The 'Good' Schools: Parental Preferences, Student Growth, and School Segregation

• In Event: U.S. Education Systems and Anti-Black Racism

Abstract

In the last decade, there has been a surge of research on the effects of public service performance information in policy domains such as healthcare, policing, mail delivery, and sanitation (e.g., James 2011; James and Van Ryzin 2017; Marvel 2016). This study examines the social and political consequences of information about the effectiveness of local public schools. In partnership with the Spencer Foundation and YouGov, we conduct an online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of parents of children age 0-12. We explore the effects of academic performance information on parents’ school preferences and their implications for school segregation.

Depending on how it is measured, school segregation by race/ethnicity and family income has seen a sharp rise or a stubborn plateau over the last three decades (Frankenberg et al. 2019; Owens, Reardon, and Jencks 2016; Rusk 2002; Stroub and Richards 2013). We hypothesize that one of the barriers to reducing racial/ethnic and economic segregation is the public’s reliance on misleading measures of school quality. For many American families, a key criterion in the choice of where to live is the perceived quality of local schools as measured by student academic performance (Black 1999; Figlio and Lucas 2004). Moreover, within districts that employ various mechanisms for school choice, families’ decisions are driven, in part, by perceptions of academic performance (Glazerman and Dotter 2017; Harris and Larsen 2015).

Conventional measures of school performance rely on student test scores from a single point in time (e.g., the average score of a group of students or the percentage of students who meet a proficiency target). We refer to measures based on these kinds of data as student *achievement*. By contrast, student *growth* measures the rate of improvement in students’ test scores over time. While student growth does not necessarily isolate the causal effect of a school on students’ academic performance--there are other non-school factors that also influence the rates at which students learn--growth is a better measure of school effectiveness than achievement (Reardon 2018).

Moreover, average achievement bears a strong relationship to the racial/ethnic and economic composition of the student body (Hegedus 2018; Sirin 2005). Schools that serve a larger proportion of disadvantaged students tend to have lower average achievement for reasons unrelated to their effectiveness. The students in such schools face more out-of-school obstacles than their more advantaged peers. The differences in average achievement between schools are largely due to differences in the backgrounds of the students they serve--not differences in the quality of schooling. Measuring growth makes it possible to identify schools where students progress faster than average, regardless of their starting point.

We seek to understand whether distributing information about student growth encourages families to prefer schools that serve a less advantaged student body, facilitating a decline in the racial/ethnic and economic segregation between schools. We conduct an online survey experiment featuring a nationally representative sample of 2,800 parents of children age 0-12. Participants are asked to select their preferred school from a set of three options. Every participant receives demographic information for each school. In addition, one-quarter of participants are randomly assigned to receive average achievement information for each school, one-quarter receives average growth information for each school, and one-quarter receives both achievement and growth information for each school. All information comes from the Stanford Education Data Archive, which contains demographic and state test score data for nearly every public school in the US. Participants complete this task six times. For the first five tasks, they choose between three randomly selected schools drawn from a randomly selected district. For the sixth task, they choose between three randomly selected schools drawn from their own local district. The experiment is scheduled to be administered in January 2021.

This research design allows us to estimate the average effects of providing growth information on the demographic characteristics of parents’ preferred schools. We expect to learn whether the provision of growth information causes parents to choose less white and less affluent schools on average. Moreover, because each participant chooses between schools in a different set of districts, we can learn about the kinds of districts where the provision of growth information facilitates integration, where it has no effect, and where it potentially exacerbates segregation. Because parents choose between schools in their own district for the final task, we can also learn if overall patterns replicate there or if the effects of providing growth information are neutralized by parents’ prior knowledge of local schools.

Authors

• David Houston, George Mason University

• Jeffrey R. Henig, Columbia University