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Keeping school choice under the radar keeps parents grounded

(from Kentucky Alliance for School Choice)

A popular retort to calls for school choice is: “It’s not popular.”

So opponents of choice argue against it.

For example, when the Kentucky Department of Education’s spokesperson Lisa Gross was asked about the Bluegrass Institute’s survey showing strong support for school choice, she responded: “What we’ve found is that parents want to stick with the public school and make that school better rather than take their children out, and we see that under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) transfer option. We found parents don’t take advantage of that. They tend to want to make the school better.”

What Gross may not know is that a new study shows that very few schools appear to even respond to requests from parents about options.

“You Can’t Choose If You Don’t Know: The Failure to Properly Inform Parents about NCLB School Choice,” a study conducted by researchers at the University of Arkansas Department of Education reform, found a surprisingly low response rate from schools duty bound to provide choices required by NCLB.

The study included 10 Kentucky schools, eight of which did not respond at all with information about NCLB options available to parents of students enrolled in those schools.

Overall, the study showed that fewer than 6 percent of schools nationally provided the information e-mail replies. Many schools responded without providing the requested information, but those schools did request more information about the person requesting the information.

Before Kentucky’s education establishment begins decrying the lack of popularity for choice, perhaps it should examine the extent to which schools even respond to requests for information from parents desperate to get students a better education.

Sources:

“You Can’t Choose If You Don’t Know: The Failure to Properly Inform Parents about NCLB School Choice” by Jay P. Greene, Jonathan Butcher, Laura Israel Jensen, Catherine Shock, Education Working Paper Archive, University of Arkansas, June 4, 2007.

“Survey getting scrutiny, school choice favored by parents, but method of questioning criticized” by Natalie Jordan, (Bowling Green) Daily News, May 21, 2007.

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