Public schools of choice are fast becoming part of national educational debate and practice. This article presents an empirical test of the claim that choice encourages something other than standardized education. We draw our data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. Our analyses center on questions at the heart of curriculum studies: What knowledge is of most worth and what principles of practice govern work with curricular content? Using multiple measures of curriculum content and of the procedures governing work with that content, we find little support for the argument that public school choice, as currently implemented, is an inventive mechanism for altering the academic lives of students and teachers.
