How does competition for school resources, along with racial and socioeconomic biases, shape parental preferences for schools? In this article, I investigate how school attributes affect preferences and choice, which sheds light on the processes that maintain school segregation. To do so, I conduct a survey experiment that explores parental preferences and the tradeoffs inherent in the process of school selection using school profiles that resemble those available on widely used education data platforms. I find that parents hold the strongest positive preferences for learning opportunities and overall school achievement compared to other attributes, including school racial and socioeconomic composition. Additionally, though parents prefer schools that have higher equity rankings, highly equitable schools are less desirable to parents than schools with more status and learning opportunities. However, parents also hold independent racial and socioeconomic preferences and —on average—avoid schools with more students of color and low-income students. Furthermore, results suggest they are largely unwilling to make tradeoffs that would result in schools with higher fractions of students of color or low-income students. Taken together, this study links prior studies on the segregating effects of educational data with literatures on school segregation by illustrating the specific dimensions that drive school choice.

中文翻译：

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学业成绩、公平性和学生人口统计对家长对学校偏好的影响：来自调查实验的证据


对学校资源的竞争以及种族和社会经济偏见如何影响家长对学校的偏好？在本文中，我研究了学校属性如何影响偏好和选择，这揭示了维持学校隔离的过程。为此，我进行了一项调查实验，使用类似于广泛使用的教育数据平台上提供的学校资料来探索家长的偏好和择校过程中固有的权衡。我发现，与其他属性（包括学校种族和社会经济构成）相比，家长对学习机会和整体学校成绩持有最强烈的积极偏好。此外，尽管家长更喜欢公平排名较高的学校，但与地位和学习机会较高的学校相比，高度公平的学校对家长来说并不那么有吸引力。然而，家长也持有独立的种族和社会经济偏好，并且平均而言会避开有更多有色人种学生和低收入学生的学校。此外，结果表明，他们基本上不愿意做出权衡，这会导致学校有色人种学生或低收入学生的比例更高。总而言之，本研究通过说明推动学校选择的具体维度，将先前关于教育数据隔离影响的研究与有关学校隔离的文献联系起来。