providers of higher education. This topic receives a lot of attention in many societies these days because it is felt that a system that relies heavily on central planning is unable to respond to the needs of an increasingly diverse student clientele. It is generally believed that consumers are better equipped than ever to make their own choices; increasingly consumers possess the wealth, means and skills to make choices that affect their personal wellbeing. To this end many governments have in fact liberalised a large number of the markets that were previously regulated and protected by government. Examples are public utility sectors, telecommunication, electricity, etc. However, the higher education market in many mature economies is still characterised by a great deal of regulation. The question is whether the kind of liberalisation we see in other quasi-public good sectors can be extended to the higher education sector. To what degree does allowing student choice to be accommodated lead to improved educational outcomes? As will be argued in this chapter, the answer to this question will depend heavily on how rational students are, the degree of transparency that exists in the higher education market and the way the government has shaped the funding and framework conditions for this market. Before addressing the effects of various initiatives to strengthen student choice in higher education we will present a model that incorporates the various factors that shape student choice. This is done in the next section. Of these factors the ones of concern will be those relating to government policy – the institutional factors that shape student choice. After presenting the broader concepts and the theoretical model that ties them together, a number of specific issues that relate to student choice will be addressed, namely:

The movement toward choice is the first step in a movement toward getting the incentives right in educationincentives for both the suppliers of educational services, that is, schools and their teachers, and for the consumers of education, that is, parents and children. The incentives for schools that a voucher system would introduce would include an interest in attracting and keeping the best students they could. The incentives for parents and students would include the ability to get into schools they find attractive and to remain in those schools. These incentives already exist, of course, but in the absence of choice by parents and schools, they can be implemented only by moving. That is, parents can implement their interests by moving to a school district or attendance zone within their financial reach that they find most attractive. Principals and teachers can implement their interests only by trying to get transferred to a school with a student body that is more to their liking. The results are unfortunate in several respects. For both the schools and the parents and child, an important incentive to improve is missing: The school cannot attract students by improving itself and cannot dismiss students who do not live up to its standards, and the student and parents have no incentive to perform and behave well for the student to be in the school they aspire to. This absence of appropriate incentives on both sides of the educational process means that an important source of educational improvement is missing. A second consequence of the absence of choice in education is that there is extensive stratification of schools, but unlike the comparison used by Astin of Caltech and low-status colleges, this stratification is based entirely on income and race. For example, the incomes of parents of children at New Trier High School in a wealthy Chicago suburb differ far more from those at Chicago's inner-city Dunbar High School than do those at the most selective colleges from those at the least selective. The result of choice in elementary and secondary education, whether confined to the public sector or including the private sector through vouchers, would not be to increase stratification; it would be to replace the current stratification by income and race by a stratification based on students' performance and behavior. To be sure, students' performance and behavior are correlated with income and race, but they are a different basis for stratification that both changes the grounds on which the competition for schools and students takes place and reduces the stratification by income and race. To use an example introduced by Astin, the top students at the selective Bronx High School of Science in New York City (as well as the student body as a whole) are far more diverse in income and race than are the top students (or all students) at New Trier High School or any other suburban school in North Shore Chicago. (I use Chicago-area schools as an example because I am familiar with them, but nearly comparable stratification can be found in almost any large metropolitan area in the United States.) It is perhaps time to be straightforward about stratification among schools more generally. Numerous scholars inveigh against choice on grounds of inequality or stratification, as does Astin.

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.

This article investigates the school choice practices of middle-class[1] parents. It aims to find out what kind of strategies and practices parents have in the school choice process. For this aim, data were obtained through interviews with parents of students attending a primary school in an affluent area in Ankara. The results of the study show that parents with adequate economic, social and cultural capital are influential in their children's educational processes and develop various strategies for school choice. They strive to choose the best school they think will contribute to their children in gaining a better position in the labour market in the future. It is noteworthy that the most important factor in primary school choice is teacher quality. This is followed by features such as the location of the school, teacher-student relationship, security and the physical facilities in the school. The social capital of parents has an important part in the school choice process and the social networks in which they are involved determine the school choice processes considerably. Since the enrolment of students in primary schools in Turkey is address-based, parents wishing to enrol their children in other schools develop various strategies during the enrolment process, notably “address change”. [1] Although defining middle class is quite difficult and controversial, an operational definition can be made with reference to lifestyle, education, occupation, income, culture and consumption habits. In this study, middle class refers to people who are educated, having a profession, having middle income, living in an affluent area and joining cultural activities.

