Anxiety over school admissions isn’t limited to college – parents of young children are also feeling pressure, some more acutely than others

by Bailey A. Brown, Spelman College

Deciding where to send your child to kindergarten has become one of the most high-stakes moments in many American families’ lives.

A few factors have made selecting an elementary school particularly challenging in recent years. For one, there are simply more schools for parents to pick from over the past few decades, ranging from traditional public and private to a growing number of magnet and charter programs. There are also new policies in some places, such as New York City, that allow parents to select not just their closest neighborhood public school but schools across and outside of the districts where they live.

As a scholar of sociology and education, I have seen how the expanding range of school options – sometimes called school choice – has s