Can Families Always Get What They Want? Families' Perceptions of School Quality and Their Effects on School Choice Decisions

Abstract

School quality and school choice are two hotly debated issues within current academic research, and the two topics are not wholly disconnected from one another. School quality literature includes debates over the most accurate definition, or definitions, of what constitutes school quality. Research addressing school choice often includes references to issues of school quality, albeit with different conclusions about the level of importance school quality plays in actual school choice decisions. In order to understand families' decisions about schools, one must recognize not only the ways in which perceptions of quality influence choices, but also that school quality and school choice are, at the same time, conceptually distinct topics. Therefore, the primary question guiding my research asks, is there a relationship between families perceptions of quality education and the school choices they ultimately make. More specifically, my research first explores how families determine what constitutes a quality school, and second, how that informs the schools they select for their children. I examine six distinct types of school choice options families may choose for their children: private, neighborhood public, magnet, charter, non-neighborhood public, or homeschooling. I investigate whether or not family assessments of quality vary along racial or socioeconomic lines and whether such variation explains some differences in families school choices by these sociodemographic characteristics. I explore families behavior during their search for their children school to determine if any racial or socioeconomic variation exists in how different families conduct this search. I also examine factors that may prevent some families from actualizing their ideals of school quality in their choices. In other words, are there obstacles to particular school choices for families from diverse social backgrounds? Data in this study comes from the Pennsylvania and Metropolitan Area Survey, collected with the Philadelphia Indicators project and Temple University Institute of Public Affairs. This survey includes households within five Pennsylvania counties; Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties as well as four counties in New Jersey: Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, and Salem counties. This sample includes only households including at least one school aged child (enrolled in grades kindergarten through twelfth grade) proving a sample size of N = 589 households. My findings demonstrate that significant variation by race and class exist in families perceptions of school quality, in specific school characteristics they report represent the most important indicator of school quality, in the number of school choice options families consider during the process of school choice decision making, in specific factors families report as most important for school choice decisions, and finally in the actual school choices families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds make for their children education. Research about how families choose schools and how this decision making process differs by race and socioeconomic status can serve to inform discussions about increasing the amount of public choice schools such as magnets, charters, non-neighborhood public school transfer programs. This research has the potential to assist policy-makers in determining whether expanding such choice options may result in either an increase or a decrease in the ability of racial minorities and those with fewer financial means to attend quality schools. This research may also help determine whether current levels of school segregation along racial and class lines will improve or worsen as families ability to choose schools for their children expands. In Chapter 5 of my study, the unit of analysis for my sample size changes from families (N = 589) to the total number of school choices those 589 families made for their children, resulting in a sample size of N = 655 choices used only in Chapter 5.