Parental School Choice Research Articles

Faith-Inspired Muslim Parents’ School Choices and Attitudes in the Cultural West and Australia

All parents want the best accessible, available and affordable school for their children. Yet, the literature highlights that school choice for middle-class parents in the cultural West is a deliberate decision and a reflection of their salient identities. For racialised middle-class Western parents, school choice is an instrumental investment to secure social upward mobility and minimise the harms of racism for their children. Research focusing on Western middle-class Muslim parents highlights that accommodation of Muslim identities and ethno-religious values is pivotal in parental school choice. This is expected due to the rise of Islamophobia in the cultural West since 9/11. The semi-structured interviews with faith-inspired middle-class Muslim parents in Australia bring a new dimension to the parental school choice literature. Regardless of carrying more or less similar concerns for their children in an Islamophobic climate, middle-class Muslim parents’ school choices vary based on their childhood schooling experiences in the Australian context, diverse parenting styles and mentalities and their children’s varying personalities demanding a particular type of school setting. This article demonstrates there is no one size fits all Muslim parent in terms of deciding which school is the best for their children in an Islamophobic climate.

The influence of parental demographics on school choice decision-making in Western Gauteng, South Africa

Major political changes since 1994 have initiated the pace of change in the South African education system. Parents’ values, traditions and practices that served in the past were no longer relevant in the new dynamic educational environment. Parental school choice and “the right to choose” movement has subsequently come to the fore. The purpose of this article elucidates findings regarding the demographics of active school choice engagement among middle class parents in Western Gauteng, South Africa. The study, situated in the Gauteng province, South Africa, followed a conclusive research design with a post positivist paradigm. Parent questionnaires were distributed to different types of urban schools to establish the perceptions of parents regarding the factors, anxieties, aspirations and strategies influencing school choice decision-making. Findings reveal that language, income and education not only have a definitive influence on active school choice engagement but also affect the level of importance attached to specific school choice factors. Education in South Africa can thus be viewed as a unique complex system embedded in a political, cultural and economic context.

A review and evaluation of secondary school accountability in England: Statistical strengths, weaknesses and challenges for 'Progress 8' raised by COVID-19.

School performance measures are published annually in England to hold schools to account and to support parental school choice. This article reviews and evaluates the ‘Progress 8’ secondary school accountability system for state‐funded schools. We assess the statistical strengths and weaknesses of Progress 8 relating to: choice of pupil outcome attainment measure; potential adjustments for pupil input attainment and background characteristics; decisions around which schools and pupils are excluded from the measure; presentation of Progress 8 to users, choice of statistical model, and calculation of statistical uncertainty; and issues related to the volatility of school performance over time, including scope for reporting multi‐year averages. We then discuss challenges for Progress 8 raised by the COVID‐19 pandemic. Six simple recommendations follow to improve Progress 8 and school accountability in England. Context and implicationRationale for this studyThis study fulfils a need for a comprehensive statistical evaluation of the Progress 8 school accountability system in England, which has been in place since 2016.Why the new findings matterA review of Progress 8 is an important contribution as decisions on its calculation and presentation have important consequences for schools and pupils.Implications for educational researchers and policy makersOur findings on the statistical strengths and weaknesses of Progress 8 and the resulting recommendations made for improvements to the measure and school accountability have clear implications for informing policy makers in the educational system. This includes wider lessons extending beyond Progress 8 to other performance metrics and to other school systems internationally where similar issues apply. Additionally, the review highlights key concerns that the public and school practitioners may like to consider when drawing upon Progress 8 to make decisions around school choice and in assessing how well a school is performing.

