Modelling school choice as a complex system: understanding school segregation

We revisit literature about school choice and school segregation from the perspective of complexity theory. This paper argues that commonly found features of complex systems are all present in the dynamics of school choice. These features emerge from the interdependence between households, their interactions with school attributes and the institutional contexts in which they reside. While the dynamics of school choice exhibit features of a complex system in general, context is found to be important for how to apply complexity concepts exactly. We propose that a social complexity perspective can add to providing new generative explanations of resilient patterns of school segregation and may help identifying policies towards robust school integration. This requires a combination of theoretically informed computational modeling with empirical data about specific social and institutional contexts. We argue that this combination is missing in currently employed methodologies in the field. Pathways for developing it are discussed.