A Contest without Winners: How Students Experience Competitive School Choice

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Kate Phillippo follows a diverse group of Chicago students through the processes of researching, applying to, and enrolling in public high school, finding that the students are powerful policy actors who carry out and redefine competitive choice. Phillippo's work amplifies the voices of students rather than the parents, educators, public intellectuals, and policymakers who so often inform school choice research and investigates how students interact with and emerge from competitive choice academically, developmentally, and civically.

Through students' experiences, she shows how competitive choice legitimates and exacerbates existing social inequalities; collides with students' developmental vulnerability to messages about their ability, merit, and potential; and encourages young people's individualistic actions as they come to feel that they must earn their educational rights. From urban infrastructure to income inequality to racial segregation, Phillippo examines the factors that shape students' policy enactment and interpretation, as policymakers and educators ask students to compete for access to public resources.With competitive choice, even the winners the lucky few admitted to their dream schools don't outright win.

A Contest without Winners challenges meritocratic and market-driven notions of opportunity creation for young people and raises critical questions about the goals we have for public schooling.

Reviews

"Finally, a smart, thorough, in-depth examination of the impact of high-stakes competitive high school admissions processes on the young people who engage it. A Contest without Winners holds a mirror up to the district, showing what the costs are for policy decisions to heavily invest in a few elite schools rather than ensuring that all students in the district have access to high-quality schooling."Amanda E. Lewis, coauthor of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools

"A Contest without Winners shows readers the faces and voices of the eighth graders embroiled in Chicagos competitive choice system. Kate Phillippo describes how the students navigate the demands placed on them, how the system changes their views of fairness and of themselves, and how school choice policy legitimizes the very inequalities that rig the competition."Kevin G. Welner, director, National Education Policy Center

Author Bio

Kate Phillippo is associate professor of cultural and educational policy studies at Loyola University Chicagos School of Education. She is author of Advisory in Urban High Schools: A Study of Expanded Teacher Roles.