Why do parents compete for popular schools? This dissertation offers two underexplored perspectives on this question, highlighting how categories shape parents’ perception of hierarchy, and how parents enact responsible selves through their school choices. I leverage a policy effort in Singapore’s school choice system that I refer to as “unranking.” This effort aims to foster the perception of a heterarchy of schools—the view that different schools are good in different ways—in place of the existing academically-based status hierarchy. Ultimately, the goal is to attract parents to apply to a broader range of schools, thereby reducing the degree to which they compete for the most popular schools. Drawing on interviews with parents choosing primary schools, I find that they continue to perceive a hierarchy of schools. In Chapter 1, I explain this finding by arguing that parents infer the worth of a school through the educational categories that have marked their own lives. In contrast with rational choice-based approaches that treat preferences as exogenous, rather than as an object of analysis, a focus on categories offers a more precise understanding of which preferences continue to be the most consequential for parents’ choices, and why the status hierarchy persists despite unranking. Chapter 2 complements Chapter 1, presenting systematic quantitative evidence that the competition for popular schools has not abated since the introduction of the policy. In Chapter 3, I show that parental competition for popular schools is not only a means of securing outcomes for one’s children; it is also a means of enacting one’s identity as a responsible parent. I examine how parents construct these identities in the context of a policy discourse that offers alternative scripts of what it means to be a responsible parent, and suggest that identity work constitutes another dimension of inequality in the school choice process.