We utilize original survey data to examine factors influencing parental assessment of schools. When asked a series of questions about their evaluation of hypothetical schools in a survey experiment, respondents were given the option to select "don't know" and explain in their own words what additional information they would want to know…

Like many predominantly Black urban cities, Detroit, Michigan, has experienced significant out-migration among Black residents over the past 30 years. This situation has altered families' relationships to the communities and schools where they have been nurtured or call home. Therefore, this paper examines how seven Black families' place…

School choice research has provided some initial understandings of how parents choose schools. Parents' school options are bounded to differentiated choice sets--the menu of school options that parents construct when making school selections. The geographical location where families live and schools are located and families' race and class…

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, families have faced a difficult decision between online and in-person instruction. In many school districts, a higher proportion of non-White families selected online instruction for fall 2020, but the factors influencing these patterns are unclear. Using a case study approach, I focus on the experiences of 21…

Parents often select schools by relying on subjective assessments of quality made by other parents, which are increasingly becoming available through written reviews on school ratings websites. To identify relationships between review content and school quality, we apply recent advances in natural language processing to nearly half a million…

Parents' decision making about whether to send their children to a traditional public or charter schools has been studied mostly in urban, low-income areas. Few studies have focused on the decisions of high-income, suburban families. In a sample of Core Knowledge charter schools in a predominantly White and socioeconomically advantaged set of…