Governed by choice [electronic resource] : how school choosers and the public assess school quality and respond to information
Keywords: Education.

How families choose schools for their children can shape those children's social, academic, and cultural experiences. It can also shape the schools that educate and socialize our young. Increasingly, school choice is being used as an education reform strategy, with charter schools, magnet schools, private school vouchers, and open enrollment programs providing low-cost opportunities for families to select from an assortment of nearby schools. School choice advocates often invoke a type of market logic whereby loving parents who know their children intimately make careful, informed school choices, generating pressures for schools to offer appealing, high-quality programs or risk succumbing to under-enrollment. However, these "demand side" pressures can go wrong, yielding education systems that poorly serve the goals that societies have for their schools. First, families could make choices that are inconsistent with their desires. For example, if school choosers are uninformed or misinformed about their options, they might choose schools that are poorly suited to their children's needs while their aggregated choices fail to support and reward high-quality schools. Second, families' desires for their own children's schools could be inconsistent with the broader public's goals for its education systems. For example, if families choose schools that intensely focus on advancing their own children's private success, then schools might underserve more collective interests related to society's political, social, and economic wellbeing. This dissertation explores the desires and behaviors of school choosers, examining where demand side pressures might go wrong and how school choice policies and programs can be strengthened. The dissertation features three empirical articles. The first two articles use experimental and quasi-experimental methods to assess the effects of providing school choosers with information about their options. I find that school choosers' beliefs and behaviors are highly malleable but do not always respond to the provision of information about schools in predictable ways. Parents and children respond differently to the same information, and while formal government ratings can change opinions of schools, they are less influential than the types of comments that people regularly hear through their social networks. The third article examines what school choosers and the American public desire from schools, testing the hypothesis that parents would like schools to pursue their children's private wellbeing -- at the expense of our collective political, social, and economic wellbeing -- to a much greater extent than the public would like. Using randomized experiments with a large, nationally representative sample, I show that parents' and the public's desire for schools are more similar than what is commonly hypothesized. In an era when school choice is a cornerstone of many education reform efforts, improving our understanding of how people choose schools -- and how we can support them as they do -- improves our ability to construct sensible education policies and programs.