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This paper aims to identify the determinants of school choice and factors that define the success of a school as perceived by the parents and then compare “Public” and “Private” schools with respect to the explored criteria to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the institutions.

The study is based on 1,121 quantitative data collected through survey questionnaire from the parents living in urban areas of Bangladesh. The school choice model was developed and validated by applying structural equation modeling.

This paper offers a statistically significant, robust and reliable five-dimensional 23-item school choice model that includes both school characteristics and preferred outcomes as perceived by the parents. Characteristic-wise comparisons in terms of characteristics revealed that public schools are superior to private institutions in fulfilling several choice criteria such as parents–teacher relationships, performance of the teachers, offerings of special programs, safety assurance in the campus and in having bigger campus with playground. On the other hand, private schools dominate in providing better educational environment, arranging training to the teachers, ensuring satisfactory library services and delivering information effectively to the parents. Among outcome determinants, government schools are well ahead in creating self-discipline, morality and good work habits among students. Private schools are superior in developing critical thinking skill of the kids.

There is a gap of comprehensive empirical study on school choice in South Asia region that includes both school characteristics and outcomes. Therefore, this paper contributes significantly to the relevant literature.

The pattern of racial segregation in U.S. elementary and secondary schools has changed significantly over the last 25 years. This chapter examines the relationship between the racial composition of schools and the choices white parents make concerning the schools their children attend. Restricted access files at the Bureau of the Census allow us to identify each household's Census block of residence and, in turn, suburban public school districts and urban public school attendance areas. We find that the racial composition of schools and neighborhoods are very important in the school and location decisions of white families.

In this chapter we draw on research from Canada to develop a framework for understanding the variety of forms of supplementary education and their position within broader organization fields of education. The chapter asks: What is the nature and organizing logic of supplementary education in Canada? and, How does supplementary education relate to public schools in Canada?

Data come from a variety of secondary sources.

Distributed between three relatively autonomous settings – state, market, and nonprofit – supplementary education exhibits tremendous variety in its use value to parents, instructional content, and organizational form. Supplementary education is popular among Canadian parents and appears to be growing, yet it has failed to fundamentally alter the technical core of Canadian schooling, processes that stratify students, and child and family usage of their time or income. Supplementary education’s inability to penetrate these processes reflects its peripheral position within the broader organizational field of Canadian schooling.

The adoption of an organizational field approach generates new ways of thinking about determinants, forming and organizing logics of supplementary education both nationally and comparatively.

This paper aims to extend the scope of previous studies on education-occupation mismatch to explicitly focus on the role high school track choices have on the risk of being mismatched in the labor market.

The paper uses the most exhaustive available database regarding the early-career paths of university graduates in Romania. Using a novel matching technique, entropy balancing (EB), our study relies on multinomial logit models and logit regressions to estimate the effect of the completed high school track on the likelihood of being mismatched in the labor market. The empirical analysis focuses on two types of education-occupation mismatches: horizontal and vertical mismatches.

We show that studying a different field in college compared to the completed high school track increases the risk of being skill mismatched in the first job after graduation. Five years after college graduation, the influence of the high school track fades, while being skill mismatched in the first employment plays a more important role. In contrast, we find no evidence that pursuing a college major unrelated to the completed high school track increases the probability of being overeducated. However, being overeducated in the first job increases the risk of being overeducated five years later.

The study brings new reliable evidence on the extent to which high school track choices may contribute to the risk of being mismatched in the labor market.

This chapter reflects on an undergraduate dissertation study that explored the idea of school choice with parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds who were all connected through their son’s football team. The project became ‘lost’ when the author’s doctoral work took a different direction; however, this loss was not complete as there was an extended physical engagement with the research site, a social tapestry of ongoing connections, and a psychological and intellectual reflexive process that has both influenced and guided the author’s future studies and writing. The original study involved individual interviews with the boys’ parents, discussing the transition from junior school to secondary school. As well as some informal ethnographic observations of the football games and wider community activities. It employed the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to explore the extent to which parents have a ‘choice’ about their children’s education. The findings of the study supported the premise that there are pervasive forms of classed based inequalities in education and the idea of a ‘fallacy’ of school choice. The theoretical frameworks applied highlighted the ways in which ‘choice’ is constrained in relation to finance, place, class and ideas of belonging and community. The ‘lost’ project would have taken a longitudinal approach to follow the journeys of boys using multimodal forms of ethnography. The chapter argues that even though projects may be lost, they are not forgotten. It details how the author’s ideas for following up the football boys and the findings of the initial study have done, and continue to permeate the author’s thinking, research and understandings of place, class, stigma, constraint and the absence of choice for individuals and communities.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the well-intended plan by the government through the Ministry of Education to continue providing quality learning through online learning and in an equitable and inclusive manner during school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper is based on a review of the available literature including assessment reports, academic studies and media reports.

