School Choice and Culture Wars in the Classroom: What Different Parents Seek from Education.

Abstract

Most current proposals for school reform seek to shift power to parents, thereby bringing new actors into the educational decision process. As these reforms proceed, concern is growing that different types of parents' values about education will lead to stratification and segregation in the schools. Using survey data from two suburban and two inner-city school districts, the authors investigate parents' preferences for different aspects of education. They show that parents of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds do find different school attributes important, but that these differences are not the ones emphasized by most current literature. Any differentiation along SES (socioeconomic status) and racial lines in the choice of schools will not necessarily result from parents of higher SES strategically placing their children in the best schools. Rather, differences may emerge as the result of sorting, in which lower SES parents stress a different set of values in education and choose schools that reflect the different dimensions of education they view as important.

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