Seeing Merit as a Vehicle for Opportunity and Equity: Youth Respond to School Choice Policy
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Seeing Merit as a Vehicle for Opportunity and Equity: Youth Respond to School Choice Policy Kate Phillippo1 · Briellen Griffin1 · B. Jacob Del Dotto1 · Crystal Lennix1 · Ha Tran1 Accepted: 22 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract School choice policy is ubiquitous in urban school districts. Evidence suggests that it has not fully delivered on its proponents’ promises of equitable educational opportunity. While scholars and policymakers scrutinize data to determine school choice’s equity outcomes, little attention has been paid to how school choice policy directly influences youth understanding of educational equity and opportunity. This study therefore explores how youth who engage with school choice policy come to understand and act upon the distribution of educational opportunities, and the extent to which their understandings and actions vary by social identity, family resources, school resources and admissions outcomes. 36 youth, engaged in the high school choice process, participated in this study, which is guided by policy enactment theory. Across subgroups, participants overwhelmingly valued merit as the best principle by which to distribute educational opportunity. Alongside this near-universal embrace of merit and widespread participation in choice policy-required actions, those who accessed the highest-performing schools often did so by activating nonacademic resources that required financial capital. These findings highlight a shared ritual that serves to instantiate and reinforce ideals of meritocracy. Findings inform our discussion of school choice policy’s educational equity and civic implications. Keywords School choice policy · Urban education policy · Urban youth · Equity · Merit · Meritocracy · Educational opportunity · Policy enactment theory
* Kate Phillippo [email protected] 1
School of Education and School of Social Work, Cultural and Educational Policy Studies, Loyola University Chicago, 820 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 1100, Chicago, IL 60611, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
The Urban Review
Introduction School choice policy—in which students and their parents select from schooling options made available by local and state educational authorities—was introduced and promoted with grand promises. These included an array of public schooling options beyond more conventional attendance boundaries, reduced racial isolation of students, a weakened relationship between family income, neighborhood characteristics and educational opportunities, and a greater sense of parent and student agency over the schooling process (Archbald 2004; Betts and Loveless 2005; Fuller 2002). School choice was framed as a panacea for the perceived failure of public education, imbued with “the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in a myriad other ways” (Chubb and Moe 1990, p. 217). This “panacea” was also expected to reverse decades of “white flight” and cities’ consequent loss of educational resources (Donnor 2012),
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