| 来源类型 | Report |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| The school choice journey: Parents experiencing more than improved test scores | |
| Thomas Stewart; Patrick J. Wolf | |
| 发表日期 | 2015-01-26 |
| 出版年 | 2015 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Key Points Studies indicate that low-income parents participating in the District of Columbia’s private-school choice program prioritize—at least initially—the safety of schools over schools’ academic quality as they transition from public schools. Furthermore, when evaluating their child’s academic progress, parents do not view standardized test scores as a key metric of success. Most interestingly, these urban parents report that they want to be respected as advocates of their child’s education and will fight hard to keep their child’s private-school choice program if that program’s future is threatened. These lessons should be considered when designing and implementing publicly funded, means-tested programs in an effort to break the cycle of poverty among low-income families and disadvantaged communities. Read the PDF. Private-school choice is many things, depending on families’ income and geographic location. It is an education policy reform, a flashpoint of political controversy, and an example of government outsourcing of public-service provision. It is also a journey for low-income parents who move from being clients of social services to consumers of goods and advocates for their own political interests. Most policy analysts and policymakers evaluate private-school choice programs based on the sole criterion of student test-score gains. They assume that test-score increases are what parents and society want most from schools and that student scores are the outcome that school choice will most affect. Our research suggests that these assumptions are largely false. From 2004 until 2009, we carefully documented the school choice journey of 100 families participating in the District of Columbia (DC) Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP). The OSP is the nation’s only federally funded private-school choice program. It provides K–12 tuition vouchers worth up to $7,500 to low-income students in DC to attend any participating private school of their family’s choosing. With financial support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, we conducted an annual series of focus-group sessions and personal interviews with these low-income urban families. Most of the families were selecting schools, specifically private schools, for the first time. Their stories of excitement, challenge, occasional frustration, and ultimate triumph are told in our new book, The School Choice Journey: School Vouchers and the Empowerment of Urban Families.1 The Journey reveals four key lessons: Parents participating in OSP tend to follow Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs when selecting schools. They first ensure that their child is safe at school before focusing on academic quality. Unlike policymakers, parents do not view test scores as the key metric of success in education (or even as one of the main indicators of success). They use less-formal measures of student growth and development to assess progress and satisfaction. Urban parents benefit from informational and programmatic supports when exercising school choice for the first time, but they also need to be respected as the shapers of their child’s education. Low-income parents view private-school choice programs as sufficiently valuable to them that they will fight hard to keep their child’s program if politicians try to take it away from them. Government programs can be delivered to recipients in ways that range from highly paternalistic to completely hands-off. We argue in The Journey that neither of these extremes is constructive for interventions geared toward income-disadvantaged urban families. When government programs are implemented in a highly paternalistic way, clients play no role in shaping the nature of the service and often feel demeaned, disenfranchised, and dependent. When government initiatives are completely hands-off, though, income-disadvantaged participants can feel overwhelmed by their new responsibilities and fail to make the program work to their advantage. The best way for the government to implement social interventions, we argue, is to aim for a sweet spot that allows program participants sufficient control over the service so that they feel they own it, while also providing key programmatic supports needed to make the program a success. Many parents whose child received the Opportunity Scholarships to attend a private school of their choice initially had a client mentality: they were used to receiving government services such as Medicaid and disability benefits, which tend to be delivered by professional bureaucrats with an air of spirit-crushing paternalism.2 The new school choice program challenged these parents to transcend their client perspective and become informed consumers and proactive choosers of their child’s private school. A school choice was not going to be handed to them. They had to make their own choice and remain active participants in the process. Read the full report. Notes 1, For this and subsequent references to The Journey, see Thomas Stewart and Patrick J. Wolf, The School Choice Journey: School Vouchers and the Empowerment of Families (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 2. Joe Soss, “Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning, and Political Action,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 2 (1999): 363–81. |
| 主题 | K-12 Schooling |
| 标签 | K-12 education ; parents ; private schools ; school |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/school-choice-journey-parents-experiencing-improved-test-scores/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/206074 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Thomas Stewart,Patrick J. Wolf. The school choice journey: Parents experiencing more than improved test scores. 2015. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| The-school-choice-jo（424KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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