Choosing Schools

by Schneider, Mark; Teske, Paul Eric; Marschall, Melissa

• ISBN13: 9780691092836
• ISBN10: 0691092834
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-03-18
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	vii
List of Tables	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction School Choice, Parent Incentives, and the Use of Information	3	(18)
PART ONE
Reinventing the Governance Structure of Education: School Choice as Educational Reform	21	(18)
Parent Behavior and the Demand Side of School Choice	39	(20)
Studying Choice: The Research Design	59	(28)
PART TWO
The Distribution of Preferences: What Do Parents Want from Schools?	87	(21)
How Do Parents Search for Information?	108	(18)
Building Social Networks to Search for Information about Schools	126	(23)
PART THREE
The Distribution of Knowledge: How Much Do Parents Know about the Schools?	149	(15)
Allocational Efficiency: You Can't Always Get What You Want---But Some Do	164	(21)
Productive Efficiency: Does School Choice Affect Academic Performance?	185	(19)
Does Choice Increase Segregation and Stratification?	204	(19)
Choosing Together Is Better than Bowling Alone: School Choice and the Creation of Social Capital	223	(15)
Opting Out of Public Schools: Can Choice Affect the Relationship between Private and Public Schools?	238	(23)
CONCLUSION
Myths and Markets: Choice Is No Panacea, But It Does Work	261	(14)
Notes	275	(10)
References	285	(22)
Index	307