Sociological Contributions to School Choice Policy and Politics Around the Globe: Introduction to the 2020 PEA Yearbook

Sociology of Education and School Choice Policies and Practices

Ball (2008) notes that “the original problematic of the sociology of education” is the “relationships between policy, schooling, and opportunity” (p. 664; see also Dale, 2001). In the post–World War II period, one key strand of research in the sociology of education was aimed at informing policy strategies that would address social inequality through education (Ball, 2008; Dale, 2001). This was followed by a period of research in the late 1960s through the 1980s from a variety of critical and “post-” perspectives that looked more skeptically at the ability of education policy to address social inequality (Apple, 1996; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). By the 1990s, sociological research that examined the relationship between schools and social inequality more broadly fell out of favor with government funding bodies as their attention shifted to analyzing school effectiveness and school management approaches (Dale, 2001). This shift reflected changes in the political–ideological environment of the period. Politicians and prominent reformers successfully promoted the idea that government bureaucracies were ineffective and needed to be managed through non-traditional strategies of school organization that would prompt them to be more efficient and accountable for results (Apple, 2006; Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Mehta, 2013).

This shift in focus has had implications for the sociology of education in that it opened the door wide for experimentation with school choice policies and practices in education governance (see Dorn & Potterton, 2015; Scott & DiMartino, 2009). As many politicians and reformers lost faith in public education systems, research aimed at improving the traditional delivery of public education did not have purchase in a context in which that mode of delivery was questioned. As a consequence, sociologists of education, especially those who are concerned with schools as organizations and institutional practices, have gradually turned their attention to analyzing those policies aimed at improving school effectiveness that have been implemented since the 1990s, including school choice policies (Berends, 2015; Berends & Zottola, 2009).

In general, sociological research on school choice has reflected three areas of concern which parallel the broader foci in the field (Ball, 2006; Berends & Zottola, 2009; Reay, 2017; Wells, 2009):

The Critical Nature of the Sociology of Education

It is important to comment briefly on how sociological approaches are related to, yet distinctive from, “Critical Policy Analysis” (CPA), which was the focus of a recent PEA Yearbook (Diem, Young, & Sampson, 2019). The studies in our current volume contribute to understanding “the complex relations that connect education with the larger realities of our societies” in an attempt to offer social critique and to work toward social justice (Apple, Ball, & Gandin, 2010, p. 3). In this sense, the sociology of education has common ground with CPA (Diem, Young, Lee, Mansfield, & Welton, 2014), which examines the intersections between education, inequality, and public policies. As Diem and Young (2015) have noted, “Critical policy researchers engage in critique, interrogate the policy process, and the epistemological roots of policy work, examine the players involved in the policy process, and reveal policy constructions” (p. 841).

Researchers who use sociological approaches tend to prioritize the explanation of sociological phenomena (e.g., competition and conflict among groups, socio-cultural contexts and processes, and subjectivity and agency), which is often accompanied by critical interpretation or reflection on the meaning of those phenomena for “the complex relations that connect education with the larger realities of our societies” (Apple et al., 2010, p. 3), but these may or may not address policy questions. In contrast, CPA researchers are concerned primarily with policy and focus on such issues as the difference between policy rhetoric and policy reality, among others. Thus, the difference between the sociology of education and CPA is their starting point. They share general concerns but have inverted points of departure and arrival.

Overview of the Yearbook’s Contributions

This Yearbook showcases studies in the sociology of organization and political sociology and highlights how concepts such as legitimacy, autonomy, agency, institutional logics, bounded rationality, parental accountability, and the different forms of capital help provide new perspectives on the way choice policies are enacted by policymakers, administrators, counselors, and teachers. The studies pinpoint the ways these concepts are useful in illuminating the sociological underpinnings of policy formation and enactment and the importance of understanding the social relationships, networks, and structures through which policies are planned and rolled out. Simultaneously, sociological concepts are deployed to help deconstruct what we believe are the important institutional logics embedded in and the individual dispositions that make up the local and/or national contexts that mediate educational policy implementations and outcomes. These concepts elucidate the significance of social groups and their classed, gendered, racialized, and spatialized meaning-making, dispositions, positions, and networks that shape and constrain school choice practices and applications. In addition, the studies in this Yearbook offer new ways of integrating sociological theories with cultural and spatial theories to further highlight the complex politics of school choice. We hope that this Yearbook’s approaches bring renewed attention to sociological imaginations of school choice research in the future.

