Information, school choice, and academic achievement : evidence from two experiments

"There is growing empirical evidence that low-income parents place lower weights on academics when choosing schools, implying that school choice plans may have the smallest impact on the choices of the families they are targeting. This paper uses a natural experiment generated by the 2004 implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public School District (CMS) and a field experiment we designed and implemented as part of the district's 2006 school choice plan to examine how transparent information on school-level academic performance affects the test scores of the schools parents choose and the subsequent impact on their children's academic outcomes. We find in both cases that providing parents with transparent information on the academic achievement at schools with their school choice forms results in significantly more parents choosing substantially higher-performing schools. We then use instrumental variables approaches, exploiting random variation generated by each experiment in the test score of the school attended to estimate the impact of attending a higher-scoring school on student academic outcomes. We find that attending higher-performing schools results in significant increases in their children's standardized test scores at the end of the first year. If the results we find represent permanent increases in student-level test scores, they suggest a small policy change that lowers information or decision making costs for these parents had a substantial monetary impact on their children's lifetime earnings, adding to growing evidence that small changes in information can greatly affect choices, program participation, and outcomes"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site