Enacting performance-based accountability in a Southern European school system: between administrative and market logics

Performance-based accountability (PBA) policies are increasingly adopted in a wide range of education systems in order to reform school governance and to improve students’ results and schools’ performance. Countries around the world have been implementing national large-scale assessments to make school actors more accountable and responsible for students’ results. This policy model has been generalized in countries with different administrative traditions, including those with a short tradition in New Public Management. This is the case in Spain, where PBA has been adopted unevenly in different regions, with Madrid being one of the earliest adopters. In recent decades, Madrid has developed a model that combines administrative test-based accountability with a system of broad parental school choice, which also facilitates the activation of market forms of accountability. However, the combination and interaction between market and administrative forms of accountability is understudied. This paper adopts a policy enactment perspective to analyze, through a case study approach, the interaction of administrative and market forms of accountability and its enactment at the school level. The case study is based on a set of 41 semi-structured interviews with teachers, principals, and school inspectors in a sample of eight schools in Madrid, combined with document analysis of school educational projects and improvement plans. The evidence suggests that administrative and market forms of accountability tend to generate dynamics of interdependence, resulting in increasing external pressures which schools tend to address with superficial responses, including teaching to the test, or second-order competition between schools.

The Factors Impacting Parental Choice in Picking Non-public Schools for Their Children

The purpose of the study was to investigate the school related factors influencing parental choice of private schools in the city of Bangalore. The study intended to analyze factors affecting parents’ choice of private schools in Bangalore, to discuss the extent to which various factors influence parents’ choice of private schools. The study used descriptive survey design. The target population of this study consisted of all parents of students studying in private primary schools in the city of Bangalore. A total sample of 180 parents was drawn purposively from Bangalore. The tool used for collecting the data was a self-constructed questionnaire which included 32 statements were prepared on the basis of a 5-point Likert scale. The study identified seven distinct factors affecting the parents’ decision of choosing a private school. Among these the factor that was seen to have most significant influence on parent’s decision to choose a private was school environment. The second most important factor that parent’s considered was the School quality. Third, parents considered curricular activities offered by school. Next, parents considered Quality of instruction while choosing a school. However, student welfare, parental involvement and proximity to the area of residence were considered less important by parents when choosing a school.

A parental school choice misery: Middle class parents’ dilemma in choosing a primary school in Berlin’s multi-ethnic neighborhoods

Abstract To follow up on research conducted in several countries, in this paper, we look at the dilemmas middle-class parents face of being “good parents” by choosing the “best” school with a milieu-related environment for their child versus being “good citizens” by choosing a “local” public school with a large proportion of students from a working-class or migrant background. Analyzing semi-structured interviews with parents, the paper explores whether and how parents in Germany’s capital city of Berlin refer to this dilemma concerning primary school choice and how they resolve it and justify their decision. The parents interviewed applied strategies in deciding to be “good parents” or “good citizens” or at least to make it easier to solve the dilemma. All the strategies presented in other studies can be found in our sample as well. In addition, we identified two more parental strategies: the strategy of downward comparison and the strategy of choosing a private school. It is notable that the perceived proportion of children with a migrant background in the neighborhood played a major role in relation to the dilemma and the strategies chosen.

La influencia de la fama de las escuelas en la elección de centro escolar de las familias: un analisis etnográfico

La libertad de elección de centro de las familias ocupa un lugar central en la política pública educativa en nuestro contexto de cuasimercado escolar, aunque diversas voces afirman que es un factor que explica la segregación escolar en nuestro contexto. Nos preguntamos por el papel que desempeñan las representaciones sobre las escuelas —la «fama»— en la elección familiar y en qué medida se relaciona con la desigual distribución del alumnado. Presentamos los resultados de una etnografía con perspectiva holística y macroetnográfica realizada en tres áreas urbanas de la Comunidad de Madrid: el distrito de Usera en la capital y las ciudades de Leganés y Majadahonda, elegidas por sus diferencias en renta y presencia de población de origen extranjero. Las técnicas utilizadas han sido la observación participante y entrevistas en profundidad, analizado los datos según el método de análisis por categorización. La fama nos muestra que las «buenas razones» de la elección familiar se construyen y validan en la interacción cara-a-cara, en momentos y espacios de la vida cotidiana. Lo microsocial es la escala donde se construye la fama de un centro escolar y donde se van formando las decisiones familiares. La fama tiene que ver especialmente con la composición de la población escolar y la titularidad, y muestra la clasificación y jerarquía de las escuelas de la zona a la vez que guía las estrategias familiares de evitación hacia determinados grupos sociales. El estudio refuerza la idea de que la libertad de elección de centro favorece la segregación escolar, aunque cuestiona la centralidad de la segregación residencial como factor explicativo de la segregación escolar. Las relaciones entre los grupos sociales que subyacen a las imágenes de la fama evidencian que para explicar la segregación en el sistema educativo se ha de estudiar el efecto en la vida escolar de la estructura social y la sociabilidad en el territorio. 

