Reassignment Policies and School Stratification

School choice is expanding, but the majority of students in countries like the United States still attend the school associated with their residential address. We study assignment policies and reassignments of students, where students apply to attend a magnet school or request to transfer to another school within the public school system. Policymakers and researchers have expressed concerns that these type of reassignment programs could increase racial and socioeconomic stratification and cause an imbalance of resources across schools. We provide evidence from the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina. Our focus is on changes in racial and socioeconomic stratification across schools relative to the existing degree of stratification that exists in the district through its assignment via schools’ attendance boundaries. The reassignment programs available in this district reduce stratification in terms of race, socioeconomic status, student need, and student ability. To place our results in context, we conduct several simulations to compare the observed changes in stratification to what changes are possible. The effects on stratification are similar to what would be expected if students move between schools without regard to school composition, and the effects are small relative to the largest increases or decreases in stratification that could be expected given the volume of reassignments observed in these data. Thus, the reassignment programs we study do not increase stratification in terms of race, socioeconomic status, or student need/ability, but they also do not reduce stratification to a particularly large degree. Our results speak to school choice programs that can be characterized as controlled choice programs in which the district places constraints on moves between schools.

‘We’re Giving Them Choice Which Is Controlled Choice’—Care Managers’ Views on Finding Social Care Support for People with Learning Disabilities

Choice and control are pivotal in UK Government policy for achieving personalisation of social care for people with learning disabilities; however, little is known about the role care management plays in supporting people with learning disabilities finding social care services. This article explores that the support care managers provide people with learning disabilities, how care managers source and use information to offer choice in relation to accommodation and support, with a focus on people receiving managed budgets. Qualitative interviews with eight care managers from two local authorities in the South East of England were analysed using thematic network analysis, producing three global themes. The first ‘shaping choice’ describes the role of the care management process and assessments have in determining opportunities for choice. The gathering and interpretation of quality information is explored in the second global theme, highlighting the role of visiting settings to understand their quality. ‘Choice in principle’ is the third global theme, whereby the factors shaping choice come to be seen as choice akin to that anyone else has. These findings have implications for future policy and practice in relation to care management for people with learning disabilities.

From Open Enrollment to Controlled Choice: How Choice-Based Assignment Replaced the Neighborhood School in Cambridge, Massachusetts

In 1981, Cambridge, Massachusetts, became the first school district in America to replace its neighborhood schools with a “controlled choice” assignment plan, which considered parental preference and racial balance. This article considers the history preceding this decision to explore how and why some Americans became enamored with choice-based assignment at the expense of the neighborhood school in the late twentieth century. It argues that Cambridge's problematic experience with open enrollment in the 1960s and 1970s created a vocal, consumer-oriented, and politically active class of parents who became accustomed to choice and, by the early 1980s, dependent on its benefits. Moreover, controlled choice proved especially attractive in this university community because Cambridge had a constituency of well-educated, middle-income parents who possessed the social capital to identify the best educational opportunities for their children, but lacked the economic capital to use real estate to gain access to their preferred schools.

‘The kind of things we’ve heard keep people in the district’: White racial exclusion and the evolution of school choice policies in Portland Public Schools

This policy history traces the evolution of Portland Public Schools’ school choice programme from the early 1970s until 2010 and examines its impacts on the historically black Albina neighbourhood. The purpose of this research is to identify the ideologies and assumptions that led to the establishment of the initial school choice programme and continued to influence decision makers as the programme evolved into a more neoliberal marketplace of schools. The district originally embraced controlled choice as a means to manage integration so it would not significantly tip the racial balance in predominantly white schools. By opting to make integration voluntary for students in predominantly white schools, the board legitimised white parents’ preferences for racially exclusionary school settings. In Portland Public Schools, white racial exclusion laid the foundation that shaped the technologies of the school choice programme as it developed into a more neoliberal iteration.