Title
“The Scarcity Loop: How School Choice Reshapes the Rationing of Public Education”
Authors
Jennifer L. Jennings | Class of 1988 Professor of Domestic Policy; Director, Education Research Section
Publisher
Russell Sage Foundation
From the Author
“When we talk about school choice, we usually picture a family choosing a school. But my research over the last two decades studying the many actors involved — the school system, principals, and counselors, as well as parents and students — convinced me that image overlooks too much of what actually determines where students end up, and what kinds of opportunity they encounter there.
“I wrote ‘The Scarcity Loop’ to show what happens when we introduce choice into a public system where good educational opportunities are scarce. The context is New York City, where students can apply to hundreds of high schools, but there still are not enough good seats to go around.
“The central argument of the book is that school choice does not replace rationing, but it does reorganize how scarce opportunities are rationed, and pushes more of the burden of securing them onto families. When access to a good school depends on how well families can search, strategize, travel, assess risk, and play the odds, a public failure becomes a private problem to solve. We start judging how families chose instead of asking why there weren’t enough good schools in the first place. The question I want readers to leave with is why so much depends on parents’ and teenagers’ ability to navigate among choices that were unequal to begin with.”
—Jennifer L. Jennings
Headshot courtesy of Jennifer L. Jennings
Book cover courtesy of Russell Sage Foundation