Public School Choice at the Intersection of Voluntary Integration and Not-So-Good Neighborhood Schools: Lessons From Parents’ Experiences

Abstract

This article presents research on the school choice processes and practices in a large urban district on the West Coast. It shares the stories of three mothers’ experiences with public school choice and tells how, through the process of choosing schools for their children, they became participants in the inequities and inequalities of the district’s choice programs. By showing how these mothers accomplished their goals of getting their child into a school other than their neighborhood school, the article illuminates how school choice policies proposed to be more equitable and democratic for parents, in many ways, still reproduce the schooling inequalities that they were intended to reduce.