School choice is among the most intriguing features of recent school reforms, due in part to evidence that in many countries that have conducted choice reforms over the past decade the trade-off between educational efficiency and equity of educational opportunity has been indispensable.

Market elements – such as increased ‘consumer’ choice, published performance indicators and financial reward for success – have been introduced in many areas of public policy, including education, highlighting that school systems based on informed choice among autonomous schools improve student achievement by creating incentives for students, parents, teachers, schools and administrators to provide the best learning environment. Besides efficiency arguments the proponents of a choice based system argue that the reduction of bureaucratic rules and procedures (such as catchment areas) brings along more equal educational opportunities (Gorard et al. 2003). However, the theoretical and empirical cases on the effect of choice on equity are hotly debated.  First, choice tends to cumulate better socio-economic background (high-SES) students into certain schools, creating not only positive peer effects, but also negative externality to the disadvantaged students. Second, early segregation pressures families to increase their responsibility for their children’s achievements and can cause a tendency of prep-schooling. Third, better teachers tend to accumulate in better schools fostering the segregation and increasing the effect of background characteristics even more. 

In some European countries (UK, Netherlands) ‘parental choice’ has long been built into the system, while in others place of living is used to determine school placement. Latter includes more or less strict ‘catchment based’ models. However, both – the strict model and the mixture of an official policy of ‘no choice’ with a de facto exercise of an option of choice leads to inequalities between school districts. These are argued to be at least as great as in pro choice countries.

Thus, the degree of choice per se can hardly be the decisive factor to explain the differences between educational systems. Rather different institutional aspects interact along several dimensions and several reshapings in educational systems’- i.e. accountability, autonomy and choice, can be mutually reinforcing.  Woessmann et al. (2010), Betts and Loveless (2005), Le Grand (2007) approve that a lot depends on the specific design and implementation of choice policies.

We argue that there are many paths with more or less choice, which manage to achieve a good balance between educational efficiency and equity (i.e. outcome). Our aim is to investigate which are the necessary and sufficient combinations of conditions (i.e. institutional features of educational policy) to achieve this balance. We define the latter as the systems’ ability to guarantee good results (i.e. high scores in PISA) irrespectively of family background characteristics (operationalized by standard deviation of PISA 2009 scores illustrating the importance of background characteristics in results).

Taking into account the paradigmatic shift from government to governance and the importance of active citizens in the latter, we argue that strict assignment of pupils to schools is not a sustainable option and the relevance of choice models is widening. Therefore, there is a growing need for understanding how to offer this freedom of choice without harming disadvantaged students.

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