Primary school choice - an important mechanism influencing equity in education Jaroslava Simonová Abstract This dissertation describes the process of school choice in primary education and the factors influencing it. Using a qualitative grounded theory design, the work builds on data from 41 interviews with parents from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Parents' decision-making about school choice is shaped primarily by the organizational needs of parents and their inner need to be a "good parent". When being interviewed, parents report a number of criteria, which, according to them, are important in school choice. However, for many of them they fail to obtain relevant and reliable information. Therefore, they may eventually make a decision based on criteria other than those referred to as important, although they are rarely aware of this shift and the change in criteria. There are three unavoidable criteria in decision-making: availability, reputation and the emotions that parents experienced at school during their visit. The child's needs are the important intervening conditions. They play an important role, especially if the parents feel that their child has some particular needs. The parents' experience with the education system and their personality characteristics are also important. The significant...

Capacities of elementary schools in the hinterland of the big cities presents actual problem of Czech educational system and no sufficient specialized attention is paid to it, except it has significant impact to the quality of education in these localities. Moreover it can support the inequalities in education. Therefore this diploma thesis offers complex view of investigated issue. The benefits of this work lies especially in the effort to indicate discussion about this topic, which no experts pay special attention to. The main goal is to describe the research problem, to clarify all the causes and consequences of the insufficient capacities in elementary schools problem and find out what is the extent of the problem in the hinterland of Prague. Primary and secondary data was used to achieve these goals. The overall research concept is based on mixed research technique. This diploma thesis finds out what is the current status of elementary schools education system in the hinterland of the big cities and what are causes and consequences of insufficient capacity problem of elementary schools with both quantitative and qualitative methods. Capacities of elementary schools present quite complicated problem which is caused by various reasons. It is hard to say if elementary schools founders failed in...

Educational systems are complex adaptive systems (CAS). The macroeffects of an educational policy emerge from and depend on individual students' reactions to the policy. However, educational policymakers traditionally rely on equation-based models, which are deficient in reflecting the work of microbehaviors. Using inappropriate tools to make policies may be a reason why there were many unintended educational consequences in history. A proper methodology to design and analyze policies for complex educational systems is agent-based modeling (ABM). Grounded in the theories of CAS and computational irreducibility, ABM is capable of connecting microbehaviors with macropatterns. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the application of ABM in educational policy analysis by constructing an agent-based overlapping generations model with hypothesized inputs to qualitatively represent the environment of the Taipei School District. Four research questions explored the effects of Taipei's 2016 student-assignment mechanism and its free tuition policy on educational opportunity and school quality under different assumptions of students' school-choice strategies. The simulated outputs were analyzed using descriptive statistics and paired samples t tests. The findings, which could hardly be revealed by traditional models, showed that the effects were complex and depended on students' strategies along with the number of choices students were allowed to make; the assignment outcomes for elite students were robust to the mechanism, and the free tuition policy worsened school quality. Although exploratory, these findings can serve as hypotheses and a guide for Taipei's policymakers to collect empirical data in evaluating their 2016 mechanism and tuition policy.

The purpose of the study is to create an understanding of the continued stratification within the school in relation to the school choice. Through understanding parents' motives behind choice and non-choice of a segregated school and differences between those motives. The study is qualitative interview study based on eight interviews with parents that live in a segregated area and have children that go to elementary school. This segregated area is in a medium sized city in Sweden. Theories that have been used are Jenkins social identity, Skegss disidentification and respectability and Marinis social values and norms. The results of study show that parents justify both choice and non-choice of school with what they consider to be the right social context for their children. It is important what student composition the school has for their children to feel group affiliation, but also because there is a fear of exclusion. As for differences in motives, parents choose to not choose the nearby segregated school because they do not want to be associated with the notion that exists about the area´s parents. This shows that the free choice of school can also be understood based on the parents´ identity- creating practices.

