How Family Preferences Shape Competitive Enrollment Pressures and School Leader Perceptions in the New York City High School Market

Abstract

Over the past three decades, education policy in the United States has increasingly turned to school choice reforms to address persistent disparities in school quality and student outcomes. Advocates argue that by empowering families to select schools that best meet their needs, market pressure will drive low-performing schools to improve and promote innovation across the system. Central to this theory is the concept of competition—the idea that schools, like private firms, respond strategically when faced with the risk of losing students to better-performing alternatives. However, how competition operates in practice is poorly understood. Applying concepts and methodologies from organizational management and social network theory to family application data from the New York City high school admissions process, this dissertation outlines a new, empirically grounded framework for conceptualizing, measuring, and exploring the implications of family preference-generated school competition. Results suggest that schools vary significantly in the competition they face and pose, and various school characteristics, including performance, admissions selectivity, and curricular theme, predict schools’ market positions. Analyzing the market as a complex, networked system reveals underlying submarket structures that break the market into parts, where patterns of competitive relationships are highly clustered within submarket boundaries. Additionally, a survey of NYC high school leaders provides evidence that principals are largely aware of which other schools are more preferred by their applicant pool, and the correlation between leaders’ social network characteristics and the accuracy of their competitive scans suggests professional relationships are important conduits for market-related information.