« The Economics of Religious Innovation | Main | New money does not have to enter the loanable funds market »
Sentences of sadness
There is growing empirical evidence that low-income parents place lower weights on academics when choosing schools, implying that school choice plans may have the smallest impact on the choices of the families they are targeting.
Here is much more. I can't find a non-gated version but here are other relevant papers.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 2, 2008 at 01:39 PM in Education | Permalink
Comments
This doesn't sound terribly surprising. In a lower-income family, you're likely to be more concerned with proximity to jobs and safety than the actual education.
Then again, it could be something to do with the fact that lower-income families may not even realize that you have the ability to CHOOSE a school. Most of the time, you're stuck going to whatever school happened to be closest to where you could afford to live.
Posted by: Rob Stevens at Jan 2, 2008 6:05:10 PM
"We find in both cases that providing parents with transparent information on the academic achievement at schools with their school choice forms results in significantly more parents choosing substantially higher-performing schools. We then use instrumental variables approaches, exploiting random variation generated by each experiment in the test score of the school attended to estimate the impact of attending a higher-scoring school on student academic outcomes. We find that attending higher-performing schools results in significant increases in their children's standardized test scores at the end of the first year. If the results we find represent permanent increases in student-level test scores, they suggest a small policy change that lowers information or decision making costs for these parents had a substantial monetary impact on their children's lifetime earnings, adding to growing evidence that small changes in information can greatly affect choices, program participation, and outcomes."
The bottomline is that when parents get information about school performance, they choose the better school and their children's academic performance improves. Parents don't always get this information.
Posted by: Sophie at Jan 2, 2008 6:10:05 PM
http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Ejmw82/Weinstein_InformationChoicesAchievement.pdf
for the free version
It took some. Thank you Larry and Sergey.
Posted by: Dave Barnes at Jan 2, 2008 6:24:17 PM
This is not surprising, the most important variable for most people in school choice is locatin. I was active for a long time in Catholic Education in Chicago and I remember being told by an Archdiosecan person about that reason. He said they were very surprised.
Posted by: Dan at Jan 2, 2008 6:33:11 PM
I think I remember reading in Freakonomics that school quality doesn't really matter that much in terms of educational outcomes. If they just wind up with a better environment to spend 7 hours of their day in, that sounds like a good enough reason to celebrate.
Posted by: TGGP at Jan 2, 2008 6:49:28 PM
As someone who grew up in a city with a horrible public school (Compton, Ca) my strong support for vouchers is less with the academic promises and more with the simple ability of letting parents pick what geographical location their kids go to school - many now able to choose far, far away from their city.
In other words, even if a child’s chance of going to the state university is not increased by his new school, the kid’s chance of ending up in the state penitentiary is radically decreased. This consideration might not be of primary concern to many who support vouchers, but to those who live in the ghetto, it is of PRIMARY concern. Schools, more than anything, breed gangs. Like the projects of old, when you are FORCED to a geographical location, you make gang recruiting easier - and your kids chances of entering the prison system that much greater.
Posted by: HispanicPundit at Jan 2, 2008 6:58:50 PM
The dirty little secret about school choice is that it is should be most important to the middle and upper middle class. They are the ones who plunk down $1m for a house in a great area, only to find terrible schools. See the Heritage Foundation here http://www.heritage.org/research/education/ednotes90.cfm .
Pacific Research Institute scholars Lance Izumi, Vicki Murray, and Rachel Chaney offer this alarming wake-up call for parents in their new book: Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice. The authors tell a troubling story about the quality of public schools in California's middle-class communities:Too many students at these schools are not grade-level proficient in English. Too many of these students are not grade-level proficient in math. And too many of these students are not ready for college-level work. The supposedly "good" schools that these students attend have produced disturbingly bad results.
Posted by: Charlie Quidnunc at Jan 2, 2008 7:03:09 PM
Why is it dirty and why is it a secret that middle class families want school choice?
