(Re)Construction of Choice: Parental Choice of Internationally Oriented High Schools in China

• In Event: 15.060 - MTCC Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: 15.060-7 - School Choice and Intersectionality: Comparative and International Perspectives From the United States, China, and Israel

Abstract

A growing body of critical research on school choice has contributed to our understanding of the neoliberal ideology of the choice agenda in education (e.g. Apple, 2006; Ball, 2003; Henig, 1994; Pedroni, 2013; Whitty, Power, and Halpin, 1998). These critical studies question marketization, parental choice, and competition, key strategies adopted by various school choice programs. Different from government-led school choice policies in the West, school choice is officially banned by the Chinese central government. The current continuous school choice fever in China is a bottom-up movement that is initiated by the rising Chinese middle-class parents (Liu & Apple, 2016; Wu, 2014). This paper will contribute to critical scholarship on school choice policies in general and the emerging critical studies on school choice issues in China in particular by examining the complexities of parental choice of internationally-oriented high schools, a new trend of high school choice in China.

The parent-initiated school choice movement has become apparent in China since the 1990s. Key public schools are the desired choice schools. Previous research on school choice practices in China (Wu, 2008, 2011, 2014) has highlighted school choice as a middle-class conversion strategy, which is consistent with the findings from western critical scholars (e.g. Ball, 2003; Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz,1995; Ball and Vincent, 1998; Rollock, Gillborn, Vincent, and Ball, 2014). This paper looks critically at a new trend of parental choice of high school in China that emerged since 2010 as the Chinese central government has increasingly regulated school choice practices at public high schools while a growing number of urban Chinese high school students are applying to overseas universities.

Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984, 1986) concepts of capital and conversion strategy, as well as critical literature on globalization and education, the paper examines the process of choice-making through the analysis of 16 interviews with Chinese parents choosing a newly-established, internationally-oriented high school for their children. This study shows that these Chinese middle-upper and upper-class parents made complex nested choices, which involved the intertwining of international college choice and high school choice.

These parents were highly strategic in their decisions to engage with an international education market. Capital conversion was used to transfer strategic advantage from these privileged parents to their children. The use of economic capital is the precondition for high school choice because the cost of attending an internationally-oriented high school was about $40,000, which excludes the families who cannot afford such educational costs. However, parental concerns about educational costs and their children’s mastery of Chinese language and culture distinguish affluent parents who try to gain access to an internationally focused high school in China versus those who send their children abroad for high school. The study points out that class, language, and location all contribute to the ways in which choice is played out in Chinese middle-upper and upper-class families. This study not only demonstrates the way conversion strategies work globally, but it also helps us understand the (re)production of social advantage in education in a globalized context.

Author

• Shuning Liu, Ball State University