Parental preferences in school choice: comparing reputational hierarchies of schools in Chile and Finland

Abstract

Parents evaluate the reputations of the schools when making judgements about their desirability. They try to approximate the quality of schools and the social environment and contrast those with their hopes and fears concerning their child’s education. We aim to clarify how the reputations of schools are constructed in Finland and Chile and what sorts of reputational categories, hierarchies and preferences of schools and classes families form when making a choice. Bernstein’s instrumental and expressive orders are applied as tools to analyse these reputations from qualitative interview data. The amount and type of expressive order turned out to be the crucial factor when comparing schools’ reputations and in the making of choices. While in Chile the expressive-social order in terms of contributing to habitus was seen as the most important factor in constructing school reputations and shaping preferences, in Finland the expressive-personal order in the form of school contentment was highlighted.

Keywords:

• school choice
• social class
• reputation
• distinction

Acknowledgements

We thank the Academy of Finland and the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica of Chile for funding this study. We express our gratitude for the comments received in ECER 2012 in Cádiz.

Funding

The interviews were conducted by the research group Parents and School Choice: Family Strategies, Segregation and School Policies in Chilean and Finnish Basic Schooling (PASC). The project was funded by the Academy of Finland and the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica of Chile and is a co-project of the University of Helsinki, the University of Turku, and The Catholic University of Chile.

Notes

1. Despite the elaborate literature on preferences, especially regarding rational choice theory (e.g. Friedman and Hechter 1988), we will not go deeper into that discussion, but rather treat the concept as a tool with which to examine why some schools become more desirable from a parental point of view than others.

2. The interviews were conducted in the spring of 2011 by the research group Parents and School Choice: Family Strategies, Segregation and School Policies in Chilean and Finnish Basic Schooling (PASC). The project is funded by the Academy of Finland and the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica of Chile, and is a co-project of the University of Helsinki, the University of Turku and The Catholic University of Chile.

3. In Finland there are classes which are based on different pupil allocation practices within one school. For example, in certain schools the reputations of general classrooms and classes with special emphasis may differ tremendously in the discourse of the parents (Kosunen 2013), so discussing only the school reputations is not specific enough and may obscure some of the distinction processes.