Although the discussion above highlights the range and growing number of studies on school choice, a few gaps remain that are addressed by the papers in this Yearbook. For example, much of the sociological literature on school choice has focused on the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, particularly when it comes to examining the choice strategies of parents. Second, few studies have examined how school leaders understand and respond to families’ choices and incentives in school choice policy. Third, there is very little research on the policy sociology of school choice, that is, on the ways that different actors connect and compete in the policy formation process to influence the development of school choice policy. Finally, scant literature examines conflict and competition for resources in the organizational or regulatory contexts surrounding school choice. By addressing the gaps highlighted here, this Yearbook makes contributions to school choice research on multiple fronts.

The first section showcases studies that examine how school leaders and families understand and respond to the incentives in school choice policy by analyzing the strategies of parents, school principals, school owners, and school counselors. These studies highlight how school choice policies are engaged by local actors in New York City, Buenos Aires (Argentina), Chile, and the Philippines. First, Jennifer L. Jennings and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj utilize the concept of legitimacy to better understand how school counselors interpret and share information about New York City’s high school choice policy. Their study reveals that because of confusion and doubt related to the policy, counselors encouraged families to act in ways that were contradictory to official, formal, and preferred choice behaviors (Jennings & Sattin-Bajaj, this issue). In the second paper, Adrián Zancajo employs a policy enactment framework to move beyond schools’ basic responses to the Chilean education market and to better understand how behaviors are necessarily affected by social, political, and economic contexts. Zancajo explains how Chilean schools dealt with competitive incentives, and how their activities were shaped by resource positionality and power (Zancajo, this issue). Mauro C. Moschetti and Antoni Verger use the concepts of bounded and reflexive rationality to explore how disadvantaged families in Buenos Aires, Argentina, negotiated their school choice preferences. The authors’ findings show how families in low-income settings are constrained by unequal distributions of school choice subsidies and how their choices are contingent on social networks, educational background, geography, and social selectivity (Moschetti & Verger, this issue). The final paper in this section, by Andreu Termes, D. Brent Edwards, Jr., and Antoni Verger, describes how educational public–private partnerships (EPPPs) have been implemented in the Philippines through a voucher system, leading to increasing levels of school stratification and segregation (Termes, Edwards, & Verger, this issue). The authors employ a conceptual framework that focuses on schools’ logics of action and families’ patterns of choice in the “lived” spaces of competition—the socially and geographically bound spaces of reciprocally oriented interactions between schools and families that operate as “fields” (Woods, Bagley, & Glatter, 1998).

The second section presents new studies on the sociology of school choice politics and education markets. This research is particularly powerful for shedding light on the networks, social contexts, and social processes through which a range of actors engage and compete in the development and enactment of school choice policy. The first paper in this section, by Joel R. Malin, Christopher Lubienski, and Queenstar Mensa-Bonsu, explores policy sociology through the practices and influence of school choice policy framing and media coverage in Indiana. The authors highlight how traditional media outlets, such as local and regional newspapers, are increasingly vulnerable to powerful and ideological approaches to information sharing, and how the media frequently provides a space for political messaging and education reform advocacy (Malin, Lubienski, & Mensa-Bonsu, this issue). Next, Rand Quinn and Laura Ogburn focus on Philadelphia’s portfolio management model of reform, and they argue that frames, or ideas that operate in the foreground of debates, must be drawn from existing logics, or ideas that operate in the background (Campbell, 2004). Their findings reveal how education stakeholders’ advocacy and activism can spur changes in portfolio models, and how these efforts can even work to constrain policymakers (Quinn & Ogburn, this issue).

