The influence of school fame in parental school choice: An ethnographic analysis

Abstract

Parental school choice is a central factor in quasi-market educational systems as the Spanish one, although diverse voices affirm that it is a factor that explains school segregation in our context. Forgotten by educational literature, this article analyses the role that images and representations of schools, condensed in the concept of fame-reputation, play on parental school choice. The article presents ethnographic research with a holistic and macro perspective carried out in different geographical and socio-cultural settings in Madrid (Spain): Usera, Leganés y Majadahonda, chosen for their differences in income and presence of population of foreign origin. The techniques used have been participant observation and interviews, analyzing the data according to the categorization method. This research has shown that parental school choice bases on «good reasons» construed and validated through a network of daily-life and face-to-face interactions. Micro-social is the scale where the fame-reputation of a school is built and where family decisions are formed. Fame-reputation has to do especially with the composition of the school population and ownership, shows the classification and hierarchy of schools in the area while guiding avoidance strategies towards certain social groups. The study reinforces the idea that freedom of choice of center favors school segregation although it questions the centrality of residential segregation as an explanatory factor of school segregation. The relationships between the social groups underlying the images of fame show that in order to explain the segregation in the educational system, the effect on school life of the social structure and sociability in the territory must be studied.