School Choice Requires Parents to Know What's Going On — That's a Pretty High Bar
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the unrealistic assumption that parents have enough information to make good school choices.
Key Takeaways
- Information asymmetry is real - Parents rarely have the data or expertise to evaluate school quality effectively
- Marketing replaces substance - Schools that are good at marketing attract families regardless of actual educational quality
- This disadvantages vulnerable families - Parents with less time, education, or English proficiency are least able to navigate choice systems
Transcript
Parents should be able to choose the school that's best for their child.
Really?
In order to choose which school is best for your child, you would have to know something about that school.
And I don't know if you've noticed this, but parents tend to not know very much about what's going on in their child's current school.
So in what universe are parents going to have good information about what's going on in other schools that their kid doesn't go to, when they don't even pay attention to what's going on in their current school.
Like, this idea that school choice has some sort of magical power, that parents have access to some sort of information that would clue them in to what would be best for their child, like, that just does not add up to me.
Because people are not paying attention.
The information is not getting through.
The information we send home from school, in a newsletter, on paper, electronically, in a text message, in an app to communicate with families, it's not getting read.
So I don't really believe that empowering parents to make informed choices is going to work all that well because most parents are not that interested in being that informed.
And the parents that are intensely interested in being informed tend to be interested in the wrong things.
Let me know what you think.