Hispanic, English Learner, and Low-Income Parental Magnet Middle School Choice in a Majority Hispanic California Community

Prior research suggests that parents of Hispanics, English learners, and students living in poverty exercise school choice less frequently than other parents, which may be a factor in the resegregation of public schools. This quasi-experimental, causal–comparative design tests whether ethnicity, language dominance, or socioeconomic status of the student are related to the exercise of parental choice of magnet middle school programs in a majority, minority community. The primary finding was that in this Hispanic, English learner, low-income majority California community, none of the independent variables studied predicted the exercise of parental magnet school choice. The discussion compares these findings with prior studies and suggests some possible explanations.

DETERMINANTS OF PARENTAL CHILD’S SCHOOL PREFERENCES IN QATAR

Purpose: The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of “Quality Education”, “Developing Better Social Skills”, “Homework Assignment”, “Using Private Tutors”, “Charging School Fees” and “Nationality” on “Parental School Preference” using primary data collected from preparatory and secondary school teachers in Qatar.
 Methodology: The population for this study consists of all parents in Qatar. The current study used a very large stratified sample size n = 1462 that was determined by the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) using a 95% confidence interval estimate. The nine items used in this study are part of a huge questionnaire measuring attitude and parental child’s school preferences. Kaisers-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test and the Bartless test of sphericity were used to determine the appropriateness of using factor analysis. What are more; principal axis factoring and oblique rotation extracted three factors?
 Main findings: The representative sample Factor analysis extracted three dimensions (quality education, developing better social skills, homework assignment). The dependent variable (parental school choice) was regressed on the factor scores of these three extracted dimensions in addition to four independent variables (school fees, nationality, repeating a school grade, and parents’ disappointment if their child doesn’t go far in school). The results revealed that parental school choice is significantly determined by three explanatory variables: the quality of education, school fees, and nationality.
 Implications: Raising standards for teachers should be a key element in educational quality. What’s more, in the spirit of findings the policymakers in Qatar should make funding part of school fees for expatriates a priority.
 Novelty: This article empirically correlates two main fields of educational research: Parental School Choice is given Quality of Education, Charging School Fees, and Nationality.

The Mediating Role of Students’ Perception of Parental Behaviours between Parental Attachment and School Choice Exploration

This study aimed to explore the relationships between students’ perception of parental behaviours towards their children’s choice, parental attachment and students’ exploration when choosing a school. Participants included 1851 pre-adolescents attending some public middle schools’ third classes. They completed the adaptation to school choices of the Exploration of Vocational Issue Scale—the SIL Scale—to evaluate the students’ perceptions of their parents’ career-related behaviours and the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment to evaluate the parental relationships. The results showed significant relationships between communication, parental trust and parental alienation in regard to the exploration of choosing a school. Furthermore, the three perceived parental behaviours (support, interference and lack of engagement) partially mediated the relationship between parental attachment and exploration. The study suggests that a good attachment relationships encourages students to explore their own opportunity to choose the best schooling option only if they feel supported and not bypassed by their parents.

