Are parents from high-school choice states different?

An exploration of 50CAN’s massive 23,000 parent survey

Last week, our friends at 50CAN published a massive survey about American education. The State of Educational Opportunity in America surveyed 23,000 parents, allowing for 50-state comparisons with more credibility than most education surveys can offer.

I’ve been playing around with the data over the course of a few days now, and I’m grateful for the useful questions and enormous sample size.

Primarily, I’ve been looking for any comparisons or patterns between choice-rich states and states with relatively little choice. I found a few results offering some insight into how parent perception and engagement might shift in choice-rich environments.

Brief note for the nerds

As a rudimentary way of identifying how choice-rich a state is (or isn’t), I used the Traditional Public School Share (TPS share) calculation from our EdChoice Share charts, which we update every January. This number identifies the percentage of K-12 students in a state attending a school in their residential district, those who do not use inter-district open enrollment, charter schools, private schools (either in a school choice program or paid for out of pocket), or homeschooling. High TPS share states are “low choice” states for my purposes here.

And just to be clear, there are major limitations to comparing state level numbers as opposed to the respondent-level data 50CAN has. States have many features besides enrollment statistics. Likewise, bivariate correlations can only tell you so much. These thoughts are just quick investigations into patterns I thought I was noticing as I was reading the report. It’s a Friday in February in the Midwest, this is what passes for fun.

1. Parents sense more agency in high choice states

The 50CAN survey asked parents if they felt like they had a choice in deciding where their child attended school. A strong majority (70%) said yes, but as I scrolled through the state-by-state results, I thought I was beginning to see a pattern that surprised me.

A little background: school choice programs, like most every public service, tend to struggle with awareness gaps. EdChoice survey work has found the average parent is not very good at identifying what school choice policies exist in their state, generally doing little better than randomly guessing.

Given that background, I expected to see basically the same results between all states for this survey question. But a simple bivariate correlation test suggests otherwise:

(Note: this calculation is a conservative one, as I decided to drop DC. Our capital city is a heavy outlier both in how low their TPS share is and in how many parents felt they had a choice. Keeping DC in nearly doubled the slope.)

The more K-12 students were concentrated into residential district schools, the less likely parents were to say they had a choice in where they enrolled their child. (These results were significant at the 95% confidence level.) So, while parents might not be great at identifying what choice policies exist in their state, a meaningful amount seem to recognize when they do or do not have options.

Obviously, much more than just environment goes into the sense of choice. High income parents were likelier to say they felt like they had choices, for example. But median household income, school spending, or even school spending as a percentage of median household income all had no explanatory power when I included them in the model.

Something worth building off of in the future.

2. Parents in high choice states are more likely to have reviewed their school’s performance relative to other schools.

Does an educational ecosystem with more freedom of choice generate more engaged parents? 50CAN asked parents whether they reviewed information about their children’s schools’ academic performance relative to other schools.

Most hadn’t; only 26% said yes. There is a pattern, however, of high-choice states having a greater share of parents looking into performance reviews.

(Once again, this chart excludes DC as an outlier.)

In a relationship significant at the 99% confidence level, high choice states have more parents aware of school performance metrics. Two numbers can’t prove much, but to me they sketch a picture of parents leaning into their metrics.

Interestingly, these results probably can’t be explained exclusively by school choice parents. On page 132, 50CAN breaks down results by school type. While some sectors are more likely to have parents review performance than public schools, it’s not by much relative to a lot of questions in this section of the survey. I don’t think you get a slope like this without TPS parents in high-choice states also looking at school performance.

3. Parents in high-choice states are more plugged into their current schools

After asking parents about reviewing school performance, 50CAN asked how familiar they were about their schools’ budgets and whether they have attended parent meetings held at their schools.

With the budget question, not many parents were fiscal wonks, with less than a quarter (22%) answering that they were “very familiar” with their school’s budget. But once again, there seemed to be a pattern between high-choice and low-choice states.

(DC is removed as an outlier again.)

Finally, we’ll look at the trends for parent meeting attendance. Twenty-six percent of parents said they had attended school-held parent meetings in the last year, but once again this varied substantially by state:

(DC is removed as an outlier again.)

While the budget familiarity slope is a little shallower, they are both significant at the 98% confidence level. School choice is far from the only indicator of being glued to the school budget; I think the more time and money you put into your school, the more likely you are to be glued to how that money is being spent. For example, according to 50CAN, independent private school parents (usually the most expensive private schools) are far more likely to indicate high familiarity than any other sector. Additionally, states with higher per-pupil public school spending relative to statewide median household income are much more likely to have higher shares of parents familiar with school budgets and attend parent meetings.

---

Trust me, we could spend all day looking at all the questions, breakdowns, and state comparisons in this enormous survey.

But I was especially drawn to the questions that could speak to a parent’s general relationship to the education ecosystem. I’ve lived in two states with very different frameworks, and anecdotally, parents’ perceptions about what is “normal” are rather different, even if most everything else about them is the same. Hopefully these explorations aid conversations about how school choice policies fit into the various needs families might have and what limitations a homogenous, district-dominated education ecosystem might impose.

Refer Informed Choice to a friend. If they sign up, you’ll be entered in a drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card. Here is the link:

Have a choice research related question you’d like the team to answer? Send it to informedchoice1996@gmail.com and you might see it answered in a future Informed Choice post.