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Sociology
How families choose schools for their children can shape those children's social, academic, and cultural experiences. It can also shape the schools that educate and socialize our young. Increasingly, school choice is being used as an education reform strategy, with charter schools, magnet schools, private school vouchers, and open enrollment programs providing low-cost opportunities for families to select from an assortment of nearby schools. School choice advocates often invoke a type of market logic whereby loving parents who know their children intimately make careful, informed school choices, generating pressures for schools to offer appealing, high-quality programs or risk succumbing to under-enrollment. However, these "demand side" pressures can go wrong, yielding education systems that poorly serve the goals that societies have for their schools. First, families could make choices that are inconsistent with their desires. For example, if school choosers are uninformed or misinformed about their options, they might choose schools that are poorly suited to their children's needs while their aggregated choices fail to support and reward high-quality schools. Second, families' desires for their own children's schools could be inconsistent with the broader public's goals for its education systems. For example, if families choose schools that intensely focus on advancing their own children's private success, then schools might underserve more collective interests related to society's political, social, and economic wellbeing. This dissertation explores the desires and behaviors of school choosers, examining where demand side pressures might go wrong and how school choice policies and programs can be strengthened. The dissertation features three empirical articles. The first two articles use experimental and quasi-experimental methods to assess the effects of providing school choosers with information about their options. I find that school choosers' beliefs and behaviors are highly malleable but do not always respond to the provision of information about schools in predictable ways. Parents and children respond differently to the same information, and while formal government ratings can change opinions of schools, they are less influential than the types of comments that people regularly hear through their social networks. The third article examines what school choosers and the American public desire from schools, testing the hypothesis that parents would like schools to pursue their children's private wellbeing -- at the expense of our collective political, social, and economic wellbeing -- to a much greater extent than the public would like. Using randomized experiments with a large, nationally representative sample, I show that parents' and the public's desire for schools are more similar than what is commonly hypothesized. In an era when school choice is a cornerstone of many education reform efforts, improving our understanding of how people choose schools -- and how we can support them as they do -- improves our ability to construct sensible education policies and programs.
School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.
New York Times best seller Ever since Gabrielle Stanley Blair became a parent, she’s believed that a thoughtfully designed home is one of the greatest gifts we can give our families, and that the objects and decor we choose to surround ourselves with tell our family’s story. In this, her first book, Blair offers a room-by-room guide to keeping things sane, organized, creative, and stylish. She provides advice on getting the most out of even the smallest spaces; simple fixes that make it easy for little ones to help out around the house; ingenious storage solutions for the never-ending stream of kid stuff; rainy-day DIY projects; and much, much more.
John Coons is a progressive Berkeley law professor emeritus who in 1978 published a seminal book on the need for private school choice in the United States for children of lesser means. His motivation was and is straightforward. Families of greater means have always chosen their children’s schools, whether by moving to preferred neighborhoods or paying private tuitions. Coons says we can’t with good conscience continue to rob poor children of similar opportunities, children who often have the greatest educational needs. This book represents the ongoing observations of Coons, now 92 years of age, as he has written in brief essays published on an education blog in Florida – a state with an extraordinary degree of K-12 learning options. In a political arena that has been polarized on the issue of educational choice, Coons is a reminder that Democratic progressives were among the earliest to see value in expanding the educational universe of disadvantaged schoolchildren.
No school improvement effort can be effective without addressing school culture, and in this book you'll learn how to put in place the five pillars essential to building a culture of achievement.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared school voucher programs constitutional, the many unanswered questions concerning the potential effects of school choice will become especially pressing. Contributors to this volume draw on state-of-the-art economic methods to answer some of these questions, investigating the ways in which school choice affects a wide range of issues. Combining the results of empirical research with analyses of the basic economic forces underlying local education markets, The Economics of School Choice presents evidence concerning the impact of school choice on student achievement, school productivity, teachers, and special education. It also tackles difficult questions such as whether school choice affects where people decide to live and how choice can be integrated into a system of school financing that gives children from different backgrounds equal access to resources. Contributors discuss the latest findings on Florida's school choice program as well as voucher programs and charter schools in several other states. The resulting volume not only reveals the promise of school choice, but examines its pitfalls as well, showing how programs can be designed that exploit the idea's potential but avoid its worst effects. With school choice programs gradually becoming both more possible and more popular, this book stands out as an essential exploration of the effects such programs will have, and a necessary resource for anyone interested in the idea of school choice.
In going about its work, the commission reviewed the possible effects of school choice in light of the core value of public education: that all children should be thoroughly educated, so that they may pursue their own dreams and contribute to a democratic, egalitarian, and prosperous American society. Drawing from that premise, the commission explored choice in terms of four key issues: benefits to children whose parents choose new schools; benefits to children whose families do not exercise choice; effects on the national commitment to equal opportunity and school desegregation; and advancement of social cohesion and common democratic values.
Effective Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) provision is a right for all learners, yet it often proves challenging for educators and caregivers, particularly those teaching learners with additional needs. This book provides practical guidance for teachers and Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) who require the knowledge, skills and confidence to deliver effective RSE to young people with Special Educational Needs. It offers both specific support tailored to pupils with Profound & Multiple Learning Difficulties (PMLD) and Severe Learning Difficulties (SLD), Down’s Syndrome and Autism, as well as broad support to embed a whole-school approach in mainstream and special settings. Chapters guide the reader through a range of key topics, with advice, strategies and ready-to-use resources to teach RSE in a positive and respectful way. This much-needed book will be invaluable for education professionals, residential care providers, and anybody looking to support young people with Special Educational Needs as they learn about relationships and sex. It will also help schools to meet statutory requirements covering the delivery of Relationships and Sex Education.