Posted by: guy in the veal calf office at Jan 2, 2008 9:00:14 PM
Personal experience: Sausalito is known for having some of the worst schools in California, even with lots of extra funding. The reason is that Marin City (primarily black and poor) is part of the district, and all of the wealthy white parents in Sausalito send their kids to private schools. We sent our son to the Sausalito charter school for a year, which is literally next door to the Sausalito elementary school, and then decided to move because even that school wasn't what we thought was right for our sons.
Given that every parent in Marin City knows that the charter school is available, why don't they all want to send their children there even though it has higher academic scores? I don't know, but I'm sure it's a complicated mix of race, academics and inertia.
Posted by: Frank Leahy at Jan 2, 2008 10:34:10 PM
I'm not a smart shopper for, well, anything really.
What percent of students need to be "picky" before everyone benefits from this behavior? The number is certainly less than 100%, so low income parents just might be rescued from their apathy and turn Tyler's frown upside down.
Posted by: Matt at Jan 3, 2008 12:18:26 AM
Echoing Matt, the alternate interpretation is that the people who will benefit most from school choice are those who are least concerned with school quality. If school choice raises the floor and the ceiling on school performance then potentially the least discriminating consumers will gain from the work of the more selective consumers. Lots of people still buy cars that Consumer Reports advises against but no one buys a car as mediocre as those available on the US market before Toyota and Honda arrived. Likewise, choice and competition (above some minimum threshold) will raise the bar of all schools, especially the low-performers.
Omar
Posted by: Omar Wasow at Jan 3, 2008 1:39:53 AM
Yes, the marginal buyer determines the price and the quality, eventually.
Posted by: Andrew at Jan 3, 2008 4:14:05 AM
Anybody stupid enough to think education works like consumer goods markets should have to explain why there isn't a McHarvard franchise on their block.
School choice lets a few find more appropriate schools. But there's no evidence that it actually causes schools overall to improve.
Posted by: Mike Huben at Jan 3, 2008 5:12:49 AM
> implying that school choice plans may have the smallest impact on the choices of the families they are targeting.
These programs are not targeting the poor. They are offering enhanced services for wealthier and better educated families who have the means to take advantage of them. By acting in opposition to district-wide enhancements, they are specifically intended to ensure that the poor receive only basic schooling.
Posted by: Stephen Downes at Jan 3, 2008 8:26:03 AM
Why does this make you sad, do you want everyone to be grade grind? I had a freind from Korea who brought his daugters here to get them out of a country where the children leave for school early in the morning and then go to tutoring ariving home at about 10:00pm.
Posted by: Floccina at Jan 3, 2008 10:19:22 AM
BTW My Korean friend is a college professor and his wife has a master’s degree.
Also lower income people are generally less good at school and so maybe they would be better off to opt for easier more enjoyable schools.
I have often though that a poor family with children who are not good at school would be better off if the money spent to school his child was given to the child to buy capital instead of the schooling. For example if you took the money that would have been spent schooling him for 7 extra years and bought him a piece of heavy equipment like a backhoe he might be better off. An unschooled man with a backhoe can probably earn much more money than a man who went to school but did badly in school without a backhoe.
BTW IMO a tutor can teach a poor student to read and do basic math in couple of months of 1 hour a day sessions, but schools often fail to teach this to bad students after years in classrooms.
Posted by: Floccina at Jan 3, 2008 10:43:31 AM
Also remember Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison and my grand parents went to very little school.
IMO Schools test/give credentials more than educate.
Posted by: Floccina at Jan 3, 2008 10:46:10 AM
Interesting as ever, thanks. Two small semi-thoughts?
1) Perhaps we overfixate on schools? And perhaps especially where people from working-class and poor backgrounds go. I just don't think school is the big deal to many of these people that it is to middle-class and upper-middle people. And I think it's one of those funny failings of respectable people, to imagine that good schooling can solve tons of problems. I see no reason to think that it can. Not that small steps towards better schooling shouldn't be thought about, of course ...