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Given the many school choices available to parents, there is a need to understand the reasons parents of a child who is gifted choose to keep their child in his/her current school. Parents* satisfaction with their child*s school and their academic growth is essential to continued enrollment of the child in that school (Abdulkadiroglu, Angrist, & Pathak, 2011; Van Tassel-Baska, 2006). The parents* decision to keep their child who is gifted enrolled in their current school may be influenced by factors within the school as well as those factors outside of the school. The purpose of this study was to research factors that may influence the parents* decision to keep their child who is gifted enrolled in their current school. The research studied parental perceptions of academic support, social and emotional support, and principal support for gifted education for their child who is gifted and the parents* willingness to keep their child who is gifted enrolled at their current school. The target group in the study was parents of children who are gifted and enrolled in a very large urban school district but did not include parents of children who are gifted and also have a disability. The research included the analysis of a survey and follow-up interview questions with parents of a child who is gifted and enrolled in the very large urban school district. There were 683 survey responses out of 4,401 total parents surveyed with a return rate of 16%. The low return rate is considered a limitation of the study and it is recommended to conduct additional research on the majority of parents who did not participate in the survey. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 10 randomly selected parents of children who are gifted and enrolled in the very large urban school district. The survey and interview data was coded and analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics. There were two research questions that guided the development of the research process and the analysis of data. The first question focused on indicators of parent satisfaction that included academic needs met, social and emotional needs met, and principal support for gifted education. The survey and interview data yielded mixed results with parents split between the belief that their child*s academic needs were met, social and emotional needs were met, and that their child*s principal was supportive of gifted education. The second research question considered the relationship between the three indicators of parent satisfaction and the parents* willingness to consider enrolling their child in a school solely for students who are gifted. The results showed that there is a statistically significant relationship between the parents* belief that their child*s academic needs were met and the parents* consideration to send their child to a school solely for students who are gifted. However, there was a lack of evidence to establish a relationship between parent*s belief about their child*s social and emotional needs or the parents belief that their child*s principal was supportive of gifted education. The implications of the study are numerous. There are enough parents willing to consider sending their child to a school solely for students who are gifted to support opening the school. The majority of the survey participants had elementary school children; therefore, consideration should be focused on opening an elementary school for students who are gifted. Long range planning is needed to determine how to support the school for students who are gifted as well as the impact of transferring the students from one school zone to the school for students who are gifted. The literature reflected the diverse nature of the parents* satisfaction with academic support, social and emotional support, and principal support for gifted education and revealed that when the parents* are satisfied it does not guarantee that the parent will keep their child enrolled in their current school. The need for on-going communication between the school and the parents are critical to keeping the student enrolled in their current school. Further research is needed to determine the beliefs of parents with children who are gifted and identify themselves as Black, Hispanic, Asian, or another race since the majority of the survey participants were White. More research is also needed to determine the reasons why large numbers of parents would consider sending their child to a school solely for students who are gifted regardless of their satisfaction levels with school support. In addition, further research needs to be conducted to determine why parents would choose to keep their child enrolled in their current school when the parents believed their academic or social and emotional needs were not met or their principal was not supportive of gifted education.

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In the 1990s, Sweden implemented the internationally debated school choice reform, introducing unprecedented freedom in education for students within its school system. This allowed students to attend the school of their choosing without being confined by school district. In order to maintain relevance since its inception, the reform has required several amendments to the Education Act, made over the years by a variety of governments and parliaments with differing political ideologies. Despite the political divergence of these governments and parliaments, however, the motivation behind and implementation of these amendments have shown to be quite similar across the board. From this vantage point, it is of sociological interest to investigate how free school choice is portrayed in the government's bills and the parliament’s debates when adopting changes to the Education Act during the years 1992/93, 2009/10 and 2020/21 within the various discursive fields. To do so, this study has employed  Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's (2014) perspective on discourse theory and found three prominent discourses; the free student, the quality of the education and the diversity and segregation in the school. By examining each discourse and its signs and elements, nodal points have been identified. Through analysis of said nodal points, the study concludes that there has been a shift in the analyzed documents’ central discourse over time through discursive struggles for hegemony and the re-articulation of nodal points and elements. This highlights a possible underlying ideological and power struggle within the overarching discourse surrounding free school choice.