For the past few years, Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution has ranked the nation’s hundred largest school districts based on the amount of school choice they give to families and the degree to which they promote competition between schools. In many ways, these rankings are similar to Fordham’s own choice-friendly cities list, though the unit of analysis and metric differ somewhat. As in prior years, five of Brookings’s thirteen indicators concern the availability, accessibility, comparability, clarity, and relevance of information about school performance—a far heavier emphasis than one finds in Fordham’s metric. The other eight indicators deal with topics such as school closure, transportation, and the existence of a common application for district schools, several of which are common to both reports.
Though not one of the nation’s largest districts, the Recovery School District in New Orleans is again included in the Brookings rankings because of its unique status within the school choice movement. Once again, it ranks first overall. Yet in the report accompanying this year’s rankings, Whitehurst argues that because of its unique circumstances, New Orleans isn’t a realistic model for other districts. He points instead to Denver, now listed second overall and first among large school districts. (New Orleans and Denver finished first and third respectively in Fordham’s study.)
Other districts Brookings rates highly include New York, Newark, D.C., Houston, Boston, and Baltimore—all of which (with the exception of D.C.) finished lower in Fordham’s overall rankings, while Milwaukee and Indianapolis finished higher. These differences reflect a number of factors, one of which is the comparatively greater emphasis on public versus private school choice in Brookings’ report.
Indeed, the report’s treatment of public school choice—and open enrollment systems in particular—is admirably sophisticated, insightful, and politically astute. In particular, it argues that “the cities that are closest to having a system that supports full and equitable open enrollment are exposing the limitations of a design perspective that prioritizes abstract features such as fairness, efficiency, stability, and universality to the exclusion of factors that are high priorities for many parents.” The result is a system that seems “very good from an intellectual perspective but creates undesirable levels of dissatisfaction among its users.”
This is spot-on, as far as I’m concerned, as is the proposed solution—a design perspective that applies the insights of behavioral economics to school choice by “constraining the initial menu of choices and nudging the shopper towards alternatives that evidence suggests should be preferred.” For example, Boston parents have the option of “rejecting the pre-populated list [of schools] and choosing instead from a much larger list of options.” Fantastic. Let’s do that everywhere.
Similarly, the report rightly acknowledges that eliminating neighborhood preference is politically impossible in some districts due to the psychology of “loss-aversion” (parents prefer certainty to uncertainty because they worry about bad outcomes more than they care about good ones) and the very real losses incurred by richer families. Again, the report offers a sensible solution: Parents should opt out of lotteries rather than opting into them, thereby encouraging choice without requiring it. Only the purest libertarian could object to such a strategy.
Ultimately, the Brookings and Fordham reports complement each other, despite their differences, and their common message can be summed up in one word: progress.
SOURCE: Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, “Education Choice and Competition Index 2015: Summary and Commentary,” Brookings Institution (February 2016).
