Choosing Schools: Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools

Mark Schneider; Paul Teske; Melissa Marschall

Published by Princeton University Press 2000

Choosing Schools

Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools

Mark Schneider , Paul Teske and Melissa Marschall

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691225685

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Mark Schneider is Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. His books include The Competitive City and, with Paul Teske, Public Entrepreneurs (Princeton). Paul Teske is Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Melissa Marschall is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Reviews

"Choosing Schools is a valuable contribution to the highly contentious, emotionally charged debate about school choice. Schneider, Teske, and Marschall have written a careful, reasonable, balanced and fair assessment of the evidence. Their quietly persuasive book deserves a wide readership."—Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education in the U.S. Department of Education and author of The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980

"The authors' careful and judicious reading of their evidence will be greatly appreciated by those who are frustrated by the selective and inflated claims that more typically have dominated the school choice debate. While the published articles of these authors are familiar to those who have followed the school choice debate carefully, the integration of the various pieces into this book gives that content a sense of freshness, greater complexity, and added empirical horsepower."—Jeffrey Henig, author of Rethinking School Choice and coauthor of The Color of School Reform

"Winner of the Aaron Wildavsky Best Book Award"

"[A] very comprehensive volume. . . . The reader will be stimulated by the depth of analyses and the originality of the interpretations. . . . Clearly, this book will be the standard departure point for further study on informing school choice."---Henry M. Levin, Urban Affairs Review

"A rich . . . interesting book. . . . Choosing Schools is relentlessly fair in its efforts to stay true to the data."---Jeffrey R. Henig, Journal of Politics

"There is not much empirical evidence on how school choice programs work in practice—which is perhaps the central concern in the debate over choice, political and intellectual. This book provides interesting new evidence on a wide range of choice-related topics, and ties it together with theories from economics, social psychology, sociology, and public opinion. In so doing, it offers a firm basis for gaining perspective on the performance of school choice and judging its prospects. There is nothing like it in the literature. It is a tour de force."—Terry M. Moe, Hoover Institution and Stanford University

"This timely, thoughtful, and useful guide, which clearly favors educational choice as a solution to the many challenges facing American schools today, should be read by those on both sides of the debate."

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Figures Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Tables Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Introduction. School Choice, Parent Incentives, and the Use of Information Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part One
Chapter 1. Reinventing the Governance Structure of Education: School Choice as Educational Reform Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Chapter 2. Parent Behavior and the Demand Side of School Choice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
Chapter 3. Studying Choice: The Research Design Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Part Two
Chapter 4. The Distribution of Preferences: What Do Parents Want from Schools? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
Chapter 5. How Do Parents Search for Information? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	108
Chapter 6. Building Social Networks to Search for Information about Schools Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	126
Part Three. Chapter 6 Building Social Networks to Search for Information about Schools
Chapter 7. The Distribution of Knowledge: How Much Do Parents Know about the Schools? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
Chapter 8. Allocational Efficiency: You Can't Always Get What You Want—But Some Do Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	164
Chapter 9. Productive Efficiency: Does School Choice Affect Academic Performance? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
Chapter 10. Does Choice Increase Segregation and Stratification? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
Chapter 11. Choosing Together Is Better than Bowling Alone: School Choice and the Creation of Social Capital Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
Chapter 12. Opting Out of Public Schools: Can Choice Affect the Relationship between Private and Public Schools? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	238
Conclusion
Chapter 13. Myths and Markets: Choice Is No Panacea, But It Does Work Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	307