Several recent education reform measures, including the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), couple school choice with accountability measures to allow parents of children in under-performing schools the opportunity to choose higher-performing schools. We use the introduction of NCLB in the...

"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...

We analyze two experiments that provided direct information on school test scores to lower-income families in a public school choice plan. We find that receiving information significantly increases the fraction of parents choosing higher-performing schools. Parents with high-scoring alternatives...