What matters to parents in picking their child’s school?

School choice’s worst critics have been clear that they see a foul game afoot:

• Step One: An ill-intentioned charter or voucher school sets up shop
• Step Two: The school makes a pitch to the community, luring in poor parents and students who don’t know how to make heads or tails of picking a school
• Step Three: Profit

“Socioeconomically disadvantaged children and their families are easier to manipulate,” an education blogger and teacher from Philadelphia wrote. “Many urban poor are not in a position to access research on charter school performance, so they simply believe what they hear or are told.”

One clear problem with the author’s argument is that it is condescending and wildly overstated, we shouldn’t lose sight of that. The vast majority of school operators have the best interests on children at heart. If they wanted to unscrupulously profit, there are many other industries with wider margins.

But the critique is also too targeted. It’s not just the urban poor that have a hard time understanding options and picking a school – it’s something that’s hard for any family, poor or rich. The limited information that we do have on school performance is often very hard to access and is usually presented in a convoluted way that can be challenging for even the most savvy helicopter parents to sort through. For families that have limited time or are disconnected from social networks, determining what a school offers and how well it performs academically can be exceedingly difficult. This causes families to have to pick schools blindly, or based on indicators that might not be correlated with outcomes they actually care about.

There has been a movement, championed by organizations like GreatSchools and the Foundation for Excellence in Education, to try and make data on school performance easier for parents to access. In my new paper, “Balancing the Equation: Supply and Demand in Tomorrow’s School Choice Marketplace,” I dig into some of the fascinating work researchers are doing to better understand how parents make decisions about where to send their children to school.

1. Presentation matters

Rebecca Jacobsen, Andy Saultz, and Jeff Snyder completed a randomized experiment with more than 1,100 participants that presented the exact same data on school performance in different ways and judged how parents reacted. Even though schools rated as an “A,” “90% percent proficient” and “advanced” meant the same thing, respondents routinely ranked schools that received an “A” higher than schools whose results were reported in the other ways. The same was true on the other end of the spectrum. Schools given a “C” were seen as much worse as those rated “basic” even though the classifications again meant the same thing.

How data is presented matters and those looking to inform parents need to realize that seemingly subtle distinctions can magnify what parents think about schools.

2. Who is offering the information matters

Jon Valant found that parents were more likely to trust school performance data from independent non-profit organizations than state governments.  Of the people he surveyed, 77% rated their trust in the school performance data presented by non-profits as a 3 or better (on a scale of 1 to 5), whereas only 60% gave the same score to state governments.

Who is offering the information matters, and it looks like there is potential for greater influence from third party organizations disseminating state data than from the state acting as a one-stop shop for both data collection and dissemination.

3. What is offered matters

Even more than non-governmental organizations, Valant found that parents trust other parents when it comes to gauging the quality of a school.  In an experiment where families were given different information about schools and asked to rate them, he found that seeing two positive comments about a school from another parent as opposed to two negative comments led to a jump of 2/3^rd of one letter grade (from a C+ to a B). Even though the comments were “brief, appeared alongside formal academic ratings, came from unidentified sources on the internet, and described schools that many respondents knew well,” they “fundamentally reshaped the way parents and other adults evaluated school policy.”

Websites like Yelp that allow people to leave reviews have revolutionized the way consumers get information.  Giving parents a platform to share information about schools could go a long way in helping them make a more informed choice.

No matter where you stand on the question of school choice, it is hard to argue that giving parents better information about their child’s school is a bad thing. Using the latest knowledge on parental decision-making can help better inform the marketplace and prevent parents from being taken advantage of.

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