School choice research is abundant, but rarely incorporates students' experiences or perspectives. This study investigates a diverse group of students' school choice experiences as they applied to, gained admission to and enrolled in high school in Chicago Public Schools, which offers over 130 options. Adapting Ball and colleagues' (2012) concept of policy actor positionality, we analyzed the role of students' developmental and social statuses in students' school choice experiences. Students' policy encounters were developmentally consistent, but their admissions results and subsequent academic trajectories diverged by their socioeconomic status. We discuss these findings' developmental and equity implications for school choice policy. In recent decades, many urban districts have adopted intradistrict school choice policy, 1 which allows students and their parents to select a preferred public school rather than be assigned to one based on neighborhood attendance boundaries. Proponents argue that school choice can expand students' access to high quality schools, regardless of where they live (Betts & Loveless, 2005; Burke et al., 2013). Choice advocates laud its potential to boost student performance, since poorly performing schools ostensibly face the threat of declining enrollment and, eventually, closure (Manno, Finn & Vanourek, 1999). Researchers have investigated whether these claims have been realized, exploring topics such as the distribution of diverse students across schools of choice (e.g., Gold et al., 2010), on-time graduation rates (Lauen, 2009), and district-wide performance changes after school choice policy adoption (e.g., Cordes, 2017; Imberman, 2011).

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