School Choice in Little Beirut

I’m traveling in Portland, Oregon right now and noticed the December, “Best Schools” issue of Portland Monthly magazine, with 631 private and public schools rated. I picked it up, curious to see what characteristics they felt were important when ranking schools, figuring this might hold some relevance to the characteristics parents consider important. Now, this is taken with a giant grain of salt—the target demographic for this magazine isn’t exactly the one policy wonks usually think about when discussing school choice (a $114K 2008 Maserati made their gift guide recommendations, and I picked up the magazine in the checkout line at Whole Foods).

First interesting thing to note is that they highlight the Portland public school transfer system as an option for parents interested in living in one school zone, but sending their kids to school in another. Apparently, about a third of Portland Public School students don’t attend their neighborhood school. Looks like I might need to come back out here to do some school choice research. The first step they recommend? To attend “Celebrate” at the Portland Expo Center, where parents can meet representatives from every school in the district.

Second interesting thing is that the information in their “Best Schools” public school guide included a mix of federal measures of school performance, state ratings, and additional information, like teacher-student ratio, that parents consider important. Ethnic diversity, the percentage of “non-Caucasian” students attending a school, was also one of the characteristics listed. This just underscores that, despite what people might say in surveys, demographics do play a part in school decisions and it’s important for policymakers to be aware of that when designing school choice programs.

Third, compared with the variety of information on school performance available for public schools, the private school guide looked a little paltry. Most of the categories were descriptive—tuition range, percent receiving financial aid, religious affiliation. The only student performance measures available were average SAT reading and math scores, and those were only available for schools with a 12^th grade. If I were shopping for a school, this would leave me a little unsatisfied after the abundance of information about public schools.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised when I read this magazine. In the city where I grew up, a magazine catering to people who buy Rolexes would not even bother ranking the public schools, much less focus most of the print space on them. So it’s encouraging to see a city—even if it’s arguably one of the more progressive places in the country (dubbed “little Beirut” by Bush I)—where public schools warrant multiple pages of description.