Parent Involvement,Influence, and Satisfaction in Magnet Schools: Do Reasons for Choice Matter?

This paper explores the relationships between parents' reasons for choosing a magnet school and their levels of satisfaction, involvement, and influence with the school. Data are reported from over a thousand magnet school parents in two urban districts. The results suggest three general findings: (1) As reported in previous research, magnet school parents choose schools for a wide array of reasons and are highly satisfied with their chosen school; (2) parents' reasons for choice are important predictors of their levels of satisfaction, influence, and involvement with the school; and (3) parents who choose for values reasons, as compared to other reasons, are more likely to be involved in and satisfied with their school of choice and report that parents have influence over school decisions.     

The Readability and Complexity of District-Provided School-Choice Information

Public school choice has become a common feature in American school districts. Any potential benefits that could be derived from these policies depend heavily on the ability of parents and students to make informed and educated decisions about their school options. We examined the readability and complexity of school-choice guides across a sample of large urban districts. These guides are intended to assist parents in learning about their child's options and to help them make informed decisions about schools. We found that none of the guides examined were written within the range considered appropriate for all adults to comprehend. In large urban districts where there are a large proportion of parents that have low levels of literacy, it is likely that many parents will have difficulty comprehending the information presented in the choice guides. We provide some simple steps that could be taken to improve readability of these guides.     

An examination of inter-district public school transfers in Wisconsin

Using data for all Wisconsin school districts over the 2003/04 through 2006/07 school years, we evaluate the state of Wisconsin's Open Enrollment (inter-district transfer) program to determine which school district characteristics influence parental transfer decisions. To our knowledge, this is the first study of school choice in a public school setting that evaluates transfer decisions controlling for district characteristics from which the students are transferring. The main result of our research indicates that parents of transfer students reside in districts with high property values but low taxes, and they choose to send their children to higher spending school districts. Other key findings are that parents send their children to districts with lower percentages of minorities, and are more likely to transfer from districts with fewer extracurricular opportunities.     

Parent preferences and parent choices: the public–private decision about school choice

School choice survey data from the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, a large county‐wide school district, is analysed to examine the characteristics of parents who consider choosing private schools for their children and those who do not. We examine differences in background, including race, educational attainment and socioeconomic status, as well as differences in parent satisfaction with their child’s previous school, parent involvement in school, parents’ priorities in school choice, as well as parents’ social networks. After controlling for background characteristics, we find that parent satisfaction with their child’s previous school was not a predictor of considering a private school. Rather, parent involvement seems to be a more important indicator of whether or not a parent would consider sending their child to a private school. In this case, parents are not ‘pushed’ away from public schools, contrary to much public rhetoric that suggests private schools are somehow inherently ‘better’ than public schools and parents who are dissatisfied with their public schools will opt for private schools. Instead, these findings suggest a ‘pull’ towards private schools. Parents may perceive that parent involvement and parent communication are more easily facilitated and valued in private schools.     

How Central Office Leaders Influence School Leaders’ Decision-Making: Unpacking Power Dynamics in Two School-Based Decision-Making Systems

ABSTRACT

While past studies on school district decentralization found that central office leaders can limit school leaders’ decision-making power, the studies did not examine how they do so. We investigated this in eight elementary schools in two large urban school systems with official policies of school site-based decision-making. We found that even though school leaders had legal authority over most instructional decisions, they overwhelmingly made decisions consistent with central office preferences. The question is why. By examining the micro process of interaction between central office and school leaders, we found that central office leaders in both districts used a range of persuasive strategies to influence school-level decisions. Specifically, they linked their suggestions to institutionalized norms, rules, and shared understandings in the district and profession. By doing so, central office leaders pushed against their decentralization policies. Differences in the combination of strategies that central office leaders used and the amount of interaction they had with school leaders led to (a) greater variability in the degree to which school leaders in one district made decisions aligned with central office preferences; and (b) greater feelings of coercion among school leaders in the second. These findings unpack the dynamics among local education leaders as they implement and sometimes alter the rules within policies through their daily practice.     

