In recent years, Innovative Schools in Dali have received increasing coverage in Chinese social media and have also attracted middle-class parents from cities, as viable bottom-up educational initiatives. This paper explores the rationales for Chinese middle-class parents' choice of Innovative Schools in Dali. Analysis of data from online…

This interview study examines the school choices of white middle class parents who live in a large Northeastern city. Interviewees identify as progressive urbanites and express an appreciation for racial diversity. Simultaneously, interviewees draw on anti-Black stereotypes when evaluating school options and avoiding majority Black schools. While…

This paper explores how middle-class mothers' involvement in and how the meanings of a public school choice are shaped by the class differences in cultural capital and economic capital between the mother and father within one family. It examines the practices of choosing a public school that shapes a middle-class mother, rather than the school…

The growth of middle-class families in gentrifying neighborhoods has sparked questions about how these families select schools for their children. Research on elementary school selection has found that some parent gentrifiers are willing to try their neighborhood public schools. These parents are often motivated by civically oriented values,…

This article studies the educational choices that secular and religious professional and managerial middle-class parents in Istanbul make for their children. It explores the ways in which class intersects with religion in Turkey where, politics, culture, social, and even economic life are marked by a deep divide among the religious and the…

In this paper the authors study 19 Global Middle Class (GMC) families currently residing in four global cities: Hong Kong; London; Buenos Aires; and Tel Aviv. Through qualitative in-depth interviews, they sought to gather insights about GMC parenting strategies, specifically drawing attention to the decision-making processes of school choice. To…

School choice policy in China aims to achieve educational equity by limiting school choice. Synchronous Admission Reform (SAR hereafter) is a recent school choice reform in China, which continues to limit parents' autonomy and strengthen the equal distribution of school resources. This study explores Chinese middle-class parents' (n = 21) justice…

This community-based research study examined the perspectives of African American parents of middle-class economic status who participated in a social network pertaining to school choice decisions during the pandemic era of virtual schooling. Their residency and school choices emerged against the grain of urban schools that have racially charged…

"Meredith v. Jefferson County/Parents Involved v. Seattle" ruled that K-12 public-school districts could no longer use the race of an individual student for placement in schools, which resulted in districts adopting new "race-neutral" assignment plans. This qualitative research study on school assignment and school choice…

I propose that the grounded types analytical method (GTAM) is a systematic and useful means of typology construction for qualitative studies. GTAM arose within European social sciences in response to a need to schematize qualitative typology and to explicate qualitative types more precisely. GTAM is applicable to a variety of qualitative…

Privatization of education has expanded dramatically worldwide in the last two decades, and Turkey is no exception. It is seen that the developments affecting the transformation of public services began with the implementation of neoliberal education policies, especially after the 1980s. These policies have led to a significant transformation in…

While many school choice studies focus on individual parents' preferences, we simultaneously address the structural context within which families make decisions and the strategies they develop in response. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 24 Black middle-class parents of young children, we demonstrate that they sought well-funded, academically…

The middle-classes use school choice as a strategy of class reproduction and comparative advantage. In this article, we show how middle-class parental school choice strategies are spatially dependent and how schooling preferences and final choices are bounded by the social and educational characteristics of the local education market of their…

Parents' happiness orientation has garnered early attention in school choice studies but has not been cautiously examined. Drawing on Aristotle's framework of Eudaimonia and Hedonia, along with Ahmed's concept of the happiness promise, this study transcends a perspec­tive of preference and examines how parents understand and pursue happiness in…

This article explores how parents choose childcare settings for their pre-school children within a context of complex policy on eligibility for free provision and a developing market. Using data from interviews with 17 mainly middle-class parents in England, we explore in detail how parents go about choosing a childcare setting and the different…