Who decides where a child should go to school? The answer to this question has changed over the past 30 years in Sweden, a country who has faced extensive neoliberal educational reforms during the past decades (Arreman och Holm 2011; Lundahl m.fl. 2013). Based on arguments about increasing individual freedom, free school choice was introduced in Sweden in the 1990s. Ever since, local authorities in Sweden have been commissioned to organize local school choice markets (Dahlstedt m.fl. 2019).

Education in democratic societies has always had to deal with the tension between individual freedom and a need for public good (Labaree 1997; Börjesson 2016; Levin 1987). The organization of school choice systems varies around Sweden, and there is not yet a single model in place for how to design school choice systems. This paper contributes with knowledge about how civil servants work to organize school choice in dialogue with local politicians, as well as how they balance between different goals in practice (e.g. goal conflicts can arise between freedom of choice and integration, since a high degree of freedom in relation to school choice generally leads to increased segregation (Trumberg och Urban 2020)).

Knowledge about what happens in the organization and design of local school choice systems is necessary to understand which values that ​​are prioritized in practice. This paper focuses on what municipalities' organization of school choice means for the Swedish school and the students within these schools.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and problematize the dilemmas and goal conflicts that emerge as civil servants work with the organization on school choice in Swedish municipalities.

The paper suggests that the tension between individual freedom and the school as a collective good tends to end up with the officials. This means that questions about conflicting goals concerning school's role in relation to freedom, justice, and equality – questions, that may be considered political by nature – often are handed over to civil servants within the municipal bureaucracy. How civil servants interpret their role and function within municipal democracy, as well as the values ​​they express, is important for the link between education and the public's trust in representative democracy.

I use the theoretical notion of ‘discretion’ (Brodkin 2020), which pinpoints the extent to which micro-practices of street-level organizations take part in shaping meta-politics. The interest in discretion highlights the importance of zooming in on the practices of civil servants and their level of discretion in enabling educational policies.

I analyze motives, justifications, and dilemmas related to local school choice organization through interviews with politicians and civil servants in two municipalities with different political majority (one conversative and one liberal-left). The two municipalities have organized their local school choice market differently, with different interpretations and ranking of various selection criteria for the local school choice markets, which provide two contrasting examples for the execution of discretion by civil servants in local school choice systems.

Municipalities in Sweden have an important responsibility for ensuring 1) equality between schools, and 2) that guardians’ preferences of school choice are met, and 3) that all schools offer equal education, regardless of the children’s socio-economic background. There is a previous lack of knowledge about the level of discretion in how civil servants interpret their role and function within municipal democracies. This paper provides such knowledge, which is important for advancing the understanding of the link between education and the public's trust in civil servants who work with educational policies.

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