Expanding choice is one of the major themes of current educational reform initiatives in many countries. All forms of school choice expand the range of options available to parents. Almost all these reforms are based on the application of market models to education and the proponents of choice have argued that many benefits will flow from empowering parents to choose the schools their children attend. As the application of market models has developed, the promises made by choice reformers have become more ambitious, expanding from a goal of increasing the efficiency of school to improving the satisfaction of parents and students with the schools their children attend to systemic change. For most reformers, the argument that "institutions matter" is not a proposition, it is an article of faith. For reformers when choice is successfully implemented, many benefits have been found to accrue to both parents and to the schools. Given choice: o Parents can choose schools that match what they believe is important in the education of their children ("allocative efficiency")o Schools are under pressure to increase the quality of their educational program and to deliver better schooling at a lower cost ("productive efficiency"); o Equity in education is increased by giving all parents the ability to leave their neighborhood schools to find better ones-a privilege that upper income parents have had via residential location or by opting for private schools. o Schools are under pressure to create stronger, better functioning communities, more responsive to parental needs and involvement; o School communities may become centers of "adult political learning", where the skills and inclinations to become involved in the school community might spill over to other policy domains and broader political domains.
However, the many theoretical and policy implications inherent in these outcomes are hotly contested. This research builds on Schneider's extensive work in the United States and his collaborative work with a group of Chilean scholars to study the operation and the effects of the extensive and long running system of school choice in Chile. In this collaborative and comparative study, he creates one of the most powerful but least used social scientific data sets, a multiple wave panel study, to analyze how parents gather and use information about schools and how the schools themselves respond to the competitive pressure of school choice. By focusing on parents whose children have just chosen schools, he will have a cleaner test of the value added by schools of choice than existing work. By comparing the results of this study with the extensive work that Schneider has done in the United States, he will be able to measure the extent to which the effects of school choice are context specific.
Broader Impacts: In addition to the scientific benefits from this study, the results of this study will contribute to our understanding of school choice as an educational reform and will have important implications for both the future study and practice of school choice in Chile and in the United States.
