The “Good” Schools: Academic Performance Data, School Choice, and Segregation

Abstract

We examine the effects of disseminating school-level academic performance data—achievement status, achievement growth, or both—on parents’ school choices and their implications for racial, ethnic, and economic segregation. Many researchers consider growth to be a superior (if still imperfect) measure of school effectiveness relative to status. Moreover, compared to status, growth has weaker relationships with schools’ demographic compositions. We conduct an online survey experiment featuring a nationally representative sample of parents and caretakers of children ages 0–12. Participants choose between three randomly sampled elementary schools drawn from the same school district. The provision of status information guides participants toward schools with higher achievement status and fewer Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students. The provision of growth information and the provision of both types of academic performance data guide participants toward higher growth schools. However, only growth information—alone, and not in concert with status information—tends to elicit choices with desegregating consequences.

Attractive Rural Schools in Czechia

“…The unavailability of standardised data on the academic performance of schools in Czechia may play a role in the preference for 'soft' characteristics, too, as there is extensive evidence from other educational systems (including large-scale field experiments) that the availability of academic performance data leads families to prefer higher achieving schools (e.g. Houston & Henig, 2023;Valant & Weixler, 2022), although parents usually also consider other school traits and differences in preferences exist between different subgroups (Beuermann et al, 2023;Mandinach et al, 2020).…”

My School District Isn’t Segregated: Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Information on Parental Preferences Regarding School Segregation

“…Importantly, however, inequality beliefs and responses are issue-specific (McCall 2013), so inequality views in one domain (e.g., income inequality) may not necessarily translate to another (e.g., school segregation). Within education contexts, studies have shown that Americans tend to hold overly optimistic views about educational outcomes (Clinton and Grissom 2015), and school choice and policy preferences can be swayed by information treatments (Houston and Henig 2023; Valant and Newark 2016; Valant and Weixler 2022).…”