Parents in different cities face different hurdles to finding and choosing a school, according to the second in a series of reports from the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.
Surveying 4,000 public school parents in eight “high-choice” cities—Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the District of Columbia—the CRPE found that overall, parents use two to three different resources to research schools, but school visits are far and away the most popular method of research. Parents of children with special needs, parents with less education, and parents of minority students have the most difficulty finding the right school, but nearly half of all parents said they had no other good option aside from their child’s current school. In Cleveland, parents are 68 percent more likely to name transportation as a barrier to school choice than are their counterparts in New Orleans, where charter schools are required to provide transportation.
