Abstract
<jats:p>In this book, the author argues that school choice has reshaped how public education is rationed. Where access once turned largely on housing price, the author demonstrates that access now depends on five interacting mechanisms—formal, spatial, navigational, symbolic, and perceptual. These mechanisms accumulate and adapt, so reforms that blunt one often leave the underlying inequality intact or simply reroute it through another. The author also complicates dominant accounts of school choice by arguing that it functions as a dual rationing system: families compete for scarce seats, and schools compete for students. In this new arrangement, the labor of securing educational opportunity is shifted onto families and sometimes onto thirteen-year-olds. Because that labor is framed as an individual responsibility, unequal high school placements can come to feel both personal and inevitable. Instead of offering minor reforms, the author calls for a public education system where good schools are not scarce to begin with, and a rationing system that is publicly owned, with the state accountable for its outcomes, rather than privately navigated.</jats:p>