What happened when Los Angeles parents got better school choice information?

“Chalkbeat Ideas is a section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work. In the fall of 2019, thousands of parents in Los Angeles received letters in the mail designed to help them choose a high school for their eighth graders. Many of these letters included novel data on how effective different high schools were at helping students learn. What the families probably didn’t realize is that they were part of an unusual experiment designed by University of Chicago economist Chris Campos, in partnership with the Los Angeles school system. Campos was looking to answer a long-discussed question : Can better information help families make better decisions about where to send their children to school? At a moment when school choice is expanding, this is a crucial issue across the country. Campos, who had previously studied school choice in Los Angeles, spent months working on how to communicate information about school performance. Many parents may assume that schools with the highest overall test scores are the ones where students make the most progress — but this often isn’t true . Campos calculated measures of student learning himself, using a complex statistical model, while also conducting focus groups with parents on how to explain these numbers clearly. Such figures are often unavailable or hard to make sense of. Campos also designed a video , disseminated to families, describing the difference between student growth and the incoming test scores of schools’ student bodies. The letter-sending experiment was remarkable. Such an undertaking is rare, especially at a large scale in a large school system. Yet it turned out the letters on their own didn’t make much of a difference. Parents and students selected schools as they always did, seemingly unmoved by this new information. But Campos was also testing out an additional idea. What would happen if large numbers of families at a single school got letters with information on student growth? Campos’ theory was that choosing a school is fundamentally a social process, both for students and their parents. The data bore this out. When a middle school was saturated with informational letters, more students tended to choose high schools with higher growth scores. That was even the case for families that did not get their own letter. In other words, what mattered more than individual information was a community-level shift in thinking. “There seems to be a tipping point,” Campos says. He continued to track these students as they moved through high school. Those from middle schools where growth information was widely shared were more likely to enroll in college and to report more supportive high school environments. Campos’ theory for why is simple: They benefitted from choosing better high schools based on better information. The high school choice system in Los Angeles is not a zero sum game since many schools are not filled to capacity. When one student chooses a school, that doesn’t necessarily mean another is bumped out of it. The letters seemed to have led to a modest migration toward more successful schools. Campos is hopeful that if families prioritize growth measures, that will pressure struggling schools to improve. “They’re going to have an even stronger incentive to perform better on these metrics,” he says. The findings offer two important, albeit still-tentative insights. First, families do seem to value data on student growth, but they often don’t have access to it. Second, to change parents’ thinking, information needs to be widely shared across a broad network of connected families, not just a handful of individuals. Campos’ results are intriguing but limited. They should be taken as provisional until they are replicated by other researchers in different settings. Successful pilot experiments like this sometimes don’t work when brought to a larger scale. The study also comes in a context in which the vast majority of students are lower-income. Moving the preferences of advantaged families may be much harder . Campos’ paper is currently going through the academic peer review process. He is still working with officials in Los Angeles to study and improve its choice system. Now, though, all parents are sent letters he’s designed providing information on student growth. Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org .

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