If you could redesign a city’s education system from scratch, what would it look like? In New Orleans, a terrible tragedy created the need to do just that. Today, education in the city bears very little resemblance to what existed ten years ago. School types, locations, information systems, and application processes are now almost entirely market-driven to give parents the information they need and the schools they want. The unprecedented landscape change in New Orleans has also given rise to a unique opportunity to study school choice in “revealed preferences”: what schools parents actually choose, and not just what they claim to want in a survey, when they must make a choice. The new report from Education Research Alliance for New Orleans compares choice data from immediately pre-Katrina with data collected two different years post-Katrina, as additional information and options settled into place over time. First the good news: After Katrina, the lowest-income families had greater access to schools with high test scores, average test scores increased across all students in the city, and even school bus transportation systems expanded (there’s no choice if you can’t get there). However, very-low-income families were less likely to choose schools with high test scores—even when those schools are easier to access than in a typical district system. But this is not entirely bad news; it is important, useful, and potentially game-changing for choice advocates. The New Orleans study shows that a number of non-academic considerations (bus transportation, afterschool care, etc.) were not only valued by families, but were often seen as mandatory. Families would “trade off” academic quality in measurable degrees to find what they really needed in a school. However, even some of these non-academic factors were overridden in favor of academic quality when 1) school-quality information became simply and prominently available to families, 2) schools of persistently low quality were closed, and 3) almost all schools were available to families through the OneApp application system. All three of these factors only appeared in the last time period from which data were taken, begging the question of how much more important academic quality would have been had those factors been part of the choice landscape earlier. So the takeaway for choice advocates must be that quality can be made to matter more highly to more families than it does in a typical district/choice hybrid system; and that non-academic factors involved in choosing schools can actually be leveraged in service of quality (e.g., universal transportation, non-school-based aftercare). It shouldn’t take a natural disaster to embrace this level of market-driven choice, especially here in Ohio, where we have academic disasters of our own to address.
SOURCE: Douglas N. Harris and Matthew F. Larsen, “What Schools Do Families Want (And Why)?” Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (January 2015).
