School choice is more than just having educational options. The availability of quality schools, information about them and access to them are essential to making choice work.
With that in mind, the Brookings Institute’s 2014 Education Choice and Competition Index, by Russ Whitehurst and Ellie Klein, ranks the largest U.S. school districts and grades them from A to F on thirteen categories related to creating a strong school choice marketplace.
Some of the rankings might appear counter-intuitive to people familiar with the school choice landscape in Florida.
Although 52 percent of students in Miami-Dade are attending schools of choice, the state’s largest school choice district was bested by Pinellas County School District, where just 39 percent of students were enrolled in schools of choice.
That's because the Brookings researchers looked at factors beyond participation in choice programs. The differences come down to district policies and transparency of information.
Ellie Klein
“We wanted to look at this from a parent perspective,” says co-author Ellie Klein. Simply making choices available isn’t good enough. To score well on the Brookings’ Index districts needed to have meaningful options and relevant information about the options. Parents also need to be able to access the options.
Keeping parents informed about their rights to school choice is very important, says Klein, but some districts use a variety of tactics to make school choice difficult to access or understand. Klein highlighted one school district in Fort Worth that used the phrase “Gold Seal” as a code word for public school transfers.
Another district in Brownsville, TX only allowed public school transfers on one single day and only if parents filled out the correct form, in person, at a district office.
“Obviously that’s not acceptable,” Klein said. School choice is ineffective if parents are unaware of the options or unable to take advantage of them because the choices are costly or difficult to make.
Russ Whitehurst
Overall, five of the thirteen categories focus on school information and student performance data and this may lead to some counterintuitive rankings for some school choice advocates. For example, New York City, with just 17 percent of students attending schools of choice, ranks second on the index while Orleans Parish School District, where 70 percent of students attend schools of choice, ranks 29. The difference lies largely with the information made available to parents in New York City.
Florida districts see their own intriguing results within the index.
