Multiple studies have shown the potential for school choice policies to benefit middle-class families, often to the detriment of lower income students in the same district. Yet, there is limited research examining the role of policies in promoting inequality by encouraging exclusionary behaviors. In this article, we utilize the concept of opportunity hoarding to analyze the specific policy provisions built into New York City’s elementary and high school choice plans that prompt middle-class parents to act in ways that secure advantages for their children. We find that parents’ anxiety about scarcity of high-quality educational options combined with the design of the choice policies facilitated pervasive opportunity hoarding that functioned as a collective strategy of class preservation.

All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

With increased tensions and political rhetoric surrounding immigration enforcement in the United States, schools are facing greater challenges in ensuring support for their students of immigrant and Latino/a origin. This study examined the associations between deportations near school districts and racial/ethnic gaps in educational outcomes in school districts across the country. With data from the Stanford Educational Data Archive, the Civil Rights Data Collection, and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, this study used longitudinal, cross-sectional analyses and found that in the years when districts had more deportations occurring within 25 miles, White-Latino/a gaps were larger in math achievement and rates of chronic absenteeism. No associations were found for gaps in English language arts achievement or rates of bullying. Implications for researchers, policymakers, and school leaders are discussed.

Given the dominance of residentially based school assignment, prior researchers have conceptualized K-12 enrollment decisions as beyond the purview of school actors. This paper questions the continued relevance of this assumption by studying the behavior of guidance counselors charged with implementing New York City's universal high school choice policy. Drawing on structured interviews with 88 middle school counselors and administrative data on choice outcomes at these middle schools, we find that counselors generally believe lower-income students are on their own in making high school choices and need additional adult support. However, they largely refrain from giving action-guiding advice to students about which schools to attend. We elaborate street-level bureaucracy theory by showing how the majority of counselors reduce cognitive dissonance between their understanding of students' needs and their inability to meet these needs adequately given existing resources. They do so by drawing selectively on competing policy logics of school choice, narrowly delineating their conception of their role, and relegating decisions to parents. Importantly, we also find departures from the predictions of this theory as approximately one in four counselors sought to meet the needs of individual students by enlarging their role despite the resource constraints they faced. Finally, we quantify the impact of variation in counselors' approaches, finding that the absence of actionguiding advice is associated with students being admitted to lower-quality schools, on average.

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