Research On School Choice From The Perspective Of Educational Equity

School choice is a kind of behavior that people compete and pursue for high quality but limitededucational resources. particularly, school choice is the kind of educational choice phenomenon thatparents would rather pay a lot to choose a school out of school district during compulsory educationperiod, than the favorable policies let school-age children go to school for free according to the schooldistrict. Western educators in many countries have carried out extensive exploration activities for this,and done a much specific research for the definitions, types, and causes of school choice,relationship between school choice and family, school choice and students. Some Chinese scholars,like Xie Weihe and Yang Dongping also did some research on the pervasiveness and the differencesbetween urban and rural areas, types of school choice and the solutions.This article is based on a survey of the basic situation of school choice aim to explore schoolchooser’s behavior motivation, behavior of the generating process, attitude of the parents and teachersand the rethink of schools and the society.The study found the following key issues：1. School choice has become a very common phenomenon in Chinese compulsory educationperiod. According to the research of several secondary schools which located in different counties andcities, we find that school choice nearly happens in every school, and the number of school chooserseven takes a high proportion.2. This survey shows that different development status between urban and rural areas is a keyreason for whether there is a school choice or not.3. Parent’s different qualities lead to different behavior motivation. The quality consists ofparents’ educational situation, occupations, income situation and attitude towards education to theirkids. For instance, well-educated parents prefer to send their children to a better school for highquality education, while parents who are not well educated or even illiterateness would like toconsider that anywhere could be is a good place, even if they send their children to a better school,they just want to maintain the family or they can take jobs outside heart and soul.4. Accompanied by school choice, money and relationship would come along. The interviewsshow that every chooser and teacher recognize the sponsorship fees, and some parents think thatpersonal connection, school-choosing fee and student’s high score have become the essentialcondition of school choice.5. School choice has accelerated a series of other phenomenon’s development. For instance,mathematical Olympiad classes, specialty classes, etc., most of the school choosers parents hope theirchildren can have some specialty to add on their excellent results so that their children can have morebargaining chips.6. Parents’ conformist mentality is another reason for school choice, namely “go with the stream”,they will do the same thing when they see what other parents do.7. This survey shows that, educational inequities do exist at this stage, parents choose other schools for their children have another important reason, which is the unbalanced distribution ofeducational resources caused by different economic development or different educational policy.However, It’s found that both state and local governments have made some efforts to improve theeducational inequity. For example, Zhengzhou government has implemented the “school districtsystem” and “Helping and Supporting Project” between elite schools and weak schools. Althoughthese initiatives encountered some obstacles in the implementation process, the educationdepartment’s willing to improve the condition of education inequity should be recognized. I believethese measures will play its role over time.