A Review of the Empirical Research on Private School Choice

Parents in the United States have had the legal right to choose the school their child attends for a long time. Traditionally, parental school choice took the form of families moving to a neighborhood with good public schools or self-financing private schooling. Contemporary education policies allow parents in many areas to choose from among public schools in neighboring districts, public magnet schools, public charter schools, private schools through the use of a voucher or tax-credit scholarship, virtual schools, or even homeschooling. The newest form of school choice is education savings accounts (ESAs), which make a portion of the funds that a state spends on children in public schools available to their parents in spending accounts that they can use to customize their children's education. Opponents claim that expanding private school choice yields no additional benefits to participants and generates significant harms to the students “left behind” in traditional public schools. A review of the empirical research on private school choice finds evidence that private school choice delivers some benefits to participating students—particularly in the area of educational attainment—and tends to help, albeit to a limited degree, the achievement of students who remain in public schools.     

How School Choice Is Framed by Parental Preferences and Family Characteristics: A Study of Western Area,Sierra Leone

This research set out to investigate how, in a post-conflict area, parental preferences and household characteristics affect school choice for their children. A multinomial logit is used to model the relationship between education preferences and the selection of schools for 954 households in Freetown and neighboring districts, Western Area, Sierra Leone. The increased economic well-being of a family tends to increase the likelihood of choosing a nongovernment school. As a child gets older parents are more likely to select government over nongovernment schools. For girls, parents are twice as likely to select a nongovernmental organization (NGO) school than a government one. Where parental preference for girls is a “safe environment” government is the preferred choice over a private proprietor school. Interestingly, the level of household education does not affect the likelihood of attending any school management type.     

All against all competition: the incorporation of the International Baccalaureate in public high schools in Canada

ABSTRACT

Since the 1980s, education in Canada has been through a process that led to school choice, targeting the improvement of students’ performance through school competition. These policies fostering an education quasi-market became an ideal framework for the expansion of IB schools. Since the Diploma Programme of the International Baccalaureate (IBDP) offers a differentiated international curriculum and is perceived as a program that contributes to students’ achievements, it has been increasingly adopted in school districts and schools. This paper explores the marketing strategies developed in schools and districts in response to school competition by tracing the incorporation of the IBDP in high schools in different districts in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Based on interviews with school staff, district officials and IB local association representatives, this study analyzes schools’ marketing decisions from a consumer and producer orientation taking into account the macro environment (federal government) and micro-environment (provincial government and districts). Rather than fostering efficiency and improving students’ achievement as intended, marketization policies resulted in an increased focus on the recruitment of high achieving students, which led to a competition between schools, between districts and between other programs in the districts or in other words –an ‘all against all’ competition.     

Equal Access? Analyzing Charter Location Relative to Demographics in Ohio

We analyze the geographical distribution of, and access to, charter schools in the state of Ohio. Using poverty and race data from the U.S. Census, as well as publicly available student achievement scores, we analyze the locational preferences of charter schools. We use Geographic Information System (GIS) to visual display charter school locations relative to these community variables. Results suggest that policies limiting charters to locate in low performing school districts (labeled “challenged districts”) lead charters to cluster in urban cities; thus students living in poverty in large portions of the state lack easy access to school choice options. Further, we find that charters tend to avoid areas of the highest concentrations of poverty and Hispanic (though not Black) students.     

School Choice: The Personal and the Political

Enrollment in school choice programs is growing, so is overall support for school choice. Many have analyzed what demographic characteristics impact attitudes towards school choice. This article adds to the literature by exploring the interaction between personal decisions regarding school choice and broader support for school choice programs. Focus groups were conducted in St. Louis and Kansas City with 35 parents of school-age children. Participant responses indicate that school choice programs illicit mixed emotions from parents. Most participants personally support school choice and exercise choice themselves by sending their children to magnet, charter, or private schools. At the same time, they have reservations about broader school choice programs. As Schelling (1978) suggests, these individuals act in their own self-interest despite the impact it might have on the aggregate. More to the point, they are willing to express choice themselves, but deny it to others.     

