What Happened To Student Mobility After The New Orleans’ Market-Based School Reforms?

One argu­ment for school choice is that par­ents will vote with their feet and move to bet­ter schools. This could cre­ate com­pe­ti­tion between schools that allows fam­i­lies to select the options that work best for them and induces all schools to improve. Advo­cates also argue that school choice will ben­e­fit low-income fam­i­lies the most because these fam­i­lies have the least choice and poor­est options in tra­di­tion­al pub­lic school systems.
To make this com­pet­i­tive process work, stu­dents have to switch schools at least some of the time as they seek out bet­ter options. Less clear is whether the intro­duc­tion of choice will increase or decrease mobil­i­ty over­all or change mobil­i­ty pat­terns. On the one hand, with choice, fam­i­lies may make bet­ter ini­tial choic­es and see less need to switch schools. Also, when stu­dents change house­holds, school choice allows them to stay in the same schools since school­ing options are no longer tied to hous­ing loca­tion. On the oth­er hand, switch­ing schools becomes eas­i­er when school­ing options are no longer tied to the neigh­bor­hood and this may increase mobil­i­ty. Since research con­sis­tent­ly shows that mobil­i­ty leads to worse stu­dent out­comes, this could have neg­a­tive con­se­quences for students.

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