A Contest without Winners
How Students Experience Competitive School Choice
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 challenges meritocratic and market-driven notions of opportunity creation for young people and raises critical questions about the goals we have for public schooling.
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
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.
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.
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 Chicago’s 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
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction: Competitive Choice Policy, the Students Who Enact It, and Its Social Backdrop
1. Unequal Opportunities, Unevenly Distributed: The Puzzle of Admission Results
2. Education Policy without Educators: How Competitive Choice Puts Responsibility for Quality Schooling on Students
3. The Sculptors and the Sculptures: How Neighborhoods Shape and Are Shaped by Competitive Choice Policy
4. Differentially Defended: Students’ Developmental Vulnerability to Competitive Choice and Family Capital’s Buffering Role
5. Civic Education: How Competitive Choice Policy Encourages Civic Individualism
Conclusion: Surprises, Lessons Learned, and a Few Paths Forward
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Research Participants
Appendix B: Research Methods: Learning from Adolescents about Urban Education Policy
Appendix C: High Schools Attended or Mentioned by Study Participants, by School Type
Notes
Index
