How Satisfied Are Parents with Their Children's Schools? New Evidence from a U.S. Department of Education Survey. (2017)

ALL FOUR SECTORS IN K-12 EDUCATION COMPETE for the support of their customers--that is, the parents of their prospective students. Those parents have more choices today than in decades past: they may send their children to the public school automatically assigned to them by their school district, or opt for a private school, charter school, or district-run school of choice. These choices include a range of cost and convenience--and, not surprisingly, a range of customer satisfaction levels. The assigned-school-district sector has a strong competitive advantage because assigned-district schools are free and universally available, and 76 percent of American students attend them, according to a 2012 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education. The three choice sectors do not enjoy those advantages and enroll fewer students: 10 percent of U.S. students attend private schools, 9 percent attend district schools of choice, and 6 percent attend charters, according to NCES. The private sector has a strong disadvantage because most families must pay tuition. The charter sector has the advantage of its programs being tuition-free but is limited to operating in specific places where charters have been approved by a state-determined authorizer. Similarly, district schools of choice also are tuition-free but cannot operate in competition with assigned-district schools unless school boards specifically allow them. To maintain and enlarge their market share, all schools of choice must satisfy the families who make use of them, who specifically opt out of the free, more convenient assigned-district alternative. So how favorably do parents rate their children's programs? How do the choice sectors compare with one another? With which aspects of schooling are choice parents most satisfied? Do these patterns vary across different segments of the population? We explore these questions by comparing parental satisfaction ratings for all four sectors: assigned-district schools, private schools, charter schools, and district schools of choice. Data and Methods NCES has regularly gathered data on the educational activities of the U.S. population since 1991 through its National Household Education Surveys Program. In 2012, it administered the Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey to a nationally representative sample of households with children enrolled in K-12 schools. Families of school-age children were mailed a questionnaire asking about one of their children's schools, and the parent most familiar with that child's school was asked to respond. In the end, 17,166 families, representing a response rate of 58 percent, completed the survey. (An additional 397 families of home-schooled children, who are not included in survey results below, also took part.) This survey was conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), and findings were released in 2015 and updated in 2016. The data were weighted so that results would be representative of the school-age population as a whole. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Among other topics, parents were asked how satisfied they were with various aspects of the school their child attended, including the school overall, the teachers their child had that year, academic standards, order and discipline, and the way the school staff interacted with parents. Respondents were given the option of indicating whether they were very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied. In their initial report, AIR and NCES researchers divided parents into four categories: parents with a child at an assigned district-operated school, and parents with a child at one of three types of chosen schools; either a public school that they chose (including district-operated schools and charter schools), a religiously affiliated private school, or a private school that did not have a religious affiliation. …