Racial Preferences for Schools: Evidence from an Experiment with White, Black, Latinx, and Asian Parents and Students

Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents’ and students’ willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics potentially correlated with race, white and Asian families preferred white schools over black and Latinx schools, Latinx families preferred Latinx schools over black schools, and black families preferred black schools over white schools. Results, importantly, demonstrate that racial composition has larger effects on white and Latinx parents’ preferences compared with white and Latinx students and smaller effects on black parents compared with black students. To ensure results were not an artifact of experimental conditions, I validate findings using administrative data on New York City families’ actual school choices in 2013. Both analyses establish that families express heterogenous racialized school preferences.

School segregation and native flight. Quasi-experimental evidence from Norway

Ethnic or racial segregation in schools and neighborhoods remains a persistent reality in most major cities in Western countries. Although extensively theorized, determining the exact mechanisms that produce such patterns has proven difficult. In this article, we investigate one of the potential causes of ethnic segregation in schools; native flight motivated by parents’ school preferences. Both observational and experimental evidence suggests that native or White parents have a strong preference for racially or ethnically homogeneous schools. If this is the case, this may strongly contribute to school segregation. In contexts where school enrollment is determined primarily by geographic proximity to schools, such preferences may prompt White or native parents to move away from schools with high racial or ethnic minority shares among students, thus contributing to both residential and school segregation. Drawing on extremely detailed, population-wide, geo-coded register data on families and school catchment areas for elementary schools in Oslo, the capital of Norway, we investigate whether native parents move away from schools with higher shares students with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. We employ a Geographic Regression Discontinuity (GRD) design by exploiting the fact that within neighborhoods, the characteristics of schools differ discontinuously along school catchment area borders. The results indicate that native origin families systematically move away from schools with high shares of students with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. This process likely contributes to both school segregation and residential segregation.

School choice and post hoc family preference in Spain: Do they match up?

The process of school choice depends on a wide range of circumstances including those related to the accessibility to schools and parental preferences. This paper has three goals: (1) Identify whether the preferences for the different kinds of schools (public, publicly-funded private, or private) vary according to the family’s traits; (2) estimate the degree of concurrence between the kind of school their children attend and the kind of school the parents prefer a posteriori; and (3) identify which social groups demonstrate lower levels of concurrence. We used a sub-sample of people with children registered in compulsory grades or post-compulsory grades up to university from representative national survey (2012). Results show that post hoc school preferences differ by educational level, economic status, religious orientation, and size of town. Likewise, we find divergences between the school parents prefer and the school their children attend, something that occurs more frequently among those with less economic resources.

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.

Opting for Private Education: Public Subsidy Programs and School Choice in Disadvantaged Contexts

Sociological research on school choice has mostly been dominated by studies analyzing the experiences of middle-class families rather than marginalized or minority populations. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic case study research, this article explores the school choice experiences of disadvantaged families accessing publicly subsidized low-fee private schools (S-LFPSs) in Buenos Aires. We built a bounded-rationality framework to understand how disadvantaged families deal with structural constraints and negotiate their preferences to produce different, but predominantly reflexive rationalities of school preferences. In detailing our findings, we intend to provide “a realistic look at the cognitive and social processes of choice making” while addressing the equity implications of these dynamics—that is, whether S-LFPSs increase educational opportunities for students in economically disadvantaged areas or not—and problematizing the gaps, ambiguities, and enforcement shortcomings of the public subsidy for private schools’ policy.