PRESS RELEASE:

Low-income parents just as proactive, satisfied as wealthier parents when choosing schools

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01/09/2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

When choosing schools for their children, low- to moderate-income parents use the same techniques and tools, and are just as satisfied with their decisions, as other wealthier parents, a new study has found.

These parents proactively seek information about school choices “consistent with decisionmaking generally in consumer affairs, and also with how upper-income parents approach school choice,” according to the report.

These findings come from Opening Doors: How Low-Income Parents Search for the Right School, a new study that zeroed in on school-choice decisions by 800 low- to moderate- income families (earning $50,000 or less) in Denver, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C.

The report offers new information about low-income parents and challenges some previously held assumptions about how they make school-choice decisions.

“These families visit schools, talk with administrators and teachers, talk with family and friends, other parents and students, review printed materials as they gather information,” said author Paul Teske. “After their children are in the schools of their choice, they report an equal or higher degree of satisfaction than other parents in other schools.”

In making their choice, 45 percent of these parents cited some aspect of academic quality as the top factor in choosing a school, 19 percent cited curriculum or a school’s thematic focus, and only 11 percent gave location or convenience as a top factor.

As a result, the report concludes, these parents surveyed rely on multiple sources of information but trust word-of-mouth more than documentation; seek quality schools but limit the number they examine; and, feel well-informed and appear satisfied with the school-choice decisions they make. Low-income parents indicated they have specific ideas about what their individual children need in a school and try to find the right match.

The study also revealed that when children are involved in a family’s decision about choosing the right school, their parents report a higher level of satisfaction with the school selected than when children are left out of the choice process.

Particularly at the high school level, students themselves play a larger role in choice decisions than has been acknowledged by educators and researchers. Yet, the study showed that even at lower grade levels student involvement may, at a minimum, consist of a visit to the school or schools under consideration and thus contribute to the satisfactory result.

The survey also showed that the lowest-income parents, those earning up to $10,000 a year, more than parents with a higher socioeconomic status, prefer to gather and use school-choice information from an information center and/or a counselor whose job is to help them with the choice process. These parents rely less on printed materials and informational web pages, the survey indicated.

The study was conducted by Paul Teske, Jody Fitzpatrick, and Gabriel Kaplan at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado at Denver Health Sciences Center. The work is part of the “Doing School Choice Right” initiative at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, and is sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates, Annie E. Casey, and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations.