Maps and Blueprints: The Social Organization of Schools

Abstract: This paper sets outs evaluative criteria that planners must consider in organizing school systems and applies them to systems where student populations and communities are diverse. Specifically, school systems should allow for families to exercise some degree of freedom of choice in what schooling options they take; but they should also be efficient, be fair, and promote the social good. To apply these criteria to education systems characterised by diversity, it is necessary to understand what diversity entails. Diversity will impact in terms of curricular or pedagogical changes, but its most fundamental effect will be in the way students group with each other, i.e. the formation of peer groups according to ethnicity, learning need, religion, family wealth, or social status. Thus, these evaluative criteria need to be considered in the context of peer group diversity. Three key policy instruments may be used to influence how peer groups are formed. These instruments are: eligibililty (which students, which schools, and which curricula are to be permitted within the school system); financing (what resources should be allocated to different types of students); and support services (what information, transportation, and adjudication services are available for students). This allows us to draw lessons for planning and influencing peer groups. We draw on examples from the U.S., contrasting the system of decentralized local financing with targetted programs to enhance school choice, from the U.K., where public school choice is extensive, from Chile, where a large scale voucher program exists, and from New Zealand, where school-level peer effects are explicitly identified in the funding formula