Race, Geography, and School Choice Policy: A Critical Analysis of Detroit Students’ Suburban School Choices

The purpose of this study is to advance our thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice policy. To do so, we present a critical race spatial analysis of Detroit students’ suburban school choices. To frame our study, we describe the racial and spatial dynamics of school choice, drawing in particular on the concepts of opportunity hoarding and predatory landscapes. We find that Detroit students’ suburban school choices were circumscribed by racial geography and concentrated in just a handful of schools and districts. We also find notable differences between students in different racial groups. For all Detroit exiters, their schools were significantly more segregated and lower quality than those of their suburban peers. We propose future directions for research on families’ school choices as well as school and district behavior at the intersection of race, geography, and school choice policy.

The Shape of Educational Equity

This chapter provides an overview of the benefits of utilizing geographic information systems (GIS) to explore the intersections of school choice policy, educational equity, space, and race. The author discusses the theory of racial space, a framework for understanding the complex interactions between spatial processes and race. Additionally, the author offers an overview of GIS functionality and discusses research that incorporates GIS as a tool to examine the role of charter schools in shaping educational opportunities and outcomes across neighborhoods, cities, and states. Finally, this chapter will introduce emerging research areas and interdisciplinary research approaches, including advanced geospatial techniques, used to examine the intersections of geography and educational equity.

School Choice in Chile

In “School Choice in Chile,” Correa et al. describe the design and implementation of the new school admissions system in Chile. The design, based on the celebrated work of Gale, Shapley, and Roth, involves several challenges to comply with the Chilean legislation. For instance, the system includes different priorities and quotas for different groups of students. Moreover, the system operates nationwide and in all grade levels. As a result of the latter, one of the primary goals was to favor the joint assignment of siblings to the same schools. To accomplish this, the authors propose a heuristic approach that dynamically updates preferences, and breaks ties at the family level to increase the probability that siblings are assigned to the same school. The system, introduced in 2016 and still in use today, serves more than half a million students each year.

Neighborhood, Segregation, and School Choice

Over the past few decades, school choice has been a widely debated issue around the globe, following the development of pluralism, liberty, and democracy. In many countries, school choice systems were preceded by residence-based school assignment systems, creating a strong connection between a neighborhood and its schools’ demographic compositions. However, schools often remain highly segregated. School segregation is thus seen as a major problem and is supposedly driven by three main factors: residential segregation, parental school choice, and schools’ selection of pupils. This paper aims to shed light on what research should be focusing on as regards school choice and residential segregation with the following two research questions: What are the links between neighborhood and school choice in the literature? How are neighborhood and school choice connected to school segregation in the literature? Two main findings emerged: (1) the neighborhood-based social networks that parents developed had limited their school choices and (2) neighborhood segregation is one of the most important factors that contributes to school segregation and is related to multi-ethnic and socioeconomic contexts.

The opportunity structure of segregation: School choice and school segregation in Sweden

It is a matter of debate whether free school choice should lead to higher or lower levels of school segregation. We investigate how school choice opportunities affect school segregation utilizing geocoded Swedish population register data with information on 13 cohorts of ninth graders. We find that local school choice opportunities strongly affect the sorting of students across schools based on the parents’ country of birth and level of education. An increase in the number of local schools leads to higher levels of local segregation net of stable area characteristics, and time-varying controls for population structure and local residential segregation. In particular, the local presence of private voucher schools pushes school segregation upwards. The segregating impact of school choice opportunities is notably stronger in ‘native’ areas with high portions of highly educated parents, and in areas with low residential segregation. Our results point to the importance of embedding individual actors in relevant opportunity structures for understanding segregation processes.

Charting the Rise of School Choice across Canadian Provinces: A Policy Index

This article introduces and discusses the findings of the Canada School Choice Policy Index (CSCPI). This is the first index of its kind that measures the development of school choice policies across the Canadian provinces from 1980 to 2020 using eight unique indicators of choice. In contrast to other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the CSCPI reveals that although Canada has witnessed an increase in school choice over time, this increase has largely been contained within public education systems rather than in the expansion of private education options. Our findings raise the importance of future research to address growing choice in public education systems across the provinces, in addition to choice in the private sphere.

Historical Analysis of School Choice in Ontario: Freedom and Inequality

The article analyzes the contemporary school choice debate in Ontario in relation to the neoliberal models of education instituted by other provinces, and places key issues of the debate within Canada’s historical context. In the first section, this paper focuses on tracing out the push for neoliberal school choice in Ontario within the broader history of its development in Canada, with particular attention to Alberta and British Columbia. The second section examines two aspects of the school choice debate: the issues of freedom of choice, as well as racial and social inequality. Finally, these aspects of school choice are placed alongside Milton Friedman’s voucher school model and the history of education in Ontario. This juxtaposition reveals some of the regulations needed to mitigate the harmful effects of school choice in Ontario.