The paper revealed that despite the visionary plan by the government that the development and implementation of an emergency response plan would ensure equitable and inclusive continued learning for all students, those learners who were disadvantaged, including those living in remote areas and urban informal settlements, girls and learners from low–socio-economic households, found it even harder to access lessons. In fact, the existing digital divide on the part of the learners and schools served to reproduce or even widen inequities in learning. The COVID-19 pandemic evidently made these inequities more visible or even worse. What had been conceived as and intended to be an equitable and inclusive learning exercise ended up marginalising learners in already marginalised spaces.

While the researchers made an attempt to search for as many documents as possible, the documents selected for the paper are limited to those that explored the online learning during COVID-19 in Kenya. These reports were critically examined with a view to providing a clear picture of what online teaching and learning was like and how this picture embraced notions of fairness and inclusivity hence equity. Despite all these, there was the possibility of having some biases in the used reports. However, the researchers carefully read them triangulating them with others with similar information in an attempt to filter biases.

The paper has demonstrated how the learning process can be influenced by the provision of the relevant teaching and learning materials, tools and infrastructure.

This paper has clearly demonstrated the position that learning is a social process and which is affected by the social factors such as gender roles, socio-economic status and the social environment in which it occurs.

The paper contributes to ongoing discussion about the potentials and challenges of online learning particularly in a country like Kenya where equity in learning still remains a considerable challenge mainly as a result of the existing socio-economic, regional and gender disparities in learning. The paper makes a contribution in terms of an authentic mode of thinking that should guide the process of provision of “learning for all”.

While privatisation in education is expanding, the number of children transferring from public to private schools seeking high-quality education has increased. This study examined equality of educational opportunity, focussing on the attributes of individual children and their familial backgrounds. The target country is Nepal, which has been facing an educational disparity problem between public and private schools.

This study performed a logistic regression analysis with the objective variable as the binary capability to attend a private school and analysed the differences between children who attended public versus private schools. Semi-structured interviews with subjects and teachers and home-visit surveys were conducted to collect and confirm data.

This study revealed that particular children were excluded from seeking high-quality education in form of attending private schools. These children's characteristics correspond to lower economic status, illiterate mothers, being only children and female. Moreover, the study observed changes in awareness due to the modernisation and globalisation of Nepali society and growing enthusiasm for education, amongst others.

Research on privatisation and access to quality education, which has attracted scholarly attention in recent years, requires a broader scope regarding target countries and more in-depth analyses. This study focussed on Nepal since, in the country, the phenomenon of children leaving public for private schools is prominent and little research has been conducted on this context. Additionally, since the study gathered extensive data on individual children and did not rely on secondary data, it was possible to perform an in-depth analysis and accurately portray the real situation faced by Nepali children.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of local labour market conditions and pupil educational attainment as primary determinants of the post-compulsory schooling decision.

Through the specification of a nested logit model, the restrictive independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption inherent in the multinomial logit (MNL) model is relaxed across multiple unordered outcomes.

The analysis shows that the factors influencing schooling decisions differ for males and females. For females, on average, the key drivers of the schooling decision are expected wage returns based on youth educational attainment, attitudes to school and parental aspirations, rather than local labour market conditions. For males, higher local unemployment rates encourage greater investment in education.

The contribution of this paper to the existing literature is threefold. First, a nested logit model is proposed as an alternative to a MNL. The former can formally incorporate the structured and sequential decision-making process that youths may engage with in relation to the post-compulsory schooling decision, as well as relaxing the restrictive IIA assumption inherent in the MNL across multiple unordered outcomes, an issue the authors discuss in more detail in the Methodology section below. Second, the analysis is based on extremely rich socio-economic data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, matched to local labour market data and administrative data from the National Pupil Database and Pupil Level Annual School Census, which provide a broad set of unusually high-quality measures of prior attainment. The authors argue that such high-quality data and an appropriate model specification allows identification of the determinants of the post-compulsory decision in a more detailed manner than many previous analyses. Third, the data have the scale necessary to consider whether the determinants of post-compulsory schooling decisions vary by gender, a particularly important issue given the differential education participation rates of males and females (e.g. in this cohort, females are about 10 percentage points more likely to go on to higher education in the UK than males), and the gendered choices of occupation (see, e.g. Bertrand, 2011). The work will, therefore, provide recent empirical evidence from England on gender differences in the determinants of education choices.