The next two papers in the second section explore the sociology of education markets, first from the perspective of parent stakeholders at a district public school and its surrounding community in Arizona, a state with a long-standing market-based school choice system. Amanda U. Potterton introduces the concept of parental accountability in a school choice system, which she defines as “the sensemaking, experiences, and consequences that are related to decision-making in a school choice environment, wherein parents’ feelings about their child’s schooling may be intense, emotionally stressful, malleable, cyclical and ongoing rather than static.” She posits that this concept provides a helpful lens for analyzing and interpreting parents’ school choice processes (Potterton, this issue). The fourth paper in this section by Ee-Seul Yoon provides a review of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories and concepts that have been applied to understand school choice research across 13 countries. She first assesses established and emerging research studies to highlight the significance of Bourdieu’s conceptual system in illuminating the social dynamics and challenges of school choice. Then, she discusses how Bourdieu’s sociospatial concepts can unlock new areas of research and politics by elucidating why and how school choice functions as a mechanism that accentuates geographic dynamics of social inequality reproduction (Yoon, this issue).

The third and final section focuses on conflict and competition for resources and control in the organizational or regulatory contexts surrounding school choice. Huriya Jabbar, Jesse Chanin, Jamie Haynes, and Sara Slaughter examine charter school teachers’ motivations for organizing unions through the lens of organizational sociology while comparing the different histories of unionism in Detroit, Michigan and New Orleans, Louisiana. They show that many of the concerns expressed by charter school teachers are similar to those of traditional teachers’ unions, although the charter school teachers are challenged by the anti-union ethos in the private sector and thus carefully negotiate their demands with a focus on student outcomes and rights. A new understanding of unionizing was observable for some employees in charter schools (Jabbar, Chanin, Haynes, & Slaughter, this issue). Finally, Sarah Jessen and Catherine DiMartino problematize the market theories of autonomy and control through a sociological study of “edvertising,” including the branding, marketing, and advertising of schools. Their study challenges market theorists such as Friedman (1955) who claim that the private sector would provide more autonomy to educators or better meet the needs of parents as consumers. Instead, they show how advertising firms often attempt to shape consumer preferences rather than adapting to consumer demand. In addition, teachers and principals are expected to become agents of the school rather than exercise their individual autonomy under “a new privatized educational ‘bureaucracy’” (Jessen & DiMartino, this issue).

Concluding Thoughts

All of the papers highlight the relevance of sociological lenses to analyze how school choice policies and politics are shaping education around the globe. The studies included in this Yearbook explore issues that have received less attention in school choice research more broadly but which are important for understanding how school choice policies play out in local settings. They place priority on understanding the relationships between actors and groups with varying levels of power and ability to participate in education markets and in the development of school choice policy (Archer, 1995; Datnow, Hubbard, & Mehan, 2002). Contributors also unpack the supply and demand-side dynamics that play out locally in international education markets and, in doing so, draw attention to the implications of education privatization on marginalized populations and neighborhoods. They are simultaneously attentive to the dynamics within and between social groups, the perceptions and agency of individual actors (e.g., families and school leaders), and the socio-cultural contexts in which these dynamics play out on the ground (Datnow et al., 2002).

In the United States, the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education has energized public and political conversations about the relative merits of different forms of privatization in education (charter schools, vouchers, tuition tax credits, among others). However, policy debates in the United States have not fully engaged the evidence from other countries about the operation and effects of many different forms of education privatization. Practically, then, the Yearbook assists researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in deriving comparative lessons by looking at the operation and implications of education marketization from multiple angles and locales, with attention to marginalized students, families, and schooling contexts. This is important because school choice programs are often implemented in urban settings and in disadvantaged communities in the United States and across the globe (Chakrabarti & Peterson, 2008; Ndimande & Lubienski, 2017; Pedró, Leroux, & Watanabe, 2015; Verger, Fontdevila, & Zancajo, 2016; Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016). More broadly, the studies in this volume highlight the continued relevance of assessing the consequences of moving away from—and the necessity to invest in—public education.

As the United States and other countries continue to experiment with school choice and education privatization, we believe this Yearbook serves as a valuable collection that brings together an international group of scholars to further develop the knowledge base surrounding school choice reforms, and through relevant, sociological lenses. Evidence from international contexts can help us to better understand the complexities involved in choice. Altogether, the 10 manuscripts in this Yearbook center the importance of sociological perspectives for examining the complex aspects of choice that are often overlooked in existing school choice literature and debates. This group of papers also offers practical considerations for how we might move forward with understanding school choice processes, both nationally and globally, and how we might better consider the complex ways in which school choice intersects with issues of inequity and social justice.