Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools: Residential Segregation and the Search for a Good School

Chapter 8. High-Stakes Choosing

237   Chapter 8   High-Stakes Choosing Mary Pattillo, Lori Delale-O’Connor, and Felicia Butts M uch of contemporary school reform ideology is anchored in the ideas of accountability (Hanushek 1994) and choice (Chubb and Moe 1990; Schneider, Teske, and Marschall 2000). Even beyond schools, choice is the key word in health care, retirement and social security, housing policy, and most other arenas in which governments (federal, state, or local) are involved in the public welfare. Choice refers to the personal initiative of residents who must choose from the array of resources available from the state. The model has changed from one in which cities or other government entities “deliver” or “provide” public services like education, health care, and protection from crime, to one in which residents “shop for” these goods in a service landscape that includes more nongovernmental, private subcontractors (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Cucchiara 2013; Klinenberg 2002). In some cases, choice is required—as in the New York City Public Schools (Jennings 2010). In other cases, publicly administered options are scarce—as in postKatrina New Orleans (Cowen Institute 2010). In all of these public-sector choice programs, the stakes are quite high because they deal with our ability to access and afford medications and doctors, our livelihoods in old age, and the care, socialization, and schooling of the next generation (Lipman 2004). The rise of choice as an education reform strategy is the result of neo­ liberal political-economic interventions more broadly. Although neo­ liberalism is most precisely defined as the call for less governmental regulation and control of industries and markets (Prasad 2006), the ideological formations that motivate neoliberalism—for example, particular definitions of freedom, choice, and rationality—have permeated the public sector. For schools, this has meant the proliferation of “choice 238    Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools experiments,” which “restrict government’s traditional ability to assign children to a particular school, shifting this authority to parents. This transfer of power often is accompanied by efforts to diversify the types of schools made available to children” (Fuller, Elmore, and Orfield 1996, 2). The empirical research on school choice is voluminous and politically contested (see chapter 1, this volume; Henig 2008). It is plentiful because school choice does not refer to any one particular policy, but instead may include vouchers, charters, busing, magnets, and many other local programs, each of which attracts attention from a range of scholarly disciplines with unique assumptions and research questions. The research is politically contested because the stakes are high for numerous constituencies—families, children, politicians, unions, teachers, foundations and philanthropists, bureaucrats, et cetera—and thus findings of all sorts are often read with an especially critical and skeptical eye. The peer-reviewed scholarship on school choice is more measured than the research done by partisan organizations, and the consensus points to minimal or mixed positive effects of school choice on student achievement, usually defined as student test scores (see chapter 10, this volume; Center for Research on Educational Outcomes 2013; DeLuca and Dayton 2009; Cullen, Jacob, and Levitt 2006; Deming et al. 2011; Rouse and Barrow 2009). Phillip Gleason and his colleagues (2010) studied test scores and thirty-five other outcomes, such as student effort, behavior, and parental involvement for students who won and lost charter school lotteries across the country. They found some positive impacts, but the majority of the results showed no advantage for students who attended charter schools. The authors concluded, “Overall, our results suggest that [charter schools] are no more successful than nearby traditional public schools in boosting student achievement” (xxix). More specifically, they found that the range of results across charter schools was wide, such that some schools were very successful in raising student achievement and others significantly lowered it. Schools in large urban districts and with large populations of disadvantaged students were more likely to show positive results. One additional and intriguing finding was that parents of students in charter schools reported higher satisfaction than the parents of comparison children who did not attend charters. That is, making a choice made parents more satisfied, even if the quality of the education on some measures was no different. This may account for their growing popularity despite weak results, a point to which we return in our analysis. Instead of adjudicating the academic evidence and political philosophies on school choice, this chapter turns to the words of ordinary people in Chicago who live in this era of choice, and are thus expected to choose schools for their children, and...