Background High school choice policies attempt to improve the educational outcomes of poor and minority students by allowing access to high school beyond neighborhood boundaries. These policies assume that given a choice, families will be able to select a school that supports their child's learning and promotes educational attainment. However, research on the effects of public school choice programs on the academic achievement of disadvantaged students is mixed, suggesting that families do not necessarily respond to these programs in ways that policymakers intend. Purpose The purpose of this article is to identify how family and neighborhood contexts interact with public school choice policies to shape the educational opportunities of inner-city students. Specifically, we ask: What criteria are used to choose schools? What are the implications of these school choice decisions for students’ future educational and occupational opportunities? Research Design We use data from interviews and fieldwork conducted with 118 low-income African American youth ages 15–24 who attended Baltimore City Public Schools at some point during their high school career. Research on school choice tends to rely on data from parents, and we offer a unique contribution by asking youth themselves about their experiences with school choice. Conclusions Although school choice policies assume that parents will guide youths’ decision about where to go to high school, the majority of youth in our sample were the primary decision makers in the high school choice process. Additionally, these youth made these choices under considerable constraints imposed by the district policy and by their family, peers, and academic background. As a result, the youth often selected a school within a very limited choice set and chose schools that did not necessarily maximize their educational opportunity. Our results demonstrate that school choice policies must take into account the social context in which educational decisions are made in order to maximize chances for students’ individual academic achievement and to decrease inequality by race and social class.

The international branch campus has emerged as a prominent feature on the international higher education landscape. Although there exists a fairly substantial body of literature that has sought to identify the motivations or choice criteria used by international students to select countries and institutions, there has to date been little research on student motivations for studying at an international branch campus. This quantitative study, using the push-pull model of international student destination choice as its theoretical framework, involved 320 undergraduate and postgraduate students studying at branch campuses in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It was found that the main motivations of students who choose to study at an international branch campus are different to those students who choose to study at home campuses. Thus, we propose a revised model of international student destination choice, which incorporates two distinct sets of push and pull factors—one that applies to the home campuses of Western universities and one that applies to international branch campuses. In addition to developing the theory on international student choice, our findings may be used by higher education institutions to better understand both their existing and potential students, with the view to applying segmentation techniques in their marketing activities.

Socioeconomic differences among low-income and racially minoritized students may be consequential for understanding the dynamics of school choice—especially in high-poverty and racially segregated urban contexts that are often targeted by school choice policies. Yet school choice research largely focuses on differences between groups and relies on measures that broadly categorize students as low-income or not. Drawing on parent interviews in Detroit, this study describes socioeconomic differences among low-income and racially minoritized families and examines how those differences relate to their engagement in the school choice process. While families faced a similar landscape of choice, relied on similar types of resources, and did not have drastically different preferences, relative socioeconomic disadvantages translated to more constrained access and engagement in school choice.

The existence and development of public schools is influenced by a plethora of factors. Through the creation of education policies, any state education system is striving to accomplish specific goals. Both informal and formal private schooling is taking the lead in all cultures and societies. Unmistakably, the distinction between private and public schools is evident. However, given the different circumstances, choosing the best alternative for a child is regularly a fervently discussed topic among parents. There is no universal answer to the question whether private schools are actually better than or superior to the public schools. Our research aimed to describe the school choice process, it focuses on unveiling the factors and their interrelation while the parent choosing between two types of schools—private and public. First of all, the research aims to describe the parent’s perception of achieving success at school, what is the base for such belief, what the sentence—“School—base of future success” actually mean. How important is so called social index? The significance of the reputation and prestige of the educational institution during school choice process—as a guarantee for future success. The key questions for the research were as follows: (1) How interested the parents are to be actively involved in school choice process and spend certain period of time for that? (2) What factors are considered by the parents during school choice and what is the source they receive information from? (3) Does the family’s socioeconomic condition and the kids gender have influence on the process? It’s worth mentioning that, generally the research results fully coincide with the school choice theory arguments and the research findings conducted in the similar field. All these are described and presented in the first part of the article. The probabilities listed on the base of the current data, that the information source, the parent’s information level, the parents’ engagement as well as the family’s socioeconomic and demographic status play integral role in the school choice process appeared to be genuine. Apparently, the parents are much interested to provide perfect future for their kids, though socioeconomic conditions, environment, poor educational system limits their choice. Once our results compared to the existing literature and theory, one can see that our study conducted in Georgia follows the trends of the developed countries, known as the “Heyneman-Loxley effect.”

Many of the chapters in this volume provide reviews of the existing research literature. In this chapter we focus on what the research studies presented in this book have contributed to our understanding of students’ educational choices. The nature of these contributions is varied. Many findings corroborate existing research insights, or explore existing perspectives in new educational contexts or across distinct geographical and cultural settings. In some cases our work challenges prevalent accounts of students’ educational choices. This chapter has five themes: theoretical perspectives; choice as a continuous process; the role of identity and social structure; gender; and methodological insights. We end with suggestions for the future development of research into student participation and choice

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.