The balance between individual freedom and equal opportunity is central in democratic arrangements of formal education. While education is important for the private individual’s chances of thriving, it is also vital for establishing common public values for society (Levin, 1987). School choice policies are now established worldwide, as a way of allocating children to schools preferred by their parents. In countries such as England, United States, Chile, and Sweden these policies have now been operating for decades and with the increasing worldwide spread there is a growing interest in how school choice polices are organized and operated (Greaves et al., 2023).

The right of parents to make educational choices for the sake of their children is considered a human right. Advocates for school choice acknowledges parental rights to educate their children according to their own wishes (Pendola et al., 2021), while those critical of school choice emphasize the effects of school choice on increased segregation (Reay, 2017).

Based on arguments about the need for greater individual freedom, school choice and private but publicly funded so-called independent schools were introduced in Sweden in the 1990s. Previous research shows that these reforms have contributed to increased segregation in the school allocation processes over the past 30 years (Vesterberg & Dahlstedt, 2019). While privatization and school choice policy are nationally regulated the organization of school choice and school allocation is a task for the 290 municipalities. Several policy decisions need to be made by municipal politicians and civil servants resulting in large varieties of how school choice and school allocation is governed and organized. While there is a growing body of literature on allocation processes and school choice (Dabisch, 2022; Sartain et al., 2023; Sjögren, 2023) we need further knowledge on how different local authorities organize school choice and handles the balance between education as a private and public good. 

In this presentation, we report on initial results from the research project Comprehensive school allocation through school choice: How Swedish municipalities organize for freedom of choice and equal opportunity (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2023-03616). The project’s overall objective is to investigate and analyze how school allocation through school choice is organized in Swedish municipalities, with the aim of understanding how the tension between individual freedom and equal opportunity is handled and addressed by civil servants. Such knowledge is essential for local, national, and international civil servants and politicians with responsibility for educational policy. 

Drawing on the literature on school choice and policy enactment (Braun et al., 2011), focusing on policy enactment by civil servants and the contextual dimensions on where these policies are made, this paper aims, as a first step in this project, to map out and describe how Swedish municipalities allocate students through school choice related to certain contextual characteristics.

The analyses are based on a comprehensive dataset (N=290 municipalities) combining existing publicly available data from Statistics Sweden and Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions containing data on: municipality size; local political majority; socioeconomic distribution index; established independent schools and the percentage of independent schools in each municipality, with variables gathered through publicly available information on municipality websites on guidelines for comprehensive school allocation through school choice. These variables consist of whether the municipality organizes school choice; the different selection criteria for school allocation each municipality uses for allocating children through school choice (including different definitions of proximity; children with special needs; sibling priority; lottery; children with protected identities; priority of those who have made an active choice; children from other municipalities; early school start); and whether municipalities have joint, centralized application systems for both municipal and independent schools. 

Through descriptive statistics, preliminary analyses display a variety of school choice systems that exist in Sweden today, showing that some municipalities do not organize school choice at all – primarily in rural areas with no independent schools – while others more urban and populated municipalities have extensive centralized school choice systems. We present the different systems and relate them to discussions about the different aims and objectives of education that different systems enact in relation to municipal autonomy and policy enactment. These discussions are relevant to the worldwide perspectives on educational research that is promoted by the World Education Research Association (WERA).

References

Braun, A., Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Hoskins, K. (2011). Taking context seriously: Towards explaining policy enactments in the secondary school. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(4), 585–596. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2011.601555

Dabisch, V. (2022). Which child to which school? How local politicians shape catchment areas, school choice and diversity. European Educational Research Journal, 14749041221116252. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041221116252

Greaves, E., Wilson, D., & Nairn, A. (2023). Marketing and School Choice: A Systematic Literature Review. Review of Educational Research, 93(6), 825–861. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543221141658

Levin, H. M. (1987). Education as a Public and Private Good. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 6(4), 628–641. https://doi.org/10.2307/3323518

Pendola, A., Mann, B., Marshall, D., & Bryant, J. (2021). Community Insurgency: Constituency, School Choice, and the Common Good. Democracy and Education, 29(2). https://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol29/iss2/1

Reay, D. (2017). Miseducation: Inequality, education and the working classes. Policy Press.

Sartain, L., Lewers, R., & Barrow, L. (2023). Assigning Students to Schools in an Era of Public School Choice: Patterns in Enrollment, Applications, and Offers in Chicago. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 01623737231206777. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737231206777

Sjögren, H. (2023). Unruly customers? How parents’ (in)actions trouble civil servants and local school choice systems. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 0(0), 1–13.

Vesterberg, V., & Dahlstedt, M. (2019). Consequences of free school choice and local responses. In M. Dahlstedt & A. Fejes (Eds.), Neoliberalism and Market Forces in Education: Lessons from Sweden (pp. 49–62). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429470530