What parents want: school preferences and school choice

By E. Greaves, A. Vignoles, Simon Burgess, Deborah Wilson. 2009

390 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Parental demand for academic performance is a key element in the view that strengthening school choice will drive up school performance. In this paper we analyse what parents look for in choosing schools. We assemble a unique dataset combining survey information on parents’ choices plus a rich set of socio-economic characteristics; administrative data on school characteristics, admissions criteria and allocation rules; and spatial data attached to a pupil census to define the de facto set of schools available to each family in the survey. To achieve identification, we focus on cities where the school place allocation system is truth-revealing (“equal preferences”). We take great care in trying to capture the set of schools that each family could realistically choose from. We also look at a large subset of parents who continued living in the same house as before the child was born, to avoid endogenous house/school moves. We then model the choices made in terms of the characteristics of schools and families and the distances involved. School characteristics include measures of academic performance, school socio-economic and ethnic composition, and its faith school status. Initial results showed strong differences in the set of choices available to parents in different socio-economic positions. Our central analysis uses multinomial logistic regression to show that families do indeed value academic performance in schools. They also value school composition – preferring schools with low fractions of children from poor families. We compute trade-offs between these characteristics as well as between these and distance travelled. We are able to compare these trade-offs for different families. Our results suggest that preferences do not vary greatly between different socio-economic groups once constraints are fully accounted for.

Subfields: Demography, Education, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f6d5379461305983fe348561c9b7e9cb9387273

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Citations in the corpus

The Welfare Effects of Coordinated Assignment: Evidence from the New York City High School Match (2017, neutral): “A number of recent papers use micro data from assignment mechanisms to understand school demand (Hastings, Kane, and Staiger 2009; He 2012; Ajayi 2013; Agarwal and Somaini 2014; Calsamiglia, Fu, and Güell 2014; Hwang 2014; Burgess et al. 2015), typically using data from manipulable mechanisms like t”
Beyond Truth-Telling: Preference Estimation with Centralized School Choice and College Admissions (2019, background): “In analyzing school choice in the U.K., where proximity to schools is used as a tie-breaker in determining admission to oversubscribed primary schools, Burgess et al. (2014) restrict each student’s set of schools to those that are in close proximity to the student’s residence.”
Do Parents Value School Effectiveness? (2020, result): “The results also contribute to a large literature studying preferences for school quality (Black, 1999; Figlio and Lucas, 2004; Bayer et al., 2007; Hastings and Weinstein, 2008; Burgess et al., 2014; Imberman and Lovenheim, 2016).”
Safety First: Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women (2021, background): “Families have been found to value high academic attainment, proximity, and certain composition of students in terms of race and socioeconomic status 4 (Gallego and Hernando 2009, Burgess et al. 2015, Hastings, Kane and Staiger 2009, Carneiro, Das and Reis 2013).”