Deconstructing School Choice: Problem Schools or Problem Students?

• Date: 01 January 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2010.02309.x
• Published date: 01 January 2011
• Author: Thomas Rabovsky

School Choice

as a Public

Administration

Puzzle

Thomas Rabovsky is a graduate student

in political science at the University of Okla-

homa. His primary research interests include

education policy and public management,

and he is particularly interested in policies

that affect minority student outcomes in

both K–12 and higher education.

E-mail: trabovsky@ou.edu

Deconstructing School Choice 87

Thomas Rabovsky

University of Oklahoma

School choice has developed into one of the most

contentious policy debates in K–12 education.

Proponents argue that choice leads to competition among

schools, thereby raising school quality for all students,

while opponents claim that school choice often results

in racial segregation and worsens inequity.  e  ndings

of this study, collected from qualitative interviews with

school administrators and quantitative analysis of

school performance and enrollment data, suggest that a

common form of school choice, intradistrict transfer, may

not always have the desired impacts on administrators,

particularly with regard to intradistrict transfer

programs. In addition, the author  nds important

di erences in criteria that shape transfer decisions at

di erent grade levels, and in the factors that shape the

decision to transfer away from a school versus those that

in uence decisions about which school to transfer into.

Over the past 25 years, a number of scholars

have advocated a shift toward policies that

seek to use market forces of competition

in order to make public agencies and bureaucracies

run more e ciently and respond more e ectively

to citizen (consumer) demands. Within the area of

K–12 education, this trend has taken the form of

school choice (Buckley and Schneider 2007; Chubb

and Moe 1990; Coulson 1999;

Finn, Manno, and Vanourek

2000; Hoxby 2003; Merri eld

2001; Peterson and Greene

1997; Schneider, Teske, and

Marschall 2000). School choice

refers to a wide variety of

policies that allow students to

transfer out of the public school

to which they normally would

be assigned based on residence.

 ese policies range from fairly

limited systems of public choice

that allow students to transfer

from their neighborhood public

school to some other public

school outside their residential

area, to more expansive systems of choice that provide

tuition vouchers for students to exit the public school

system entirely and attend private school instead

(Henig 1994; Bel eld and Levin 2002). Proponents

have argued that by giving individuals the freedom to

exit failing schools—and take their tax money with

them—and thus injecting competition into the public

school system, school choice represents a potential

“panacea” for public education (Chubb and Moe

1990). However, critics contend that school choice

exacerbates racial segregation and social class strati-

 cation, resulting in a “two-tiered” system of public

education (Henig 1994; Lankford and Wycko 2005;

Levin 1998; Smith and Meier 1995).

Much of this debate has focused on charter schools

and voucher programs. While these forms of choice

are important and clearly warrant substantial investi-

gation, thus far, they have a ected a relatively small

percentage of schools and communities. Less work has

explored the impacts of intradistrict choice policies,

which are much more widespread. Furthermore, the

No Child Left Behind legislation contains intradis-

trict transfer provisions that are designed to leverage

market forces of competition within the public school

system, making intradistrict transfers increasingly

relevant (Fusarelli 2007).

 is study will use a mixed-

methods approach to examine

several assumptions related to

school choice that previously

have received little attention.

To do so, it  rst will discuss

interviews with school admin-

istrators that reveal a surpris-

ing reaction to school choice

among those positioned on

the frontlines. It then will

expand on this discussion with

a quantitative analysis of school

performance and transfer data

to better understand the factors

Deconstructing School Choice: Problem Schools or Problem

Students?

School choice refers to a wide

variety of policies that allow

students to transfer out of the

public school to which they

normally would be assigned

based on residence.  ese

policies range from fairly limited

systems of public choice . . . to

more expansive systems of choice

that provide tuition vouchers for

students to exit the public school

system entirely and attend

private school instead.