Successful school choice requires that parents have ample access to high-quality information. Even though choices made might not fully accord with easily observable data, parents want—and deserve—as much detail on available schools as possible. Research can help determine the most influential types of information and the preferred formatting and delivery of it. That’s the case with a new paper by Jon Valant of the Brookings Institution and Lindsay H. Weixler of Tulane University.
In New Orleans, families choose schools via the city’s central OneApp system and can rank order up to twelve choices per child. Valant and Weixler’s study focuses on families choosing pre-K, kindergarten, and ninth grade slots, the primary entry points for students heading to a new school. Before families requested placements for the 2019–20 school year, they were randomly assigned to one of three groups: a “growth” group, which received information from the researchers on the highest-performing schools they could request, regardless of distance from home; a “distance” group, which received information on all of the schools available near them, regardless of ranking; and a control group, which received communications that did not highlight any particular schools. All families, regardless of group, received this information via mailed flyers, text messages, and emails.
Academic performance information for K–12 schools came via a new state ranking system focusing on academic growth measures; for pre-K programs, a statewide early childhood education scoring system—also new that year—was utilized. The researchers note that providing the list of nearby schools is not an idle effort. Unlike many other cities where school options can be static for years, New Orleans annually sees many new schools open, old schools close, and some existing schools relocate. In theory, nearly all public schools and a large proportion of private schools anywhere in the city are available to any family.
Now for the results. The information provided to families on high-performing schools led to a 2.7 percentage point increase in the probability of growth group students requesting at least one high-growth school compared to the control group. It also led applicants to request .09 more high-growth schools on average and to request .2 more schools overall. These effects were driven almost exclusively by students entering ninth grade.
By contrast, there was little observed impact of providing location information to the distance group as a whole, who did not exhibit a statistically significant difference in requesting a nearby school, though kindergarten students were significantly more likely to choose a nearby school that the researchers advertised to them.
Among student subgroups, only one impact stood out, but it was significant: Students with disabilities receiving the growth treatment were 15.5 percentage points more likely to request at least one high-growth school than their control group counterparts. Those students also requested 1.6 more schools overall and requested an additional 0.5 high-growth schools on average.
Not for the first time, a randomized control trial has found that parents pay attention to—and respond to—school information provided to them when they have options from which to choose. As important as this knowledge is, such research designs remain idealized situations, even when real parents are involved. Valant and Weixler note in their analysis that they have no way of knowing what information parents was actually seen by parents—including their own—or sought out from other sources. Additionally, transportation and other barriers, school type, and school culture all can loom large in school choice decisions and are largely unanalyzed in research. Most importantly, this research does not include data on which schools were offered by the algorithm or which ones were ultimately chosen by families. Some researchers are getting closer to understanding actual choices, finding that parental calculus is complex, but there are so many more variables to assess than the typical research design can accommodate.
SOURCE: Jon Valant and Lindsay H. Weixler, “Informing School-Choosing Families About Their Options: A Field Experiment From New Orleans,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (May 2022).
