CSI’s Inequality Discussion Groups bring together Cornell faculty and graduate students from around campus to discuss and improve their in-progress research. This spring we’re providing lunch from 12:30 – 1:00, and encouraging attendees to eat together or separately – throughout the Center or in offices – based on their comfort levels. We’ll then begin presentations promptly at 1:00pm.

Jacqueline Ho (PhD Candidate, Sociology)

Title: Can Every School Be a Good School? Unranking and its implications for competitive school choice in Singapore

Abstract: In many education systems, families compete for admission to good schools, which contributes to segregation and inequality. This competition is fueled by the perception of a hierarchy of schools, which in turn is partly shaped by narrow, often quantitative measures of school quality, such as test scores and rankings. Scholarship on quantification suggests that replacing rankings with more multidimensional approaches to evaluation may reduce the perception of hierarchy. Recent efforts to adopt more holistic measures of school quality echo this logic. However, we lack empirical evidence of how applicants choose schools in the wake of such efforts at unranking. Drawing on 50 interviews, I examine how middle-class parents in Singapore choose primary schools in the context of “Every School a Good School,” a decade-long policy effort to reduce the competition for elite schools by encouraging parents to evaluate schools more holistically. I find that some parents do opt out of this competition, but not necessarily because they see that every school is good in its own unique way. Like most other parents, they continue to perceive schools as ordered along a unidimensional hierarchy, but believe it is unnecessary to compete for good schools. I argue that parents’ school choices reflect different strategies for constructing a sense of security, which they have learned through their lived experiences of anxiety in a hierarchical school system. I consider the implications of these findings for theories of how parents choose schools.