Self-Managing Schools and Access for Disadvantaged Students: Organizational Behavior and School Admissions in New Zealand

• In Event: Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: How Schools Respond to Parental Choice

Abstract

While there is global interest in decentralizing school governance to enhance educational improvement and access, New Zealand moved two decades ago toward a self-managing model for schools, including giving schools the ability to impose geographic admissions schemes when oversubscribed. This offers a useful test case for studying how schools use autonomy in more competitive environments, and the impact on access for disadvantaged students. Using a combination of geo-spatial analyses and interviews with school officials, we examine the process by which schools draw their own attendance boundaries relative to the demographic distribution of different communities. The evidence indicates that many more affluent schools knowingly limit access for children from disadvantaged backgrounds in order to protect the schools’ academic reputation.

Authors

• Christopher A. Lubienski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Liz Gordon, Network Research

• Jin Lee, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign