‘If the students don’t come, or if they don’t finish, we don’t get the money.’ Principals, immigration, and the organisational logic of school choice in Sweden

ABSTRACT

School choice is associated with increased educational inequality and across-school segregation. This article documents the organisational practices and logics affecting school segregation and inequality. Through an institutional ethnographic study of principals’ responses to school choice within the context of immigration in Malmö, Sweden, I find that principals work to align their schools with generalised conceptions of a ‘good’ school – a ‘Swedish’ school without many immigrants. Principals pursue the image or reality of ‘Swedishness’ through choices about the presentation of the school, approaches to managing enrolment, selection of programmes of study, and even decisions about where schools are located. Through their administrative work, principals write presumed preferences for Swedishness into the structure of the school system. The results suggest that, when addressing the link between school choice and equality, group preferences of school choosers cannot be considered independently of the organisation of schooling accomplished by principals and other organisational actors.

KEYWORDS:

• School segregation
• school choice
• institutional ethnography
• immigration
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Anna Lund, Stefan Lund, Elayne Oliphant, Annabella Pitkin, Danilyn Rutherford, Casey Frijd, Mats Trondman, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Andrea Voyer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0338-3273

Notes

1 Educational researchers typically conclude that parents are the school choosers. In the case of high school students in Sweden, parents are assumed to have limited involvement in the school selection process (see Lund 2008).

2 The research was conducted as part of a larger investigation in which 10 researchers pursuing individual research while collaborating and sharing their data (Lund and Lund 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) under Grant Number 90615201.