Rewind to the conversation you overheard on Sunday, where I’m on the other end of the line with the mother of Madison (MOM), a friend on the brink of a school shopping meltdown. Here’s what I had to say:

1) The school Madison attends is not going to make or break her test scores. When it comes to academics, the more your home is like a high quality school (particularly in the early grades), the less the school matters. That means that if you own Baby Einstein and have oodles of books, maps, and science kits cluttering up the bottom shelf of your coffee table, you are probably worrying more than you need to.

MOM is sure I’ve got this wrong. I tell MOM that she should be more worried about which teachers Madison is assigned than which school attends. More importantly, given that Madison is in school for only 6 hours a day, MOM and I should be talking about what Madison’s going to be doing after school, on the weekend, and during the summer, since they’re going to make up the bulk of Madison’s K-12 life anyway.

2) MOM is down to five schools, and the differences between the schools she’s choosing – whether on teacher quality, approaches to instruction, and peers - are negligible. MOM is drawing strong contrasts, i.e. the school in Dangerous Minds versus the school in Gossip Girl. This masks a more nuanced reality. The schools Madison might attend are not that different in terms of academic quality. I remind MOM that very few parents are choosing between schools on either end of the continuum, though many of them think they are.

MOM brings up my previous post about class size, where I note that there are kindergarten classes in New York with 15 kids and others with 31. I remind her that the some of the schools she’s looking at have classes of 16, and others have classes of 18. (In cities, there are families who are choosing between a wide range of schools, but this is certainly not representative of the parents of America’s school age kids.)

3) MOM sees the Final Five as hierarchically ranked – i.e. School A is better than School B is better than School C – and I suggest that we think about choosing a school as a matching process rather than one where some people win admission to “the best school” and everyone else is screwed. Madison is a delightful kid who’s on the shy side, and probably would be most comfortable in a place that is attuned to the social dimensions of schooling. MOM concedes that all five schools are alike in this regard.

100 million parents aren’t wrong. But particularly in some circles, they are more stressed about schools than they need to be. I buy MOM, and myself, a copy of Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety . I’ll let you know how that book is soon.

Enjoy the weekend, everyone!

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Some people protest war. Others protest hunger and suffering. Less discussed, but no less common, is a special class of protest reserved for parents: conscientious objection to their children’s troublesome friends. When parents look out into the world, they see peers whose values and attitudes are contagious. And they are notorious for circling the wagons to keep out unwanted intruders.

Which brings us back to the question of whether the school your kid attends matters as much as you think it does. On Monday and Tuesday, I pointed out that the differences between schools in improving test scores are actually quite small. However, I argued that schools do offer different kinds of opportunities to learn, and parents’ anxiety about where to send their kids to school is partially about their kids’ academic futures.

Amidst all our wonky talk about school choice and academic quality, it’s easy to forget that parents are acutely concerned about what kind of kids are going to be over for play dates. Most parents intuitively buy into the maxim, “You are the company you keep,” and believe that peers are going to affect the person their child turns out to be. Ignoring the emotional dimension of choosing schools leads us to a cookie cutter - and ultimately myopic - understanding of this process.

I’ll give you the bright side of parents’ worries, and then the dark side. Parents reason that their kids are going to spend most of their waking hours surrounded by their peers. They want their child to be flanked by kids who are well-behaved and respectful of the learning process. Parents would also prefer that the other parents at their school share their approach to parenting. For example, they’d like to know that their five year old isn’t watching "Showgirls" and hitting the bottle after they’ve dropped him off.

Parents also know, especially when the kids are young, that the parents of their kids’ friends are going to become their friends. So parents need to be able to see themselves in the other parents at the school. As Ryan, the husband of a San Francisco mom who’s blogging about her school search, said, “I liked the [parent] tour guides. I could see myself being their friends. We're going to be spending a lot of time at Alice's school, and we want to be in a place where we feel like we can connect with the other parents.”

Here’s the dark side. NCES Commissioner Mark Schneider tracked parents' use of a school search website in DC (DCschoolsearch.com), and documented which features of the schools parents looked at, and in what order. Guess what the heaviest hitter was? Demographics. Socioeconomic and racial composition play a large role when parents are choosing schools. (More on whether parents choose school quality or school racial/class composition; see also Mark Schneider's book - Charter Schools: Hope or Hype?).

Economists might argue that this is “statistical discrimination” – essentially using group averages about performance when we have insufficient information. Certainly, on average, learning conditions are worse at schools with high proportions of poor and minority kids. A less cheerful take, of course, is that this is animus-based discrimination.

Regardless of your interpretation, my point is that parents’ choices are as much about "the company" as they are about school quality.

Image credit: 4th grade, Linwood Elementary School.

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Today is NCLB’s 6th birthday. NCLB is, at its core, a policy predicated on the idea that schools vary widely in their ability to improve students’ test scores. By holding schools accountable, the hope is that “bad” schools will become more like “good” ones. (Note - this is a post about NCLB on NCLB's terms, so I'm going to focus on test scores. For more posts on NCLB, take a look here.

