Low- and high-income parents both select schools in a choice district based on school quality—but they use different measures, finds a new study in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Researchers analyzed the rank-ordered school preference lists of more than 22,000 applicants to the District of Columbia’s citywide lottery for more than 200 traditional and charter public schools. They found in middle schools, for example, low-income parents ranked schools higher if they had higher academic proficiency rates information easily available on the MySchoolDC website but high-income parents tended to rank schools based on accountability ratings, information that tended to be harder to find.
