Dayton is a leader in school choice. This city of just 165,000 residents provides families with educational options not typical of a city its size.
Charter schools are well established and now serve over 7,000 students. A long-standing privately funded scholarship program provides still more options for children in troubled schools, while a state funded voucher program, slated to launch later in 2006, will make even more options available. And though underutilized, there is even choice within the traditional public school system. Dayton has an open-enrollment policy, allowing parents to choose any school in the system, not just their neighborhood school. As a result, the approximately 90 schools serving Dayton’s children are equally divided among traditional public, charter, and private options.
School choice advocates argue that all lead to increased quality as parents flock to the highest performing schools. It’s clear that Dayton parents are taking advantage of the choices now available to them, but is school quality foremost in their decisions?
GreatSchools, one of the nation’s premier suppliers of school information to parents, is trying to find out.
A series of focus groups conducted in November by GreatSchools with Dayton’s low-income parents in November began revealing how parents decide what school to choose. When these parents were children themselves, the only school choices available were the assigned public school, private schools, or moving to a different district. So it wasn’t too surprising to learn that some of these parents were not aware that their children have many more choices. Others knew options were available, but felt they could not take advantage of them because of their work schedules or of the distance of their school of choice from their home.
Yet other parents were active consumers of school choice, and they provided us with some interesting insights. These parents were mobile and willing to put their children into schools that were distant from their homes and places of employment. Most of these parents had pulled their children from neighborhood schools because they were dissatisfied with the educational fare their children were receiving. But few could be more specific than that.
Most parents, for example, could not cite a specific reason for moving their children to a new school. All said they wanted to choose a good school. But “good” remained undefined. Most parents chose a school based on the recommendation of a friend, family member, or service provider such as Head Start. Others said that they generally had heard "that it was a good school" but didn’t investigate what that actually meant in practice. The bottom line is that most parents were not basing their decisions on a systematic evaluation of schools’ educational quality. And while almost all parents said academic quality is a top priority for them, most haven’t been using this as a factor when choosing a school.
How can we at GreatSchools help Dayton parents make better choices?
Urban parents need basic academic literacy. This means understanding school choice and navigating all the opportunities and challenges this presents. While some basic school quality information exists, it’s often buried in state web sites or packaged in hard-to-read booklets that few parents have the time to understand. In our focus groups, we found that some parents understood the language used to describe academic performance in Ohio (State Achievement tests, Terra Nova exams, percent of students proficient, etc.), but many did not. It was clear that most parents needed better explanations of the testing systems, the state’s school rating system, and what their children’s individual standardized test scores actually mean.
These parents want information they can understand and use. They want specific information about test scores, after-school activities, tutoring services, and special needs programs. We also discovered that parents in Dayton are becoming increasingly savvy about school information. Some parents in our focus groups said they wanted to know the proficiency rates in their children’s schools or the graduation rates of local high schools.
Another important thing we discovered is that parents in Dayton want information about school quality, but they want this not only in a form they understand but from a source they trust. They trust people, and don’t often use Web sites (the primary mode of delivery for GreatSchools in other states). The “build it, and they will come” mentality does not always work with urban parents. Producing informational materials and posting it on the web is not enough. Our focus group parents made clear that they do not use the Internet as a regular source of information, and that, even if aware of materials available on the Web, they would be unlikely to use them. The information Dayton parents get—and trust—comes largely from existing social networks; family, friends and their churches, in the form of the spoken word. These networks are rooted deeply in their communities.
Thus it is clear to us that, if parents in Dayton are to take full advantage of the many school choice options now being presented to them, they will need community partners they trust to provide them with decent information. GreatSchools is working with allies from the Dayton Public Schools, charter schools, private schools, philanthropy, local universities, and community groups to provide Daytonians with high quality school information. In terms of dissemination, community buy-in is key because it will be up to the schools, community groups, churches and others to get this information into the hands of parents and to answer their questions.
In Dayton, we are witnessing an exciting transformation. A partnership between a nationally respected school information organization, and key buy-in from local groups committed to making certain the information is used by parents to make informed decisions about their children’s schools.