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ERIC Number: EJ1323548
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-2332-8584
EISSN: N/A
Parents' Online School Reviews Reflect Several Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in K-12 Education
Gillani, Nabeel; Chu, Eric; Beeferman, Doug; Eynon, Rebecca; Roy, Deb
AERA Open, v7 n1 Jan-Dec 2021
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 parent reviews posted for more than 50,000 publicly funded U.S. K-12 schools on a popular ratings website. We find: (1) schools in urban areas and those serving affluent families are more likely to receive reviews; (2) review language correlates with standardized test scores--which generally track race and family income--but not school effectiveness, measured by how much students improve in their test scores over time; and (3) the linguistics of reviews reveal several racial and income-based disparities in K-12 education. These findings suggest that parents who reference school reviews may be accessing, and making decisions based on, biased perspectives that reinforce achievement gaps.
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2814
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Elementary Education; Kindergarten; Primary Education; Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A