Hierarchies of Access in Schooling: An Exploration of Parental School Choice in Haryana

The parental schooling choice in India has tilted in favour of private schools in a big way and preference for English medium has been highlighted as the main driving force behind this trend. This article analyses the school choice where both private as well as government schools offer education in English and Hindi medium. Based on the primary field survey and secondary data analysis, the article argues that the introduction of English medium in government schools has impacted the village school market significantly as it has led to the closure of three out of four private schools. However, we found that the availability of English medium school is not the sole determinant of school choice. A sharp difference in the profile of students enrolled in the government-run Hindi and English medium schools suggest that caste, gender and economic status also play a significant role in school choice.

School choice and the city: Geographies of allocation and segregation

Urban research has increasingly acknowledged the significance of the social and spatial composition of schools in the broader socio-spatial dynamics of cities overall. With increasingly marketised education systems, parental choice of school is a key mechanism affecting wider urban processes such as gentrification. Most research into school choice in cities concentrates on the dynamics of choice (how and what parents say they choose). Fewer studies deal with the relationship between choice and the subsequent allocation of pupils to schools. This paper reports the findings of an international systematic review of the connections between parental choice and pupil allocation in school choice systems across the globe. We find that school choice is associated with higher levels of segregation of pupils from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds between schools. This finding is consistent across all types of choice mechanism, in different countries and cities, and across choice systems that have been in place for different lengths of time. The reasons behind the observed relationship are, however, highly localised and contextual, including particularities of the choice mechanism, social composition of neighbourhoods and mix of school types in a city. Increases in between-school segregation may lead to schools being more homogeneous in their social composition, with broader implications for social cohesion and educational inequalities in cities. Relating the findings to the broader urban school literatures, we suggest that scales and geographies of allocation are critical in understanding the dilemmas and dynamics of choice, the resultant inequalities, and any proposed interventions or solutions to reduce these inequalities.

School choice and private schooling: a comparative case-study between Greece and Sweden

Over the past three decades, privatisation and school choice have been introduced and embodied in the vocabulary of several national education policies. This study aiming to examine the phenomenon of private schooling and the factors that affect parental school choice outlined a comprehensive framework of the national policies about private schools and school choice in Greece and Sweden. The case study design of the research provided an in-depth exploration of the two national contexts, enriching the study with empirical data. Twenty semi-structured interviews with education professionals and parents from both countries shed light on the reasons behind the school choice towards private schools. Regarding the findings of the research, several kinds of educational inequalities and social segregation were identified because of the fact that not all parents have access to school choice under equal terms.
 Keywords: School choice, private education, human capital theory, human rights theory, capability approach

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

ABSTRACTThe 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.

Key Factors Influencing Parental Choice of School for their Children in Namakkal District

Key Factors Influencing Parental Choice of School for their Children in Namakkal District

Ethnic boundaries and everyday understanding: The case of Malay and Chinese parental choice of National and National Type School in Peninsular Malaysia

Since the pre-independence era, the Malaysian schooling system has remained ethnicized by two cultural boundaries: language and religion. To explain this situation, this article focuses on how these ethnic boundaries work within Malay and Chinese parents’ decisions for National and National Type of Schools, respectively. Thirty Malaysian Malays and 25 Chinese students born between the 1970s and the 1990s were interviewed in this research. The data showed that the majority of them had been enrolled in a primary and secondary school which could be associated with their ethnic identity. Analysis of the findings also suggested that despite the importance of future career planning, regionality and family socioeconomic background in the choice of schooling, it was the language and religious factors which had determined their parents’ final decision. It also suggested that a schooling pattern based on the factors of language and religion has been sustainably maintained for three decades. The parental decision was not a simple action as it is also related to the ‘everyday’ understanding of what kind of school is appropriate to a particular ethnic group. The results of this study offer a theoretical explanation of ethnicity in everyday life from the constructivist perspective. This study also highlights how ethnic boundaries are the end-product of a social process rather than a taken-for-granted, natural and primordial fact of life ascribed through birth. Keywords : boundaries, cultural boundaries, ethnicity, primary school, schooling decision, secondary school

