School Choice and Accountability: Why Families Need Better Information Systems
Accountability systems can support informed choice
For most of our nation’s history, students’ residential addresses largely determined where they enrolled in school. This meant that school choice existed primarily for families with resources to move into neighborhoods with desirable schools or to pay private school tuition. In recent decades, policymakers have implemented policies to disrupt this address-based system by expanding both public (e.g., charter schools and inter- and intradistrict choice) and private (e.g., vouchers and education savings accounts) school choice. These alternatives have become increasingly widespread over the past several years.
The growing prevalence of school choice can be attributed not only to the current political landscape but also to the increasing public dissatisfaction with K-12 schools, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Advocates for expanding educational options for students and families make several arguments: (1) choice enables students to enroll in schools that meet their needs and align with their interests; (2) families will “vote with their feet” if a school fails to serve its students well; and (3) competition will drive innovation and ultimately improve student learning even in traditional public schools.
Related: Statewide assessments are critical for informed public school choice
These arguments rest on the often-unstated assumptions that (1) families can obtain the necessary information to determine whether a school meets their student’s needs and (2) schools will have the information needed to guide innovation and improvement. But while schools often maintain internal systems that contain a variety of measures to inform decisions, much of that information is not typically available to families.
Public schools, including charter schools, administer statewide tests and report other information required by state accountability systems, providing families with common—if incomplete—data to guide their decisions. As public funding is increasingly allocated toward private schools that are not subject to these requirements, policymakers need to consider ways to expand the availability of information to families and communities.
What Would a Choice-friendly Information System Look Like?
Debates on school choice information systems suggest some support for incorporating a broad set of measures. Broad systems can contribute to a well-functioning market for schools. As Stéphane Lavertu and Tim Rosenberger argued, “Beyond test scores and graduation rates, states should collect and disseminate information on other dimensions of human flourishing (perhaps captured via parental satisfaction surveys) and longer-term workforce and college outcomes.”
At a minimum, families would benefit from the following types of information about the schools they might be considering:
- Academic performance, including growth
- College, career, and civic readiness
- Supports for student well-being
- Curricular and extracurricular offerings
- Supports for students with special needs
Individual schools, districts, charter authorizers, or other agencies could add to this list at their discretion, particularly if they offer specialized services or a particular focus (e.g., religious or career-focused schools).
Balancing Comparability, Innovation and Local Flexibility
Choice proponents often promote the potential of increased school choice to foster innovative approaches to education that result in more diverse options for families and students. Expansive measurement mandates could threaten innovation. Policies should be carefully designed to balance the tradeoff between enabling clear comparisons for choosers and allowing schools to adopt programs that are responsive to choosers’ needs and interests.
We offer a few principles to help policymakers navigate these tradeoffs.
Identify the must-have indicators. Are there outcomes or offerings that constituents should expect from all schools, such as growth in reading and math test scores, readiness to enroll in postsecondary education without needing remediation, and services for special education students? A set of essential, common measures that applies to all schools (with possible, rare exceptions such as schools serving certain high-need populations) can provide a sufficient baseline for an information system.
Include the statewide achievement test. Although others have suggested allowing schools or systems to decide what tests to administer, we argue that state tests—imperfect as they are—provide the best opportunity to generate high-quality, comparable data, especially given the limitations of norm-referenced tests.
Identify additional categories of indicators, but permit local flexibility in selection of measures. Schools could be required to report on additional indicators such as student well-being or curricular breadth, using measures they define locally (ideally through collaboration with key constituencies). This approach allows for flexibility across different types of schools while providing families with more detailed information about their options, and it
Report on both outcomes and conditions for learning. Outcomes such as test score gains, graduation rates, and postsecondary enrollment provide families with information about the performance and postsecondary pursuits of students in a particular school. Information on conditions for learning, such as course offerings, extracurricular programs, counseling services, class sizes, and specialized supports, help families understand what their child will experience day-to-day and can reveal whether a school offers the specific programs or supports their child needs.
Consider better ways to present data. For instance, the common practice of reporting averages compresses the full range of student experiences into a single number. This can reinforce narratives that frame certain schools or student groups as uniformly “behind.” Presenting information about a wider range of performance tells a more complete story.
Establish regular cycles of system review. Information systems require ongoing attention to ensure they serve their intended purposes. Policymakers should regularly assess whether families are accessing and using the system, whether the data are understandable and actionable for diverse audiences, and whether the system produces unintended consequences such as gaming or narrowing of school offerings.
An Imperfect—but Better—Approach
Adopting these ideas requires attention to potential threats to the validity and usefulness of the data. For example, will public reporting on school performance lead to gaming or score corruption? It also involves decisions about who is responsible for designing, implementing, and monitoring the system, including how states—which are currently responsible for public school accountability—will interact with local decision makers. A workable approach will likely require collaboration across levels of government, with clear lines of accountability.
Even a well-designed system faces a fundamental limitation: Providing information is necessary but not sufficient. Families need more than access to data; they need guidance on how to interpret it and apply it to their own circumstances. A school’s test score gains may look impressive in isolation but mean something different when contextualized against the challenges it faces or the students it serves. Without support for appropriate use, information risks being misunderstood or ignored altogether.
Despite these challenges, this system would almost certainly improve families’ opportunities to evaluate options in an informed way. The question is whether policymakers can strike the right balance: Excessive regulation could stifle the very innovation that makes expanded choice appealing in the first place.
A Practical Path Toward Better Reporting and Accountability
We’ve described a change that is probably not feasible immediately. Political, practical, and technological barriers make it difficult to enact common measurement and reporting systems, and arriving at anything close to consensus in today’s partisan environment seems unlikely. But we can take small steps toward this vision through pilot programs that gather feedback from families, educators, and community members.
Progress shouldn’t wait. School choice, especially when fueled by public dollars, carries obligations beyond those to individual families. The public has a legitimate interest in understanding how schools are contributing to the development of student capacities that sustain a strong economy and a healthy democracy.
Information systems designed with these broad purposes in mind can help ensure that expanded choice serves not just the families who exercise it but also the democratic ideals and economic development that we expect publicly funded education to advance.