2) There are cultures that are actively *anti*-education, at least in the traditional "school" sense. Not just uninterested but hostile. Thomas Sowell in his book about immigrant groups points out that the Italians who immigrated to America were mostly from the south of Italy, and that (for good historical reasons) they were suspicious of schools and schooling. So, in America, they didn't follow the (say) Jewish pattern and avail themselves of school as a way to advance. But they've done well for themselves anyway. And of course there's the whole "acting black" thing, where some black kids see any other black kid who pays attention to books and studies as acting white and betraying blackness. What are better schools going to do for such people -- many of whom go on to have their own kids, of course, and who grow up in families and neighborhoods that share these anti-school values.
Plus .... Well, I just think a lot of conventional education is a crock. I'm a pretty booky, ideas-and-words kinda guy, and it stuns me, looking back on my fancy and expensive education, how much in the way of nonsense, lies and misleadingness was pushed on me. Too much of my adult life has consisted of trying to *get over* my education and get to grips with, y'know, life a little more directly. So you won't catch me thinking that education is a panacea, or that what people generally need more of is "education," at least not if what "education" means is the kind of crapola that got dumped on me.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Jan 3, 2008 10:47:18 AM
Sophie is dead right .The trouble is that I read a soundly based paper saying the same thing 40 years ago. When we find something which works to improve education, why do we almost always lurch into policies which are proven not to work instead? Probably the worst example is when our political masters try to improve education simply by pouring in money. There is a mountain of imformation which says "more teachers and/or more equipment and/or more support staff and/or sparkling new buildings equal damn-all educational improvement"; unless you do sensible, carefully designed and proven things with extra resources - like making sure parents have and understand data on which schools will give thier kids the best chance in life.
Posted by: Diversity at Jan 3, 2008 11:36:19 AM
Amen Michael Blowhard! Can I quote you?
Posted by: Floccina at Jan 3, 2008 11:39:19 AM
Floccina -- I was just riffing on what you'd written!
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Jan 3, 2008 11:43:35 AM
If you gave me a hamburger and I said I didn't like it, and then you offered me 5 more hamburgers to choose from, I'd be ambivalent too.
Posted by: 8 at Jan 3, 2008 1:00:13 PM
Another factor is perhaps that most people don't even know what a "good school" is. To someone not terribly bright, two schools that teach the same thing at the same time means those schools are equal. Or perhaps "my kid doesn't need to know latin/trig/calculus/chemistry, etc..." Education has been so poor for so long, many wouldn't know it if a McHarvard High School was plopped on their block.
Sadly, there may not be a market for good education in all places.
Posted by: stan at Jan 3, 2008 3:42:43 PM
School choice plans will affect the educational quality of all students, regardless of their parents' disinterest. What matters is that school administrators compete for the students whose parents do care.
How many low-income AOL customers stuck with AOL long after it was obvious to most industry pundits that their product was inferior? Most savvy customers left, but AOL went to great lengths to lower the price and improve the product. It still sucked, but those disinterested AOL customers benefited from the fact that other people were voting with their dollars.
Posted by: Rimfax at Jan 3, 2008 4:15:04 PM
Alternatively, suburbanites whine way too much about public schools - they really, for most of us, are doing just fine. An anectdote:
Some number of years ago, I was out to dinner with a bunch of my friends and a couple most of us had never met with a daughter about to attend high school. They mentioned they were looking at private schools for her because they (incorrectly) believed that even the AP classes in this suburban district would be just teaching to the standardized state test. We sort of all listened and let it slide past; later I spoke with some of the people there and we compared notes - and every single one of us had been the product of public schools; every single one of us (at the time) was working for IBM; and every single one of us was financially successful. School districts had ranged from urban to suburban to rural; some of us were just 5 years out while others were 20 years out; but we all had one thing in common: we'd all heard when we were in school how bad public schools were, back then, too.
Hmmm.
Here in Austin, now, I've noticed that a substantially disproportionate number of the parents we meet who send their kids to private school and who will talk your ear off about how bad public schools are live in the attendance boundaries of the best elementary school in the district - which beats the pants off private schools on any objective benchmark you can derive.
In short: when you hear people who have kids in private schools talking down public schools, think 'signalling device', not actual educational quality.
Posted by: M1EK at Jan 3, 2008 5:46:43 PM
