When “school choice” leads families to trade one bad school for another
Chicago study documents that fewer than 5 percent of students who transfer move to a high performing school
In a perfect world, school choice is supposed work by allowing families to leave bad schools and enroll their children in better ones. The failing schools either close, or improve to attract students again.
But for such a system to operate smoothly, parents need information to figure out which schools are good and which are bad.
In Chicago, researchers had an unusual opportunity to study, over several years, how publicizing information about school quality influenced where families enrolled their children. And they found that many families did pull their children out of failing schools. But they usually ended up in ones that were just as bad, or only slightly better. Astonishingly, more than 25 percent of the transfer students moved to another school that was also on the city’s probation list of failing schools.
“The reason is geography,” said Peter M. Rich, one of the study’s coauthors and a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at New York University. “The low-performing schools are clustered in high-poverty neighborhoods in the South and West Side of Chicago. They have fewer nearby options to choose from.”
Given the choice of commuting a long way to a high-performing school on the other side of town and transferring to a school in the neighborhood, low-income parents tend to choose the latter. Time-consuming travel is impractical for students with working parents. And no one wants to send elementary school children on public transportation by themselves through crime-ridden neighborhoods. But the choices closer to home are often little, if at all, better than poor students’ current schools.
While certain aspects of public transportation infrastructure, geographic segregation and neighborhood safety are unique to Chicago, Rich believes the lessons from his study, “Choice, Information, Constrained Options: School Transfers in a Stratified Education System,” published online in the American Sociological Review on Sept. 9, 2015, and slated to be printed in its October 2015 journal, are widely applicable.
“The overall lesson is that school choice policies that don’t provide transportation or, perhaps, housing subsidies for families to move to higher-income neighborhoods aren’t going to equalize educational opportunities,” Rich concluded.
Rich found that the low-performing schools were overwhelmingly When “school choice” leads families to trade one bad school for another - The Hechinger Report: