When I tell people that I support school choice—meaning charter schools, school vouchers, homeschooling, the whole kit and caboodle—the most common objection I hear is “what about kids whose parents don’t care or are going to make bad choices? Won’t they suffer under your system?”
This argument is an important one. If we allow people to choose where their children go to school, but know that some parents will be “better” choosers than others, it risks creating a deeply unfair system where children with more competent parents migrate to better schools and those with less involved parents get stuck in the worst schools.
Before we throw our hands up in despair, if we can understand why some parents are better choosers we might be able to support worse-off families in the process of picking a school. This would help level the playing field and get the benefits of a system driven by parents (instead of centralized bureaucracy) without the costs of inequity.
Right off the bat, I think we can rule out that some parents “just don’t care” about their kids. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary biology have hard-wired us to care about our offspring. Poverty is challenging, but it cannot overwhelm our basic, instinctual need to care for our young.
A more plausible explanation is that, in many low-income communities, resources like time are at a premium and social cohesion is low. Collecting the necessary information on several different schools and taking the time to weigh the pros and cons might be very difficult for a family with a single parent working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Sharing information is hard too. When your time and energy is taken up working and raising kids, there is no time to connect to other families who might be able to help give you the inside scoop on which schools are good and which are bad. As a result, low-income families are left out of the loop.
But perhaps the most salient explanation for why many families lack the skills necessary to choose their child’s school is that they have never had to choose a school before. School choosing is not a skill that someone is born with, just like no one innately knows what to do when buying a home or filling out their taxes. These are skills that people have to develop, and for the past 50-plus years, our traditional school system has told low-income people that choosing schools is not a skill they need to cultivate. We shouldn’t be surprised when they can’t do it.
If we see these factors, not a lack of caring or that shopworn catchall of “poverty,” as the barriers to better school choosing, it is clear that steps can be taken to help mitigate them.
For those families whose time is at a premium, being able to access clear and straightforward information on schools is essential. One organization creating school “report cards” to help inform families is Greatschools.org. For hundreds of thousands of schools across the country, Great Schools has a page with basic information, school performance data, and a place for parents to leave their comments. In a very short period of time and with very little effort, families can get a solid snapshot of what a school offers and how it performs.
Unfortunately, Great Schools is limited by the data that is available to them (they can only include what schools report). Requiring schools that receive public dollars to make a wide gamut of information on performance, discipline, and offerings available as a condition of receiving public funds would give organizations like Great Schools more data to populate report cards and better inform parents.
For those who are disconnected from social networks, two steps can be taken.
First, non-profit organizations and religious groups can reach out to families with information on schools. The Black Alliance for Educational Options, for example, sets up free tours of schools. Many inner city churches rent buses to take families around to the options available to them. Churches in particular have deep connections to the social fabric of low-income communities and have been facilitating civic participation with efforts like “Souls to the Polls,” which transports low-income people to go vote. Similar efforts could be made to connect families with schools.
Second, well-designed school report cards can create a kind of artificial social network through Yelp-like parent ratings. Tulane University education researcher Jon Valant found that school information sheets that included parental ratings were far and away the most trusted source of information on school performance.
We cannot give up on families who need help choosing their child’s school. We do need to devote time, energy, and resources to helping them become better choosers. We need to empower them with actionable information on school performance and help connect them to other parents to get first-hand reviews of schools and teachers.
Empowered with this information and connected to their community, they can advocate for their children like no one else can.
