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By Megan Morrissey

Last week I had the privilege of attending American Enterprise Institute’s event held in celebration of National School Choice Week. Senator Tim Scott delivered the opening remarks, focusing on the importance of school choice in giving students hope for their academic future.

Scott’s remarks were accompanied by a panel discussion on a new book co-authored by Patrick Wolf, distinguished professor at the University of Arkansas, entitled “The School Choice Journey: School Vouchers and the Empowerment of Urban Families.” Rather than focus entirely on school choice’s positive effects on students, Wolf segued the conversation into his findings on the importance of choice as a means to empower parents.

Wolf presented several groundbreaking lessons from his book for education researchers and policymakers to seriously consider for the future. Here are four main points I took away from the panel discussion:

1. Too focused on testing. 

Wolf explained that researchers of late have been too test-centered. Most of the available data regarding education reform has been quantitative, not qualitative. What’s missing are the nuances of how families experience the school choice process, or, what Wolf called, their “journey.”

This is what drove Wolf and co-author Thomas Stewart to document the school choice journey of 100 families participating in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), conducting focus groups and personal interviews with low-income urban families as they experienced selecting schools for the first time.

2. Parents want to be “shapers” of their child’s education.

Kara Kerwin, President of The Center for Education Reform and a fellow panelist, added that despite popular belief, parents both want choice AND are capable of making good decisions when it comes to their child’s education experience, especially when they are given sufficient information. However, parents often lack the necessary data to make informed choices about their child’s education. Moving forward, there must be more effective and creative communication strategies to convey transparent information concerning education options.

3. School choice is a pathway towards political mobilization for parents and families.

Wolf and Stewart found that when the parents in their study were given responsibility and sufficient information about their child’s future, they became politically active citizens. Case in point: in 2009 when politicians tried to end the OSP, instead of sitting idly by, parents of students participating in the program became politically mobilized. They rallied hard, testifying before Congress and providing impassioned pleas to save the program. In April 2011, the parents won and the OSP was reauthorized and expanded in the budget.

4. Parents do not value standardized test scores as a primary metric of their child’s success.

Instead, Wolf and Stewart found that parents tend to look at subtle factors such as changes in their child’s motivation, attitude, and behavior toward school. Wolf, Kerwin, and Rick Hess, resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI and fellow panelist, all echoed that these parents might indeed be on to something.

This finding really made me think about our nation’s growing obsession with test scores. Have we gone too far? And how have we seemed to completely ignore that some of the best evaluators of a student’s progress would actually be the parents and families of students that witness their children learn and grow every day? Would not their first-hand accounts be the best judge of their child’s educational experience, and whether they believed a school was “failing” or not? Some food for thought.

In conclusion, Wolf and Stewart have come up with distinct research, in terms of both their data collection method and findings. However, a lot of lingering questions remain for other researchers to build upon for the future. I look forward to a continued conversation on the validity of using other metrics than standardized test scores to evaluate schools, in addition to other effective ways to empower and mobilize low-income, urban families in the United States.

Megan Morrissey is an intern at The Center for Education Reform.