Never before have Americans had greater access to information about school quality. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), all school districts are required to distribute annual report cards detailing student achievement levels at each of their schools. Local newspapers frequently cover the release of state test results, emphasizing the relative standing of their community's schools. Meanwhile, new organizations like GreatSchools and SchoolMatters aggregate this information and make it readily available to parents online. But do all these performance data inform perceptions of school quality? Or do citizens base their evaluations instead on such indicators as the racial or class makeup of schools, regardless of their relationship with actual school performance? In discussions of parental choice in education, researchers have frequently speculated that parents would base their evaluations of schools primarily on the characteristics of their student bodies. And even if some parents base their decisions on educational quality, many observers worry that low-income and minority parents will be less informed about or interested in school quality, placing their children at a disadvantage in the education marketplace. The evidence on these questions available to date comes from small-scale studies of specific school districts, making it difficult to reach general conclusions about the degree to which parents and the public at large are well informed about the performance of local schools. The authors are now able to supplement that research with data from a nationally representative survey of parents and other adults conducted in 2009 under the auspices of "Education Next" and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University. Because they knew the addresses of respondents in advance of the survey, they were able to link individual respondents to specific public schools in their community and to obtain their subjective ratings of those schools. The authors also gathered publicly available data on student achievement in the same schools, making it possible to compare respondents' subjective ratings to objective measures of school quality. Results indicate that citizens' perceptions of the quality of their local schools do in fact reflect the schools' performance as measured by student proficiency rates in core academic subjects. Although citizens also appear to take into account the share of a school's students who are poor when evaluating its quality, those considerations do not overwhelm judgments based on information about academic achievement. (Contains 3 figures.)