Contest without Winners: How Students Experience Competitive School Choice

Kate Phillippo's book "A Contest without Winners" follows a diverse group of Chicago students through the processes of researching, applying to, and enrolling in public high school, highlighting how competitive school choice policy legitimizes and exacerbates existing social inequalities, collides with students' developmental vulnerability, and encourages individualistic actions. It challenges meritocratic and market-driven notions of opportunity creation for young people and raises critical questions about the goals of public schooling.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 240 pages
\n Publication date: 09 April 2019
\n Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
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While policymakers often justify school choice as a means to alleviate opportunity and achievement gaps, an unanticipated effect is increased competition over access to coveted, high-performing schools. In A Contest without Winners, Kate Phillippo follows a diverse group of Chicago students through the processes of researching, applying to, and enrolling in public high school. Throughout this journey, students prove themselves powerful policy actors who carry out and redefine competitive choice. Phillippos 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 peoples 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.

\n Weight: 270g\n
Dimension: 140 x 215 x 18 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781517904340\n \n