Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Background Over recent decades, school choice (the process by which parents select a school of their choosing for the child/children) has become a key component of education policy pursued in many countries, and a critical decision for many parents. While global scholarship has broadened understanding of how families engage with and experience school choice, less is known about how this choice operates in reciprocity with institutional practices, namely school admissions and selectivity procedures, particularly in non-Western contexts.Purpose This paper examines parents’ school choices in Iran – not in isolation, but in a reciprocal relationship with schools’ student choices. In this context, both parents and schools actively assess one another to decide whether the other is the right ‘fit’. The study posed two research questions: 1) How do parents think about and enact school choice in relation to schools’ selectivity? and 2) How do school personnel perceive and respond to parent’s affections, expectations, and preferences during the school choice process?Method Twenty-five in-depth interviews with parents and school personnel were conducted in Tehran, the capital of Iran, during autumn 2019. The data were analysed thematically, using the concepts of school cultural orders (instrumental and expressive), habitus, and distinction.Findings Parents’ school choice, as a complex social process, reciprocally influenced, and was influenced by, schools’ student choice. Through this reciprocity, parents and schools weighed one another up, expressed concerns and preferences, negotiated expectations, and sought an optimal ‘fit’; a dynamic that shaped the enrolment of the ‘right’ students, the composition of a particular student body, and the ongoing reproduction of both familial privileges and institutional culture.Conclusion These reciprocal mechanisms of school choice reveal that school choice is not merely about accessing educational resources but about securing boundary-making and distinction. Through practices of inclusion and exclusion, the interplay between parental and institutional decision making can contribute to the persistence of inequalities and the perpetuation of social reproduction and division.
Source: Educational Research
Author: Fatemeh Yazdani
Institution: Lund University
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4415615853