Public or private education? Parents’ choices between actual and potential pluralism

School autonomy, educational choices, quality and equity are the watchwords that have guided educational systems changes in many European Countries over the last years towards a pluralistic horizon. Focusing on Italian education system, the article analyzes the mechanisms leading parents to choose children’ education paths and investigates the main factors behind the choice between public and private school, exploring how such behavior merely depends on deterministic socioeconomic segmentation or on other cultural variables, such as prestige, ideology, religion, or the status appeal of an education offer. Exploring results of a nationwide Italian PRIN study (consisting in a survey on parents with children at the end of primary and low secondary school and at the beginning of upper secondary schools), the article underlines, besides the influence of parents’ education level and socioeconomic status, the importance of other latent variables influencing parents’ choice, like family involvement in school system and parents’ motivation.