When Schools Choose: Evaluation and Educational Inequality

Abstract

Educators evaluate students for admission in many oversubscribed and selective public schools. Yet, previous studies have focused on families as school choosers. Little is known about the role that educators play in determining whether students are admitted to sought-after schools in stratified education systems. Through an ethnography of the admissions process, this study examines the evaluation of applicants at an oversubscribed school. The admissions process results in the sorting of students into schools that vary on important measures, including graduation and college enrollment rates. The study reveals that school-level educators treated the evaluation process as an opportunity to increase the status of the school. They did this, in part, by selecting students who activated dominant cultural capital. The school district endeavored to make selective schools more widely accessible; however, a lack of district oversight allowed the school to instead pursue its own status-oriented goals.