The logic of using school choice to drive educational quality assumes that choosers will make rational decisions based on complete information and that market forces will do the rest. Isn’t it pretty to think so? Yet “people are flawed as information consumers and decision makers,” notes Tulane University’s Jon Valant in this thought-provoking report from AEI. Most of us, he notes, are “boundedly rational.” Our decisions make sense, but they’re a function of the time we have to spend evaluating our options, and our own cognitive capacity to process the information at hand. Thus, while many proponents see school choice as an intrinsic good arising from values such as freedom and parental control, there are limits to just how much change in the realms of education quality and achievement is actually brought about by choice per se. Valent’s report shows why: Families consider fewer schools than are available (and sometimes only one), typically turning to friends, neighbors and family members “whose insights often come without the school chooser having to search for them.” Providing more school options—and more information about those options—may make little sense when parents remain unaware of the full range of available choices or lack the time and resources to evaluate them. Simply making the data user-friendly isn’t necessarily the answer, either. The much-pilloried school report cards that reduce a school to a simple (or simplistic) A–F grade have measurable influences on the decisions parents make. Yet Valant also shows that narrative comments on those report cards are “stunningly influential” in shaping perceptions of a school—no surprise to anyone who reads reviews on Yelp. Plus, parents may choose on the basis of characteristics that have nothing to do with a school’s academic performance, frustrating those who assume that good academic performance is enough to drive demand—and that demand will boost academic performance. “Successfully informing the public is not easy,” Valant observes, considerably understating the case. He has no choice but to conclude with a call to improve the ways that we measure and report school performance, including goals beyond academic achievement, and for greater attention to how those with choices utilize the information available to them. Perhaps the clearest advice comes from AEI’s Andrew Kelly, who notes in the report’s foreword that “it is time for reformers and policymakers to pay as much attention to the demand side of school choice as they have to the supply of good schools.”
SOURCE: Jon Valant, "Better data, better decisions: Informing school choosers to improve education markets," American Enterprise Institute (November 2014).
