Case study: Letting parents select their child's public school (goodbye, zip code restrictions) minimized achievement gaps
As The Atlantic's podcast “Good on Paper” points out, most folks only consider school choice in terms of privatized options. However, the movement doesn't (and shouldn't) stop there: Los Angeles Unified School District's remarkably successful 2012 experiment—in which schools had to compete against each other for enrollment—shows how school choice frameworks can also strengthen traditional public schools.
[Host] Jerusalem Demsas: But I have a question: Is it possible to get some of the benefits of school choice within the public-school system? …
A couple of years ago I was in Chicago, and I met today’s guest, Chris Campos. He’s a labor economist at UChicago who focuses on the economics of education. And the research project he told me about then has been in the back of my head ever since.
Campos is an L.A. native, and in 2012, the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD, tried something new.
Given the demand from parents for more school choice, LAUSD decided to run an experiment: What if they gave some high school parents their pick of a few different public high schools? School choice—but within the public-school system.
What would that do for their students? How would that change the schools?
Chris was able to study this change closely, and his findings have really interesting implications for the future of public schools in America. ...
[Chris] Campos: And so they experimented with this pilot, the Belmont Zone of Choice, where they clustered in some of these new schools, some existing traditional public high schools that were part of the district, into a larger zone of choice. And within this zone of choice in the Belmont area, families were allowed to enroll in any one of these schools. And so families could apply to different schools, and if there was oversubscription, a lottery would determine who got assigned to what school.
We fast-forward seven years, and the program leads to a roughly 16 percent of a standard deviation improvement on standardized exams. If we translate that to learning days, it’s roughly 139 additional learning days.
Demsas: Wow.
Campos: So it nearly eliminates that incoming-achievement gap. We can also look at college enrollment, and we find that college enrollment increases by roughly 5 percentage points and that improvement in college enrollment is sufficiently large that it eliminates the pre-ZOC college-enrollment gap.
Demsas: Okay. So basically the students who are in the ZOC schools—which you explained that these are the parts of L.A. that are disadvantaged, less likely to have a backlash from rich parents—these students are now basically closing the gap between themselves and the higher-income areas of Los Angeles when it comes to learning days and college enrollment.
Campos: That’s right. …
Demsas: And specifically we’re talking about test scores in specific areas? When we say closing the achievement gap, what are you looking at?
Campos: Test scores, standardized exams, math and reading or English and language arts, and college enrollment. And so, if we then look at college enrollment, you may ask, What colleges are ZOC students getting nudged into?
When we look at that, we find that a majority of these students are going to California State University campuses, and there’s really not much of an impact on community-college enrollment, and if anything, a diversion away from private schools.
Demsas: Were you surprised by this—the size of this effect?
Campos: Yes, definitely I was. I was not expecting it. This was initially supposed to be a different paper on how residential decisions responded to the program. But I had the data, so I went ahead and looked at what happened to achievement. And I found these results, and then I spent roughly two months trying to kill the results. It shocked my prior. But yeah, that’s kind of how research goes.
Read the whole transcript here.
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