Choice, Diversity and 'Exit' in Schooling — A Mixed Picture

Traditionally, most systems have required that parents send their children to a school within the district of residence and close to the family home, sometimes with an elite private system co-existing alongside. In recent years, this basic model has been modified, with some countries witnessing more extensive changes than others. This article outlines the range of change that has taken place along the dual axes of promoting diversity and establishing room for the exercise of parental choice. The synthesis article draws on the material submitted by all the countries participating in the OECD study, and not only those which feature specifically in this issue.
The first section reviews the current situation regarding parental choice of school and evidence relating to how that choice is exercised by different groups of parents. For choice to be exercised, there must be alternatives to choose from, and hence there follows a review of some of the policies and practices for diversity. The article then examines diversity in more forms contrasting selective and non-selective schools, public and private schools, and formal and home schooling. Several countries have moved to greater diversification of public education, allowing for different types of schools accommodating different student ability levels or parents' educational preferences. The role of demand is clearly a central element in their emergence and differing fortunes. This in turn is closely, but not exclusively, related to the familiar factors of social advantage and reproduction as well as to issues of value choices and beliefs.     

Divergent Trends in Neighborhood and School Segregation in the Age of School Choice

This study seeks to identify changes in neighborhood and school segregation during the age of rapidly expanding school choice. Prior to 1991, public-school choice was limited. While magnet schools existed and a number of interdistrict transfer programs were in place, few public-school students left their neighborhoods to receive an education. During the past 25 years, the number of public-school choice options has exploded. Today, more than 10% of public-school students attend either a charter school or a magnet school, and many of these schools of choice are concentrated in urban areas. In order to understand how the combination of demographic changes and the expansion of school choice have shaped neighborhoods and schools, this study provides an analysis of levels of racial/ethnic diversity and integration in the 100 most populous U.S. cities and their accompanying school districts. Results of this analysis demonstrate that levels of diversity have risen dramatically in most urban areas as well as in most school districts. Concurrently, an overwhelming majority of cities have experienced increases in neighborhood-level integration while a large majority of schools in their accompanying districts have become increasingly segregated. These divergent patterns in neighborhood and school segregation are cause for alarm and require the immediate attention of policymakers and the public.     

School choice and parents’ preferences for school attributes in Chile

A key assumption of school choice and competition policies is that parents’ most important (if not only) priority when choosing a school is its quality. However, evidence about which of a school's attributes really drives parental choice is still scarce. We use census data from a parent questionnaire in Chile, a country with a national school choice and competition system, to describe the attributes most commonly considered by parents when choosing a school, and to assess how the probability of prioritizing those attributes varies with the parents’ socioeconomic characteristics, while controlling for other characteristics of the family. We find that parents choosing a school prioritize its proximity, its quality, and whether it provides religious education. Furthermore, the probability of parents prioritizing proximity is higher for parents of low socioeconomic status, while the probability of them prioritizing quality and religious education is higher for parents of high socioeconomic status. These findings show that only advantaged families choose schools based on their quality, and therefore school choice and competition policies may offer a limited benefit for disadvantaged pupils, possibly maintaining or reinforcing socioeconomic segregation in the education system.     

School Choice and the Politics of Parenthood: Exploring Parent Mobilization As a Catalyst for the Common Good

A substantial body of research has shown how white, middle-class parents in urban school districts use school choice as a tool to pursue educational advantages for their children. The purpose of this qualitative research was to examine the debate over neighborhood schools and school choice among a diverse group of parents in a gentrifying, yet highly diverse New York City neighborhood that I call “Prospect Point.” My central focus was studying a parent advocacy group that supports neighborhood schools. Findings show that about one third of families living in Prospect Point choose to send their children to charter or gifted and talented (G&T) schools located outside of the neighborhood. Given this outflow of parents and resources via school choice, most of the gentrifier parents in the sample who opted in to the local schools viewed their choice as a politically charged decision, and they credited the parent advocacy group as having influenced it. As a group, they rejected the consumer model of school choice, which they believed put the local schools at a disadvantage and was the norm for their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic demographic. Opt-in parents in this context recognized their privilege, and their children’s privilege, in the school-choice process and actively sought to diminish it through their choice to opt in. This research has important implications for the transformative role that parent mobilization can play in the future of diverse, high-quality public education and our democratic society.     

