A Contest without Winners: How Students Experience Competitive School Choice

Concern about competitive college admissions and the toll it takes on high school students has long received attention in media, policy, and academic circles. By contrast, there has been remarkably little scholarly or popular interest in understanding the implications of school choice participation for early adolescent ‘‘choosers. ’’ This is notable given the rapid expansion of elementary and secondary school choice in the United States over the last three decades, with an estimated 6 percent of all students in K–12 public schools currently attending charter schools (roughly three million students), 46 states with interor intra-district enrollment policies, and 43 states and Washington, DC with active charter school laws (Wang, Rathbun, and Musu 2019). With her book A Contest without Winners: How Students Experience Competitive School Choice, Kate Phillippo responds directly to this gap, drawing on indepth interviews with 36 eighth-grade students from two Chicago schools to explore how students experience competitive school choice, how it shapes them as adolescents, and what their competitive choice experiences mean for their identity development and civic dispositions. Chicago is a compelling place in which to explore competitive school choice policies for a number of reasons. To start, the current policy that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) uses to determine admission to selectiveenrollment and magnet schools in the district is considered one of the most equity-minded school choice policies of any large, urban district in the country. Under the policy, which was implemented in 2009, CPS divides applicants into four equally sized socioeconomic tiers, assigns each census tract to one of these tiers, and apportions a large majority of high school seats equally among the four tiers. (At the time, after the 2007 Supreme Court decision prohibiting the use of race in determining student school assignments and the district’s release from U.S. court supervision of its desegregation efforts, CPS’s shift away from race-based admissions was controversial and widely critiqued by multiple constituencies.) Chicago is also home to a wide portfolio of 130 schools with distinct academic foci and admissions criteria, ongoing neighborhood gentrification, and historical racial/ethnic and socio-economic disparities in access to high-quality educational opportunities. It is in this context that Phillippo proposes to examine students in three ways: (1) as policy actors; (2) as early adolescents; and (3) as thinkers. The book uses student narratives to interrogate the proposition that school choice policy creates conditions for personal advancement, satisfaction, and academic success. Phillippo draws from a range of useful, multi-disciplinary theories (policy enactment theory, theories of adolescent development, and situated cognition theories, among others) to ground her analysis of the consequences of competitive choice for early adolescents’ development as individuals and as citizens. A Contest without Winners is at its best when Phillippo privileges the voices of her participants to illuminate the mismatch between the demands of the policy and students’ cognitive capacities and developmental stage. The misalignment between the expectations of school choice policies and many families’ available capital (financial, cultural, and social) is well documented in the research literature; Phillippo’s book adds to this by using students’ own words describing their efforts, struggle, confusion, and, in some cases, disillusionment to demonstrate how ‘‘competitive choice works at cross-purposes to healthy adolescent development’’ (p. 97). She argues that ‘‘It discourages young people’s developmentally necessary risk taking, identity exploration, and independence from parents at times where these steps are critical in their lives. Second, by cognitively overwhelming [students] . and then setting them on rigid, formulaically determined academic tracks, competitive choice systematically sabotages its own efforts to meet students’ individual needs. ’’ Reviews 289