School Choice — Peer Reviewed Perspectives
Opinions about all aspects of school choice—articulated on Twitter, in think pieces, in newspaper articles and at the dinner table—abound. “Market Signals: Evidence on the Determinants and Consequences of School Choice From a Citywide Lottery”(Glazerman & Dotter, 2017) and “Stand and Deliver: Effects of Boston’s Charter High Schools on College Preparation, Entry, and Choice” (Angrist, Cohodes, Dynarski, Pathak, & Walters, 2016) deliver peer reviewed perspectives on school choice and Boston’s charter schools respectively. Glazerman and Dotter use the rank-ordered lists submitted by over 22,000 applicants for the Washington DC lottery for charter and public schools to evaluate determine how populations determine school preference. Angrist et al. (2016) use admissions lotteries to estimate the effects of attending charter schools in Boston on college preparation and enrollment. Glazerman and Dotter (2017) provide a wider perspective on school choice, while Angrist et al (2016) narrow in on a specific type of school choice option in Boston—charters.
Boston and School Choice
Boston’s “choice architecture,” the array of school options provided to parents and the associated rules, includes charter options (Glazerman & Dotter, 2017). Massachusetts’s first charter school opened in 1995 (Angrist et al., 2016). Increased parental choice, racial and socioeconomic integration, and improved academic performance are the ideological backbones of choice architecture (Glazerman & Dotter, 2017).
The Impact of Choice and Charters
Glazerman and Dotter (2017) add an important dimension to the implications of different types of schools within choice architecture. They find that school choosers, parents or guardians, consider the importance of school convenience, peers/demographics and academic performance to different degrees along socioeconomic lines when they select schools (Glazerman & Dotter, 2017).
Importantly, within the same category of academic performance, higher income choosers relied more on accountability ratings—information that is harder to find, while lower income applicants relied more on proficiency rates (Glazerman & Dotter, 2017). Charter schools have a strong incentive to teach to the test because of their susceptibility to school closure (Angrist et al., 2016). Angrist et al. (2016) find that there may be a large distortionary effect of test-based accountability in charters because teachers want the rewards associated with high scores. This in turn, can impact school choosers (Glazerman & Dotter, 2017).
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Search Costs
The theory of search costs suggests that there are barriers to obtaining information about many school attributes, consistent with Glazerman and Dotter’s (2017) finding that higher and lower income choosers used different indicators for developing school rankings. Within high-performing charter schools, charter attendance increases other outcomes related to human capital and future earnings such as high school graduation, AP performance, college enrollment and college persistence (Angrist et al., 2016). The search costs required to distinguish between schools with good test scores and schools that will more deeply increase human capital and future earnings may be high and ultimately impact who opts into which schools.
The Boston Context
Though the majority of charter schools in Boston are not “No Excuses” schools, Angrist et al. position No Excuses pedagogy as a defining characteristics of successful charter schools in Boston. No Excuses schools emphasize discipline, extended instruction time and traditional math and reading skills (Angrist et al., 2016). These schools have high ratings and a very particular culture (Angrist et al., 2016). Glazerman and Dotter (2017) find that school rankings by lower income choosers were explained by different factors that high income choosers: “lower income choosers did not share the preference for schools with higher percentages of students of the same race/ethnicity and lower percentages of low-income students as higher income choosers” (Glazerman & Dotter, 2017, p. 606). Additionally, lower income choosers’ preference based on distance was weaker. Lower income choosers emphasize school performance and suggesting that they would be more likely to give high ranks to No Excuses schools.