Unregulated Open Enrollment and Inequitable Access to Schools of Choice

ABSTRACT

In severing the link between residential address and school assignment, school choice policies have the potential to decrease school segregation and increase educational equity. Yet this promise is undermined when school choice creates greater opportunity for those who are already privileged while limiting access to students from historically marginalized groups. This study combines data from a new survey of local open enrollment policies in Metro Detroit, student-level administrative records, and geographic data to critically analyze the local discretion provided in Michigan’s interdistrict school choice policy in relation to the goals of access to schools of choice, desegregation, and educational equity. I found that local school districts implement provisions of state policy in ways that restrict access to Black and economically disadvantaged students while creating pathways of opportunity for others. Districts are incentivized to implement these restrictions because of the inequities built into the state school funding formula and the racialized geography of Metro Detroit that is mechanized in district and county boundaries to restrict access. This study has implications for the regulation of local school choice markets and the role they play in increasing equitable public school opportunities.     

Parent decision-making when selecting schools: The case of Nepal

This paper analyzes the parent decision-making processes underlying school selection in Nepal. The analysis is based on primary survey and focus group data collected from parent meetings in diverse local education markets in two districts of Nepal in 2011. It highlights three main arguments that are less frequently discussed in the context of school choice, including in developing countries. First, children who go to public schools play a significant role in their own decision-making on schooling; this complicates the currently predominant conceptualization that schooling decisions are primarily made by parents and school officials. Second, the gradual growth in private schools has led to significant sorting of students and created a stigma around public education. Finally, in contexts such as Nepal, that suffer from political conflict, and poor conditions for law and order, a school’s proximity to their home becomes a greater priority for students and families.     

School Board Leadership and Policymaking in Changing Political Environments

As the demographic make-up of public schools (and neighborhoods) shift and schools become increasingly segregated, the role of school boards becomes critically important in maintaining policies designed to remedy segregation and promote equal opportunity, policies which may challenge the status quo. Specifically, in school districts and communities where politics are fluctuating, longstanding diversity policies that have assisted in creating integrated learning environments can be overturned by a single school board election. Further, as suburbanization within countywide school districts creates distinct enclaves—where student populations are significantly whiter and more affluent than the district as a whole and political fragmentation is perpetuated—school board members representing elite enclaves may be less supportive of policies that would lessen the privilege of these residents. This paper explores school board leadership and policymaking in two Southern school districts where politics are currently in flux: Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky and Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina. Specifically, we seek to: (1) understand how demographic change—particularly the creation of suburban enclaves—influences public support for and implementation of integration policies; (2) examine the politics of diversity in a larger environment skeptical of race-conscious policies; and (3) analyze local policymaking and leadership.     

Regulating private support for public goods: de-clubbing public schools

ABSTRACT

Urban schools in many OECD countries are contending with policy trends that squeeze budgets and incentivize parent fundraising. The trend may be most pronounced and longstanding in the US, where parent groups and local education foundations have turned increasing attention to raising funds to support additional services, staff, or programs for schools to which admittance is primarily based on residence. This article argues that private fundraising for public schools contributes to the creation of what public economics, public choice, and urban planning theorists have described as ‘clubs’ that may exacerbate inequality. It examines two school districts that have adopted policies aiming to curb this potential inequity: the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District in California and Portland School District in Oregon. A case study approach was used to detail the policies adopted and explore their potential for de-clubbing as well as resistance encountered to reallocation of dollars at the district level.     

Examining the generalizability of administrative personnel allocation decisions

This study examined the effect of district and school size on principal teacher allocation decisions. The study tested the invariance of a personnel allocation decision making model for elementary school principals from three categories of school and district size. The sample consisted of elementary school principals from small, medium, and large schools and districts. The results confirmed the fit of the model across schools of all sizes and across small and medium size districts. For large school districts the proposed decision-making model did not fit the data. This result implies that district size has an effect on the personnel allocation decisions made by elementary school principals.