We contribute to the literature by studying school choice in the post-communist urban environment. However, it is often admitted that school choice is largely urban phenomenon, not much comparative research is done on post-communist or transition countries and urban environments.  Thus our aim is to fulfill this research gap by bringing in comparative perspective.  Our objective is to indicate the sizes of family background effects in various urban district in Russia and Estonia and how school admission policies (school choice policy hereinafter) moderate or intensify family background effect.

Family background effect is considered one of the most influential input in producing educational outcomes in all educational systems, including Post-communist countries, however, in most cases Russia and Estonia are in various reasons excluded from the sample (Schütz et al. 2008).  Literature (Woessmann 2008, 2004) considers the independency of student outcomes from family background characteristics as a vital measure of the equality of educational opportunity.  Thus we are after comparative measure of educational equality in four regions: urban Russia, rural Russia, urban Estonia, and rural Estonia.  

Having common path-dependent educational institutions from communist period, our case countries differ in both the extensiveness of the welfare state and the system level school choice policies such as extent of external control and autonomy of the schools.  However, we see many commonalities in addition to common past, i.e. school level between-school segregation based on admission by academic record, marginal share of private schools and private money in education.  Thus we consider cases similar in some dimensions – school level admission policies in urban areas; and different in many other aspects. This observation directs our quantitative research strategy.  

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