Choice as a means to drive school improvement is a simple enough idea: If parents are permitted choose where to send their kids to school, they will (in theory) maximize what they value—good schools, presumably—while minimizing their effort and risk to get it. And (also in theory) no one should be more motivated to get what they value than those who currently can’t gain access to it.
As the authors of this paper note, however, studies have tended to find that this simple idea doesn’t always play out that way in real life. The students most likely to move to a higher-quality school are typically already higher-achieving and less likely to live in poverty.
Post-Katrina New Orleans turns out not to be an exception to the rule. On average, the authors find, high-achieving NOLA students switch to high-quality schools, and low-achieving students transfer to low-quality schools. This is “suggestive evidence of a stratified school system and may lead to increased student segmentation based on student achievement and school quality,” they note.
The study, one of the first on student mobility in post-Katrina New Orleans, examines student-level data from 2007 to 2011. “It is clear some students are taking advantage of the ability to choose a high-quality educational option, although many students are still not,” they write. Indeed, of just over twenty-two thousand students in the dataset, nearly three out of four (72 percent) did not switch schools at all; 23 percent changed schools at least once; and about 5 percent switched schools at least twice. These rates are “similar to other traditional urban school districts,” they note. Significantly, within New Orleans, mobility was higher in non-charter schools. “More than one-third of students in traditional public schools changed schools, roughly twice the rate for students leaving charter schools,” the study finds.
As for those charters, the authors note that “several scholars have questioned” whether improvements in student achievement have been driven either by charter schools “creaming” high-achievers or ridding themselves of low-performing students. Mind you, they find no evidence of this happening in NOLA; yet oddly, they insist that “nevertheless, selective marketing and recruiting or cream-skimming by high-performing charter schools cannot be readily dismissed.”
The trio are on firmer ground in observing that objects at rest tend to remain at rest: The majority of NOLA students remain in the schools they initially choose, even when parents are given the freedom to choose among different (presumably better) schools. “Given the rate and frequency of student mobility, these patterns suggest that initial school selection may be an equally or more important factor than student mobility in post-Katrina New Orleans.”
If the assumption of policy makers is that in a choice-driven system, low-achievers will find their way into high-achieving schools, that appears not to be happening in New Orleans. That said, not everyone will agree that high-achieving kids flocking to high-achieving schools represents some kind of flaw. It seems reasonable to suggest that parents of low-achieving kids, though they aren’t voting with their feet now, might do so in the future. The marketplace’s timetable might not move at the rate we wish, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t move at all.
“In sum, the trends in student mobility are troubling and compel policy makers and researchers to rethink the relationship between school choice, student mobility, and school quality in a choice-based public school system,” they conclude. Fostering equal access to higher-quality schools, they advise, will involve better understanding what drives mobility patterns, “such as why parents choose schools for varying reasons, as well as find[ing] ways to sort low-achieving students into higher-quality schools in school choice contexts.”
SOURCE: Richard O. Welsh, Matthew Duque, and Andrew McEachin, “School Choice, Student Mobility, and School Quality: Evidence from Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Education Finance and Policy (Volume 11, Issue 2, Spring 2016).