However, as I wrote yesterday, once we take into account students’ background characteristics, school effects on standardized test scores are pretty small. The good news is that teacher effects on test scores are quite large (you can find more posts on teacher effectiveness here). In short, the differences between teachers in improving test scores are much larger than the differences between schools. This finding has significant implications for the potential success of school-based efforts to improve test scores, as Barbara Nye, Spyros Konstantopoulos, and Larry Hedges wrote in their paper, “How Large Are Teacher Effects?”:

Many policies attempt to improve achievement by substituting one school for another (e.g. school choice) or changing the schools themselves (e.g. whole school reform). The rationale for these policies is based on the fact that there is variation in school effects. If teacher effects are larger than school effects, then policies focusing on teacher effects as a larger source of variation in achievement may be more promising than policies focusing on school effects.

(You can click to enlarge the picture above - courtesy of the Halloween Edu-Parade, Rod Paige is Armstrong Williams.)

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Ask your companions at a dinner party about their elementary or high school, and you will learn that everyone has a theory about what made it “good” or “bad.” The amazing teachers. The decrepit building. The souped up science labs. The pungent cafeteria food. Unique extracurricular activities. The football team’s reign of terror. And the lists go on. When it comes to our schools, we all fashion ourselves as mini-experts. Most of us are convinced that some schools are better and others worse. And above all, we are certain that which school our kids attend matters.

What does it mean to say that schools matter, i.e. to claim that there are “school effects?” Essentially, this is a claim that, all else equal, going to one school versus another makes a substantial difference in a child’s outcomes. We all suspect that there are real quality differences between schools. But the trouble is that many studies find that differences between schools are dwarfed by differences within schools.

When the outcome in question is test scores, researchers have found that school effects are quite small. For example, once family characteristics are taken into account, private schools don’t come out ahead of public schools. (Catholic schools are a notable exception, though the most convincing studies find test score effects only on the students who are least likely to attend these schools.) Though city parents fight for their kids to get into selective elementary schools precisely because they are assumed to be “better schools,” economists Julie Cullen and Brian Jacob found that kids winning a kindergarten lottery to attend selective schools in Chicago don’t end up with higher test scores. (More details here.)

Does this mean that all schools are the same? Could 100 million parents be wrong? I don’t think so. These parents are only wrong if their sole goal is to pump up their kids’ test scores. But parents have a broad range of goals for their kids, and it’s not clear that test scores are the top priority. For example, Richard Rothstein and Rebecca Jacobsen found that parents, when asked to prioritize the goals of public schools, collectively value social skills and work ethic, citizenship and community responsibility, and emotional health more than the acquisition of basic academic skills. If we researchers took our heads out of the sand and studied the many goals of education, we might find that schools matter more than we think.

This is not to say that parents aren’t in it for academics – they are – but perhaps that parents see academic growth more broadly than the acquisition of test scores. Parents visit schools, and they discover that some kids are dissecting pig hearts, while others read out of textbook. They see that some schools require their students to write frequently in a variety of different styles, and provide their teachers with reasonable workloads that allow them to provide meaningful feedback. They notice that some schools offer art and music, while others have cut out these “extras.” And they know that some schools get their kids excited about learning, while others are passing out worksheets.

We’re so used to equating test scores with educational quality now that it’s easy to forget the big picture. Schools may not matter much for test scores. But that doesn’t mean that schools don’t matter.

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Every year, the parents of 55.1 million American schoolchildren fret about where to send their kids to school. They inspect potential schools from top to bottom. They wonder if the private school up the road might give their kid an edge. And they talk - to their friends, other parents, and their colleagues - to get the skinny on the local schools. In a bloggable age, parents' searches have been split open for all of us to watch - and even participate. (My favorite blog in the school shopping genre is the San Francisco K Files, written by a mom who's searching for a school for her daughter.)

This week's posts came out of conversations with my fertile friends about where to send their kids to preschool, how to buy into the best school district for their future spawn, or how to pick a good private high school. Here's a peek into these exchanges:

"Hey, eduwonkette. Thank God you're home. I went to tour this school, and - "

"The answer is that it probably doesn't matter much."

"WHAT?!?!? You study education! You do this all day! What do you mean that the school Madison goes to doesn't matter?"

"Look, researchers can't find much evidence that going to this or that school makes a big difference. Especially since the schools you're choosing between are pretty much identical. Did I tell you about the shoes I just won on ebay?"

"That's impossible."

"I know, right? They were mad cheap. And pink."

"I don't give a damn about your shoes. I need to find a school for my daughter. So seriously..."

Here's the puzzle. Parents are convinced that the right school will make all the difference for their child. Researchers are not so sure. What's going on here? Is this a story about parenting in an era of anxiety, or do researchers just have their heads in the sand?

On tap for this week:

Monday: Do Schools Matter?

Tuesday: Evidence on School Vs. Teacher Effects

Thursday: Parents' "You are the Company You Keep" Hypothesis

Friday: Why My Friends Still Like Me: My Answer to the "Where Do I Send My Kid?" Question

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