Parental preferences in the choice for a specialty school

Abstract

Choosing a specialty school involves huge challenges for families. This research aims to understand the behavioral process that leads families to choose among various specialty school programs. Discrete choice models, based on revealed preferences data from middle school applications in a large school district in Florida, are estimated using both, the top and all-ranked alternatives. This study returns insights into geographic settings, theme specialties and socioeconomic characteristics of applicants, schools and their relationships. Distance from home, the school's academic quality, the school's theme specialty, and the high percentage of applicant's own race are found to be the strongest factors related to the decision to apply.

Changing places, changing tracks: Inter-school mobility among Czech secondary students

“…issues (commuting problems) could be an important factor in this subset of revised school choices. This is in line with the observation that school proximity to place of residence is very important across different social groups in Czechia and other countries (Meyer & Kučerová, 2018;Müller et al, 2012;Prieto et al, 2018;Simonová, 2017). On the other hand, changing school without changing field of study had different effects.…”

“…Regarding the spatial factors, the assumption that school specialisation and distance are substitutes (Müller et al, 2012;Prieto et al, 2018) is supported by our data on home-to-school distance for general academic and vocational schools. 2 However, the finding that transfers within each tier are associated with shorter school distances can be explained by different mechanisms (Bertrand-Cloodt et al, 2010) and further detailed analysis is needed to better understand this result.…”

“…Given the close relationship between changing school and choice of school, we expect decisions about transferring from one school to another to be highly influenced by spatial factors as well. Indeed, results from differ-ent European countries show that distance travelled to school is the most important factor in choosing the original school (Meyer & Kučerová, 2018;Müller et al, 2012;Prieto et al, 2018;Simonová, 2017) both generally and even more so in socio-economically disadvanteged groups (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2012).…”

Measuring Inequality of Opportunity in Access to Quality Basic Education: A Case Study in Florida, US

“…Better-educated parents make better-informed choices [63]. Previous studies have found that applicants take into consideration their social circumstances when stating their preferences for specialty schools [74]. SDHC does not have poverty level or race/ethnicity in the criteria for admission, yet both the criteria at the time of the decision on admission show relevance.…”

School Choice and Satisfaction of Low Income and High Income Families: Nested Logit Model Application

“…Alanyazına göre, ebeveynlerin çocuklarının gitmesini istedikleri okula ilişkin (devlet veya özel) tercihlerinde temel belirleyicilerden biri akademik kalitedir (Altenhofen, Berends ve White, 2016;Beavis, 2004;Figlio ve Stone, 2001;Härmä, 2013;Hausman ve Goldring, 2000;Heyneman ve Stern, 2014;Prieto, Aguero-Valverde, Zarrate-Cardenas ve Maarseveen, 2019;Stewart ve Wolf, 2014). Ebeveynlerin başarılı okulları seçme olasılıkları daha yüksektir (Hastings ve Weinstein, 2008;Kisida ve Wolf, 2010).…”