| Throughout the 19th and 20th century, promoting equality of educational opportunity has been a cherished goal of American political culture. This dissertation addresses whether promoting choice in education will abet, or undermine, equality of educational opportunity for disadvantaged students by examining the causes and consequences of school choice in Chicago, a city with a large public school choice program in which over half of high school students participate.; The key contributions of this dissertation include (1) bringing historical and institutional analysis into the study of school choice; (2) estimating school, neighborhood, and peer effects on choice propensity; (3) estimating gains in school quality and productivity for those who exercise school choice; and, finally, (4) estimating the causal effect of school choice on graduation propensity. Through historical, institutional, and quantitative analysis, this study shows that school choice in Chicago is a tournament in which a small portion of advantaged students get most of the benefit from exercising school choice.; Net of student achievement and other background characteristics, students in disadvantaged neighborhoods have lower choice propensities, and choice flows tend to persist over time. In a finding consistent with relative deprivation theory, students in higher achieving social contexts are less likely to attend elite public high schools, net of their own prior achievement. Families tend to avoid schools with disadvantaged students and exhibit racial homophily in their schooling enrollment decisions. Those who exercise school choice tend to gain more advantaged peers, but unless they have test scores high enough to gain admittance to an elite magnet school, they are not likely to attend a more productive school. Propensity score analysis indicates that those who exercise high school choice are more likely to graduate than observationally similar peers who remained in their assigned schools. The evidence suggests, however, that this gap exists only for students from the most advantaged backgrounds. In a finding that has important implications for the school choice debate, parents in Chicago tend to avoid neighborhood schools with high productivity levels. This finding calls into question the assumption that competitive pressure will lead to overall educational improvement. |
