SCHOOL CHOICE AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN U.S. K-12 EDUCATION

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relationship between school choice systems, educational inequality, and institutional legitimacy, advancing our understanding of how educational policies and structures contribute to social stratification. Across three empirical studies, I explore the heterogeneity of students’ school choices, interrogate the material benefits of elite schools, and provide insights into how school admissions policies shape perceptions of fairness and inequality. In the first chapter, I focus on understanding the heterogeneity among students in the school choice process. I use computational techniques on student-level application data to identify distinct clusters of school choosers based on their ranked school choices. This inductive approach reveals several categories of student choices, reflecting complex interactions between preferences, constraints, and tradeoffs that students and families make when they choose schools. My findings suggest that different groups of students place varying emphasis on distance, selectivity, curricular foci, and safety. The second chapter critically examines the widely held belief that attending elite, selective schools universally benefits all students. More selective schools do not necessarily provide more opportunities for advanced coursework. I use a regression-discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of attending a more selective high school on advanced math course-taking. In some cases, internal stratification processes within these schools can create barriers to advanced course-taking, even for students with high academic achievement. In chapter three, I conduct a survey experiment to examine how different school admissions policies influence individuals' perceptions of fairness and their attitudes toward inequality. Using a national sample of U.S. adults, I found that exposure to meritocratic admissions systems and choice-based systems increased perceptions of fairness and deservingness, even after keeping constant the level of underlying educational inequality. My results suggest that meritocratic and choice-based frameworks can legitimize social hierarchies, even when they result in the same level of inequality as other admissions regimes. Overall, my dissertation offers new insights into how educational systems reproduce or obscure inequality and underscores the need for policies that address not just access to opportunity, but also how those opportunities are allocated and perceived.