Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

School choice attempts to “level the playing field” by making it possible for all families to have the same access to high quality schools. But whether choice benefits less advantaged families depends on whether such families can successfully navigate the sometimes complicated school shopping and enrollment process. A number of studies show cause for concern, finding that lower-income families are less likely to participate in school choice and gain lower rates of admission into high quality schools (Hastings et al. 2006; Gross, DeArmond, Denice 2015; Phillips, Larsen, and Hausman 2015)

Our Study

We will present results from a mixed method assessment of a novel approach to addressing this problem. The High Quality Schools Campaign (HQSC) in Washington, DC matches families with trained parent advocates who provide information and support around selecting “high quality” schools and navigating the enrollment process. The study identifies how the intervention was designed, implemented, and received by participating families. We also measure preliminary impacts on access to quality schools. The findings suggest intensive interventions can influence parents’ participation in the application process but scaling such efforts to serve all the families that could benefit from help remains challenging.

Background

Washington, DC is home to one of the nation’s most expansive systems of school choice. Three-quarters of all children enroll in a school outside of their neighborhood and half attend charter schools, which are publicly-funded but independently operated. In an effort to simplify the process of participating in school choice, the city adopted a unified enrollment system for charter and district schools in 2013, which enables parents to use one application to apply to virtually every school in the city (charter or district). But examinations of the implementation of simplified enrollment systems suggest that less advantaged families continue to struggle to participate in school choice. The DC-based nonprofit DC School Reform Now launched the HQSC to address this gap in participation and access to quality schools. Our study is the first of its kind to focus on this type of intervention.

References:

Hastings, Justine S., Thomas J. Kane, Douglas O. Taiger, 2006, “Parental Preferences and School Competition: Evidence from a Public School Choice Progra,” NBER Working Paper Number 11805, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.

Phillips, Kristie J. R., Elisabeth S. Larsen, Charles Hausman, 2015, “School Choice and Social Stratification: How Intra-District transfers Shift the Racial/Ethnic and Economic Composition of Schools,” Social Science Research 51:30-50.

Gross, Betheny, Michael DeArmond, Patrick Denice, 2015, Common Enrollment, Parents, and School Choice, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington Bothell, Seattle, WA.