Onderwijsvrijheid in Vlaanderen en in Nederland

In Belgium and the Netherlands, most schools are state-funded, faith-based (mainly Roman Catholic and Protestant) schools, but today this majority of Christian schools is no longer in accordance with the religious view of many parents and students. This, in turn, can lead to a restriction of parental school choice. In this contribution, we will focus on the differences between the Flemish and the Dutch education systems and argue why, in spite of a comparative legal and financial framework, the Dutch educational system is, compared to the Flemish system, better able to guarantee this school choice. The main reasons for this claim are (1) the diversity between different faith-based schools in the Netherlands compared to a more or less mono-religious model in Flanders; (2) the diversity within faith-based schools in the Netherlands, compared to the centralized governance of most Flemish faith-based (Catholic) schools; and (3) the policy of including religious symbols in most Dutch schools, versus a policy of exclusion in most Flemish schools.

Impact of publicly available vaccination rates on parental school and child care choice

ObjectiveSeveral states require schools and child cares to report vaccination rates, yet little is known about the impact of these policies. Our objectives were to assess: (1) predicted impact of vaccination rates on school/child care choice, (2) differences between vaccine hesitant and non-hesitant parents, and (3) differences by child’s age. MethodsIn 2016, a cross-sectional email survey of Colorado mothers with children ≤12 years old assessed value of vaccination rates in the context of school/child care choice. A willingness-to-pay framework measured preference for schools/child cares with different vaccination rates using tradeoff with commute time. ResultsResponse rate was 42% (679/1630). Twelve percent of respondents were vaccine hesitant. On a scale where 1 is “not important at all” and 4 is “very important” parents rated the importance of vaccination rates at 3.08. Respondents (including vaccine-hesitant respondents) would accept longer commutes to avoid schools/child cares with lower vaccination rates. Parents of child-care-age children were more likely to consider vaccination rates important. ConclusionsThis study shows parents highly value vaccination rates in the context of school and child care choice. Both hesitant and non-hesitant parents are willing to accept longer commute times to protect their children from vaccine-preventable diseases.

English Schools with a Religious Ethos: For a Re-Interpretation of Religious Autonomy

Abstract Rooted in a principle of non-interference in matters of religious beliefs, supported by an ideology of parental school choice, faith state schools in England have enjoyed a large discretion to promote their religious ethos. Recent judicial and legislative interventions into the affairs of religious schools may be criticized as they betray these philosophical roots, without offering an alternative coherent justificatory model for law and religion relationships. By seeking to remove the allegedly socially or racially divisive edge of religious autonomy, these interventions have provoked an unwarranted and inconsistent mingling of the secular and the religious. Moreover, they have imposed a form of state governance which has reinforced religious authorities to the detriment of the autonomy of local stakeholders, parents and schools. It is claimed that a more deliberative and contextual re-interpretation of the principle of religious autonomy in English law would lead to less confrontational and more acceptable outcomes.

Patterns of School Choice: Two Districts in St. Petersburg

Parental choice of primary school is analyzed using the example of local education systems in two districts of Saint Petersburg. The empirical basis of the research is provided by the results of a survey of parents conducted in 34 schools (1,055 respondents). The following data is described and compared successively: whether parents make educational choices at all, whether they consider alternative options, what school characteristics they believe to be important, what sources of information they use, and what actions they take. The study explores how characteristics of choice are related to parental education and socioeconomic status as well as to the fact of selecting a school of a specific status. Insight is provided not only into how the desire of parents to analyze all possible school options and sources of information correlates with their educational and socioeconomic backgrounds in general but also how parental choice is affected by neighborhood structural characteristics (school diversity, proportion of higher-status schools). Districts with broader structural opportunities and a larger middle class demographic feature a variety of choice strategies, which is not observed in districts with limited structural opportunities even if they are socioeconomically heterogeneous.