School Choice in an Urban Setting: Sources of Information

• In Event: Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools: Mechanisms in the Reproduction of Educational Inequality

Abstract

NCLB requires not only that all public school students routinely undergo high-stakes assessments, but that the results of these assessments be publicized. The emergence of the internet has facilitated this process. School districts now publish assessment results—broken out by school and by demographic groups within schools—directly on district-run web pages.
Moreover, a number of consumer-oriented websites (such as greatschools.org) have emerged that aggregate school and district-level data on demographics, funding, and test performance, and present them in easy-to-digest form. The confluence of a federal mandate to publicize assessment results with a medium for freely disseminating information implies that a “consumer” interested in “school shopping” now finds herself with easy access to large quantities of information on “school quality.”

This paper investigates the sources of information on school quality that parents actually draw on when choosing schools for their children, focusing, in particular, on publically available performance data. I use a set of in-depth interviews with parents of young children who currently reside in a large northeastern city that has a well-established choice program. This city has numerous charter, magnet, and private schools, as well as an extensive system of neighborhood public schools. The interviews contain detailed information on how children in these families came to attend their current schools. I examine parents’ use of NCLB “report cards” and consumer-friendly rankings based on these data, as well as other sources of information—primarily, word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted network members, but also school visits and online parent testimonials.

The data set contains 41 interviews. The sampling matrix had six cells, defined by social class (three categories) and race (African-American and white). Interviews were conducted face-to-face, usually in the respondent’s home, and typically lasted 90 to 120 minutes. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded using Atlas.ti. Subjects received a $50 honorarium.
Analysis indicates that that concerns about schools were ubiquitous among this sample of urban parents, with none indifferent. Nevertheless, the use of school performance data was almost entirely restricted to middle-class and upper-middle-class parents. It was only these parents who scoured district websites or greatschools.org, assembled spreadsheets, and conducted “research” on school quality. Indeed, while there was substantial variation in the importance ascribed to test scores, no one in these groups was oblivious. Furthermore, variation in the weight placed on standardized performance data appeared to be inversely associated with reliance on network ties: parents who did not find their network to be helpful depended much more heavily on report cards. This difference appeared to be associated with race, albeit imperfectly. Among working-class respondents, by contrast, there was almost no discussion of standardized performance data in the interviews, and information on school quality came almost exclusively through network contacts. Given the fact that one of explicit purposes of NCLB-mandated reporting was to enable these parents to become more effective school “shoppers,” this finding raises a number of policy issues, which I take up in the conclusion.

Author

• Elliot B. Weininger, College at Brockport - SUNY