Parents’ Online School Reviews Reflect Several Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in K–12 Education

Abstract

Parents often select schools by relying on subjective assessments of quality made by other parents, which are increasingly becoming available through written reviews on school ratings websites. To identify relationships between review content and school quality, we apply recent advances in natural language processing to nearly half a million parent reviews posted for more than 50,000 publicly funded U.S. K–12 schools on a popular ratings website. We find: (1) schools in urban areas and those serving affluent families are more likely to receive reviews, (2) review language correlates with standardized test scores—which generally track race and family income—but not school effectiveness, measured by how much students improve in their test scores over time, and (3) the linguistics of reviews reveal several racial and income-based disparities in K–12 education. These findings suggest that parents who reference school reviews may be accessing, and making decisions based on, biased perspectives that reinforce achievement gaps.

Spatial Mismatch and the Share of Black, Hispanic, and White Students Enrolled in Charter Schools

“…At the same time, although test scores are not unbiased or objective measures of school quality, they are salient to parents when they assess a school's learning environment. That is, parents take information about test scores into account when enrolling their students in schools (Denice and Gross 2016; Reback 2008), even as such metrics reflect—and parents’ use of them reinforces—patterns of segregation and achievement gaps (Gillani et al 2021). Additionally, results were replicated when substituting a measure of spatial mismatch based on schools’ average learning rates, which are less strongly correlated with student composition (Reardon et al 2019).…”

“…Measures like student average growth or learning rates may be less correlated with student demographics than test scores (Reardon et al 2019), but parents are more aware of and more likely to rely on simpler measures like test scores than more complicated measures like student growth or average learning rates. One recent study found that parents' online reviews of schools correlated with schools' standardized test scores but not with measures of school effectiveness or growth (Gillani et al 2021).…”

Education Data Science: Past, Present, Future

“…Recent work finds that online school report cards can create disparities in housing values and reproduce social segregation (Hasan & Kumar, 2019). Likewise, the article on this special topic by Nabeel Gillani, Eric Chu, Doug Beeferman, Rebecca Eynon, and Deb Roy (Gillani et al, 2021; “Parents’ Online School Reviews Reflect Several Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in K-12 Education”) focuses on the public written reviews that parents make on school rating websites as a means to understand how parents are making subjective assessments of quality. The authors use NLP methods (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, BERT) to study textual snippets in half a million parent reviews concerning 50,000 K–12 public schools and identify those most associated with school characteristics (race, class, and test score) and school effectiveness (test score gains).…”

“…Similarly, the article by Joshua Rosenberg, Conrad Borchers, Elizabeth Dyer, Daniel Anderson, and Christian Fischer (Rosenberg et al, 2021; “Understanding Public Sentiment About Educational Reforms: the Next Generation Science Standards on Twitter”) explores the effects of public sentiment on education reforms. Whereas the Gillani et al’s (2021) article uses half a million parental posts on greatschools.org, Rosenberg et al (2021) focus on the sentiments expressed in 656,000 Twitter posts in relation to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). As many reform scholars note, public buy-in to reforms (and teacher buy-in) is essential for reforms to be effective.…”

School choice increases racial segregation even when parents do not care about race

“…Both are highly trafficked by parents searching for schools [monthly visits of 6.9 million (M) and 3.8M, respectively ( 10 )]. Greatschools.org has been used in previous research on school choice ( 11 , 12 ). We reviewed the information provided to parents on these platforms and identified attributes that empirical research has shown are important to parents ( 13 – 20 ).…”