If all parents had their choice of schools, schools would grow less segregated over time, and people would abandon low-performing in favor of higher-performing ones.

That's the implication of a new study of parent preferences in the nation's capital, where 22,000 students entered lotteries for more than 200 public schools — nearly half of them charters.

Steven Glazerman and Dallas Dotter of Mathematica Policy Research looked at parent preferences in Washington, D.C.'s new unified enrollment system for public schools, which allows parents to rank their favored schools, and assigns students to their highest-ranked school with available space.

Parents tended to prefer schools that were close to home, with high test scores, and where their students would not be racially isolated. In a predominantly African-American urban school system, parents seemed to wannt some measure of diversity in the student body.

From the study's abstract:

The results confirm previously reported findings that commuting distance, school demographics, and academic indicators play important roles in school choice, and that there is considerable heterogeneity of preferences. Simulations suggest segregation by race and income would be reduced and enrollment in high-performing schools increased if policymakers were to expand school choice by relaxing school capacity constraints in individual campuses. The simulations also suggest that closing the lowest-performing schools could further reduce segregation and increase enrollment in high-performing schools.

The research builds on several earlier studies of school choice preferences in choice-heavy cities that, crucially, allow parents to sign up for both charter and district-run public schools through a single, unified enrollment system. Such systems are becoming more common, but have yet to be made available in Florida school districts. (more…)