Giving Students a Choice Can Make Schools Better

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Narrator: In the US, it’s no secret that a student’s primary schooling plays a crucial role in the trajectory of their life. What college they attend and what career they follow are tied to those early years. School choice has been viewed as a way for families of children who are trapped in poor schools to take control of their education. But how effective is school choice, and does it reduce inequality in educational outcomes?

Christopher Campos: A fundamental question I was interested in in this research is whether or not families are better off under traditional systems of choice, or if they’re better off in neighborhood-based assignment, and, kind of, digging deeper, yielding some additional insights into what the exact channels are that contribute to any potential effects. So we can think about families, or a working-class family, where the parents work multiple jobs, and we can compare that to a more advantaged family. And it is likely that the less advantaged family is not gonna have as much time to research schools and look into the school-choice process, while the more advantaged family may spend dozens of hours researching schools. And so what may happen in practice is that that less advantaged family is likely not gonna exercise choice or benefit from a school-choice initiative or school-choice expansion, while that more advantaged family will, right? And if we think that the less advantaged family has their student enrolled at a school that is near the 25th percentile, and the more advantaged family has their student enrolled at the school that is at the 75th percentile, the school-choice initiative in this stylized example will only exacerbate educational inequality, with the more advantaged families moving up the ladder, and the less advantaged families kind of staying where they’re at—or perhaps moving down, or not moving up by as much as the more advantaged families.

Narrator: That’s Chicago Booth’s Christopher Campos. He and his coauthor, Caitlin Kearns, looked at the Zones of Choice program that was implemented in LA in 2012. The program allowed school choice in 40 percent of districts, while maintaining neighborhood-based assignment in the other 60 percent. Families residing within Zones of Choice had access to several nearby schooling options, accessing anywhere between two and 15 programs. Although school choice is popular in the US, there had never been a study about how centralized assignment systems affect student outcomes.

Christopher Campos: The basic idea of the research is to just follow cohorts over time, comparing the educational trajectories of students that are residing within these Zones of Choice neighborhoods or boundaries to those that are in the unaffected regions, and comparing their educational trajectories over time informs us about the causal impact of these centralized systems of choice on student outcomes.

Narrator: Because each Zone of Choice varied in size and offerings, the degree of popularity within each zone also varied, which increased beneficial school competition. The researchers then measured the success of the program by looking at both test scores and college enrollment. Results showed that the preexisting achievement gap between Zones of Choice and other areas was eliminated six years after the program was introduced.

Christopher Campos: From a within-district inequality perspective, this program was effective in essentially eliminating all of the inequality that existed before its introduction. In terms of the underlying channels that contribute to these effects, I find that student-school match quality effects are very minimal. So it’s not really playing too big of a role, but competition essentially explains all of these effects. So what I find in practice is that it’s the least effective schools at the onset of the program which were compelled to improve the most and increase their overall quality, which boosted students’ outcomes, and essentially narrowed the inequality in educational outcomes within each Zone of Choice, but also between Zones of Choice and non-Zones of Choice students.

Narrator: In a variety of surveys that the school district runs each year, most students said they were happier at the schools that showed success in the Zones of Choice program. They also reported believing their teachers to be working harder to help them succeed. Both of these alternative measures seem to suggest that the program was a success.

Christopher Campos: This work serves as a useful case study, showing that these increasingly popular centralized systems of choice can elevate student outcomes and reduce achievement gaps. But I would be cautious about exporting this policy to just another random, large urban school district, because LA is very peculiar in terms of how it’s set up these Zones of Choice. One thing I haven’t mentioned thus far is each Zone of Choice is pretty segregated in terms of socioeconomic status and race. So it’s unclear whether this type of policy would have the same impact if we were to integrate across race or socioeconomic status, right? And while the adverse impacts of being enrolled in segregated schools did not outweigh the benefits of the program in the short run, it is possible that these adverse impacts could pop up when we start following these kids into later life, right? So maybe as they enter the labor market, we could start finding something different. But in general, I think this policy serves as a useful case study that we can study a lot more to better understand why school choice can work in some settings, and why it doesn’t work in other settings.

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