A good match: Appraising worth and estimating quality in school choice

This chapter analyzes school choice as a matching process. It focuses on how parents create the conditions for a successful exchange with schools. The theoretical perspective combines conceptual tools from critical and pragmatic sociology. The data comes from a qualitative research study on French middle-class families’ secondary school choices. The first section examines parents’ value judgments and estimations of school quality. The second section focuses on how parents match their children’s characteristics and their own plans for the children with existing local configurations of school provision. The final section takes a closer look at the personal and impersonal devices that parents turn to when making and implementing their decisions. After pointing out the variety of values, criteria, and devices involved in choosing a school, the conclusion analyzes school choice, and social processes more generally, based on a pragmatic reading of critical sociology and a critical reading of pragmatic sociology