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INTRODUCTION
Expanding school choice is one of the major themes of current educational reform
initiatives. In countries on every continent, governments have decided that giving parents more
options to choose among schools is an appropriate policy response to local educational problems
(Wolf and Macedo, 2004; Plank and Sykes, 2003). The proponents of school choice have argued
that many benefits will flow from empowering parents to choose the schools their children
attend, ranging from increasing the efficiency of schools (Hoxby, 2000) to improving the
education of the most disadvantaged students in the worst performing schools (Sugarman, 1999)
to improving the satisfaction of parents and students with the schools their children attend
(Goldring and Shapira, 1993).
However, as the push for school choice has intensified, a series of critiques have
identified the costs of choice. Perhaps the most persistent criticism is that choice increases the
risk of stratification by race and class (Henig, 1994; Levin, 1998). Most empirical studies of
school choice confirm that choosers are disproportionately higher-income and better educated
than non-choosers.
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In addition to stratification caused by this differential in the propensity (or
ability) to choose linked to socio-economic status, choice can increase stratification if parents’
preferences for school characteristics differ by socioeconomic status (Ascher et al., 1996; Smith
and Meier, 1995). The concern here is that some parents will select schools based on the race or
class composition of their student bodies and not on their academic quality (see, e.g., Buckley
and Schneider 2002).
Most studies that have focused on the implications of family preferences on stratification
usually suffer from thin data (Jellison, 2002; Wells, 1996) or rely solely on survey responses
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For the United States see, for example, Epple et al. (2004) or Schneider et al. (2000). For New Zealand, see Fiske
and Ladd (2000). For Scotland, see Willms (1996). For Chile, see Hseih and Urquiola (2003).
Convention