This paper explains regulation of school choice with a redistributive framework. It aims at understanding why, cross-nationally, parents face different levels of choice when enrolling their children to secondary schools. Regulating who goes to what school is a dilemma for policy makers: Many surveys show that parents prefer high levels of choice to administratively assignment of their children to a local public school. This is especially the case for middle class parents. However, when regulating student allocation, policy-makers need not only take into account the political preferences of parents, but also their attitudes when they enrol their children to schools.
This paper argues that the puzzling cross-national variation of levels of school choice can be explained when we take into account the redistributive impact of student allocation. The more resources vary between schools when the social background between schools is heterogeneous, the more changing student allocation becomes a redistributive battle.
This paper offers a cross-national comparison between Swedish and French student allocation policies since the end of the 1980s. Sweden radically liberalized its school system at that time. France, instead, kept student allocation highly regulated, while developing a significant programme of spending for socially disadvantaged schools. I argue that this is the consequence of different cross-class coalitions, which correspond to differences in social segregation between societies. In equal Sweden, the middle income group ‘won’ with liberalization, whereas in unequal France, policy-makers, attentive to not increase segregation through school choice, maintained a higher and lower income group coalition that kept middle class children out of elite public schools while addressing problems of disadvantaged schools with targeted spending programmes.
The empirical analysis is a qualitative cross-case comparison, where the main focus consists of tracing the policy processes of school choice and funding decisions, and complemented by quantitative within-country analysis.
