Academic Preferences in Choosing Charter Schools: Do Parents Do as They Say?

• In Event: School Choice and School Improvement

Abstract

Objectives: School choice advocates argue that parents will make rational decisions and “will opt for a school that can provide the best education for their child” (Berends & Zottola, 2009, p 37). If school choice is to be an engine for school improvement, as hypothesized, then parent choices based on academic performance is key. It is thus important to understand why parents make the school choices they do. We address the following questions: 1) To what extent do public school switchers say they switch to a charter school for academic versus other reasons in a parent survey? 2) How do these espoused preferences compare to revealed preferences based on school switching behavior?

Data/Methods: Data on parents’ espoused preferences came from surveys administered to parents in all charter schools in Indianapolis during spring 2007. To investigate the actual behavior of parents who switched into charter schools we use data from the Northwest Evaluation Association’s (NWEA) database of student testing records that allowed us to track students back to their prior school of enrollment.

We created three variables that allowed us to examine academic reasons for choosing a charter school; 1) Academics as a Top Priority for School Choice (ATP), 2) perception of the quality of their child’s previous school and 3) the parents’ estimate of the average grade their child received at their previous school, from A to F. We examined these variables descriptively and created contingency tables of ATP and the other factors. We also compared students’ previous schools to their current charter schools in terms of academic achievement as measured by AYP status. We also examined the switching patterns by reviewing academic achievement as measured by NWEA achievement tests in mathematics and reading.

Results: Overwhelmingly, parents in Indianapolis charter schools indicate that academics are the main driver of their choice of a charter school. We found that a smaller percentage of parents who rated their previous school as above average report academics as a top priority than parents who rated their previous schools as average or below average. The majority of parents and students in our sample left traditional public schools that did not pass AYP in the year prior to their move. We found that only one third of students on average, choose to enroll in a charter that had passed AYP while a further one third chose to enroll in charter schools that were new and therefore had no AYP designation.

Significance: If rational choice is the impetus behind school choice, and rational choices are construed to be switching to schools with higher or better academic achievement, then it is important to reconsider how this information is portrayed to parents so they can and will use it when making enrollment decisions for their children. In contrast, if parent sovereignty in making choices is the yardstick for judging school choice, then there are few criteria for judging what constitutes a good choice, beyond allowing parents to exercise their choice to maximize their own preferences, whatever they may be.

Authors

• Marc L. Stein, Johns Hopkins University

• Ellen B. Goldring, Vanderbilt University

• Xiu Cravens, Vanderbilt University