Solidarity Lost in Implementation? Social Mobility and Belief in Meritocracy Shaped by School Choice Policies.

forthcoming

Educational choices shape futures, influence life chances, and are among the most significant factors in social mobility. Despite political and academic consensus on avoiding early selection, inequalities in educational opportunities are on the rise, even in systems that aim for equity or discourage parental choice. Paradoxically, the belief that today’s educational opportunities are meritocratically earned is growing, reducing the demand for inclusive education. EDUMERIT aims to explain the policy feedback of school choice implementation by revealing its contextually embedded effects on parental experiences and fairness beliefs. It shows how varying exposure to educational selectivity and political-social constraints, shaped by stakeholders' discretion and discourses, result in discrepancies between real and perceived outcomes, as well as related fairness judgements. It breaks through the state of the art in studying policy feedback effects in shifting the focus from policy design to policy implementation, and from broader popular attitudes to parental fairness reasoning in school choice. It offers a bold new conceptualization to define under which conditions feedback effects in education result in the rising meritocracy beliefs at the expense of re-distributional demand. It sets out a comparative nested empirical design to reveal parental school choice experiences and related fairness reasoning by combining cross-European evidence with survey experiments, qualitative interpretive interviews and social media analysis in Estonia, Poland, and Sweden. EDUMERIT innovates by addressing endogeneity in education policy feedback effects and advancing a relational approach to fairness reasoning. It develops the role of ‘forward-looking’ social mobility in the broader fairness debate, elucidating inequalities that matter. It strengthens the policy and politics of inclusive education by enhancing the compatibility between meritocracy and solidarity of welfare policies.