Given the dominance of residentially based school assignment, prior researchers have conceptualized K-12 enrollment decisions as beyond the purview of school actors. This paper questions the continued relevance of this assumption by studying the behavior of guidance counselors charged with implementing New York City's universal high school choice policy. Drawing on structured interviews with 88 middle school counselors and administrative data on choice outcomes at these middle schools, we find that counselors generally believe lower-income students are on their own in making high school choices and need additional adult support. However, they largely refrain from giving action-guiding advice to students about which schools to attend. We elaborate street-level bureaucracy theory by showing how the majority of counselors reduce cognitive dissonance between their understanding of students' needs and their inability to meet these needs adequately given existing resources. They do so by drawing selectively on competing policy logics of school choice, narrowly delineating their conception of their role, and relegating decisions to parents. Importantly, we also find departures from the predictions of this theory as approximately one in four counselors sought to meet the needs of individual students by enlarging their role despite the resource constraints they faced. Finally, we quantify the impact of variation in counselors' approaches, finding that the absence of actionguiding advice is associated with students being admitted to lower-quality schools, on average.

Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents’ and students’ willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics potentially correlated with race, white and Asian families preferred white schools over black and Latinx schools, Latinx families preferred Latinx schools over black schools, and black families preferred black schools over white schools. Results, importantly, demonstrate that racial composition has larger effects on white and Latinx parents’ preferences compared with white and Latinx students and smaller effects on black parents compared with black students. To ensure results were not an artifact of experimental conditions, I validate findings using administrative data on New York City families’ actual school choices in 2013. Both analyses establish that families express heterogenous racialized school preferences.

Families indicate that fit and safety are priorities in school selections. It is not clear, however, whether school racial composition shapes families’ perceptions of anticipated school belonging. Using a survey experiment with students and parents actively choosing NYC schools, I find that families expressed racialized judgments of belonging. Among schools that were otherwise similar, respondents anticipated feeling most welcome in schools with the highest proportion of their racial group and least welcome in schools with the lowest portions of their ingroup. Families’ race-based assessments of school quality could be a key mechanism to explain racial segregation in school choice programs.

When the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) launched its ambitious Plan for Transformation in 1999, it faced enormous challenges. For decades, the agency had failed to meet even its most basic responsibilities as the city's largest landlord. By the 1990s, a combination of failed federal policies, managerial incompetence, financial malfeasance, basic neglect, and a troubled resident population had left developments in a state of decay (Popkin et al. 2000). CHA families lived in a hazardous environment, exposed to lead paint, mold, cockroaches, rats and mice, broken plumbing, exposed radiators, and broken light fixtures. The developments and surrounding neighborhoods were extremely poor, had few amenities, and were beset with crime and violence. Within the buildings, residents had to cope with broken elevators and darkened stairwells that put them at risk for injury or assault.

This series of policy briefs presents findings from more than a decade of research on the people who lived in Chicago Housing Authority properties when the agency launched its Plan for Transformation in October 1999. The ongoing, multiyear effort sought to improve resident well-being by renovating or demolishing decaying public housing properties and replacing them with new, mixed-income developments.