: Choosing Schools

University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. and the Use of Information This book is about school choice, which has been a topic for discussion, debate, and action in academia, think tanks, and government at all levels. Many books and articles explore different aspects of choice, and some issues related to choice have been fought out in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other mass media. Unfortunately, the debates about choice have often degenerated into acrimony. We hope that this book provides a balanced perspective to the unfolding debates over choice and what we can and should expect from it. We believe that our work has several elements that can help to structure and inform the analysis of choice. First, while many studies of choice focus on schools as " suppliers " of education , our main focus is on the behavior of parents faced with choice. Thus, we expand the study of choice from a focus on the supply side of education to the demand-side, represented by the behavior of parents, who in many ways are the " consumers " of education. 1 Clearly, every analysis of choice that focuses on schools must make certain assumptions about the behavior of parents in different settings. We explore the assumptions about parent-consumer behavior more thoroughly than previous studies of choice. Second, school choice is a highly charged ideological battleground. While there is widespread agreement that schools in the United States need improvement , there is equally wide disagreement about the extent to which choice can produce it. Often, as in other policy domains in which the stakes are high and in which basic ideological issues about the role of government and the role of markets conflict, debates often resemble a battle more than a scientific enterprise. Proponents and opponents of choice often take one-sided and extreme views of what choice will do for American schools, ignoring the subtleties of different approaches to choice and what we should legitimately expect choice to accomplish. For example, John Chubb and Terry Moe, whose work has …