Opting for Private Education: Public Subsidy Programs and School Choice in Disadvantaged Contexts

• In Event: 2020 Politics of Education Yearbook. School Choice Policy and Politics Around the Globe: Sociological Contributions

Abstract

Sociological research on school choice has mostly been dominated by studies analyzing the experiences of (white) middle-class families in industrialized countries. The assessment of school choice processes among disadvantaged families is still an under-researched phenomenon. Moreover, research on school choice within public-private partnership programs has been conducted predominantly in the context of voucher and charter school schemes (Languille, 2016), whereas research on school choice in the context of public subsidies to private schools is much more scarce.

To address these gaps, drawing on ethnographic case study methods, this paper explores the school choice rationalities of disadvantaged families accessing publicly subsidized low-fee private schools (S-LFPS) in Buenos Aires. We selected nine S-LFPSs offering primary education located in the city’s poorest neighborhoods to conduct on-site observations over a period of eight months, as well as in-depth interviews (n=57).

Guided by an overall sociocultural approach to school choice, but aware of the limitations of the frequently over-socialized views of sociological approaches, especially when interpreting poor families’ school choice processes, we built a bounded rationality — or enlarged sociocultural — framework to capture both structural constraints and agentic practices guiding school choice (Ben-Porath, 2010; Hatcher, 1998). From this standpoint, we seek to understand how poor families deal with structural constraints and negotiate their preferences to produce (expectedly) different school choice rationalities, and whether these rationalities and assumptions fit within the expectations subsidy policies generate.

In detailing our findings, this paper presents a typology of choice rationalities that contributes, on the one hand, to illustrate the micro-dynamics behind the expansion of subsidized private low-cost education in the city of Buenos Aires and on the other hand, to understand the nature of school choice processes of disadvantaged families in the context of subsidy programs and the equity implications of these processes. The paper shows that the school choice of disadvantaged families and specifically, the fact that increasing numbers of these families opt for private school options, is a phenomenon with multiple edges. Disadvantaged families opting for S-LFPS deploy a heterogeneity of criteria, preferences and logics when choosing a school. In fact, most of the families interviewed have retrieved and managed information about the school offer in their immediate environment and articulated deeply reflective arguments about the choice-related practices they have deployed. However, families’ educational preferences and decisions are conditioned by significant geographical, economic and symbolic constraints, as well as by constraints of a regulatory nature that relate to the specificities of the design of the subsidy program in Argentina. The fact that this subsidy program does not guarantee free education and does not regulate school admission processes is prone to social dynamics and logics of action among both families and schools that reinforce educational stratification. In this context, not all families benefit equally from the opportunities of choice that subsidies aim to generate. Ultimately, the paper aims to introduce nuances and new interpretative keys to the complex and interrelated phenomena of public-private partnerships in education and school choice.

Authors

• Mauro Moschetti, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona