Montgomery County: A Tale of School Choice

Abstract

This is a story of a national school reform unfolding in a single school district, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. It is a story of school choice as formulated by Congress, as understood by district officials, and as exercised by parents. Telling this story requires that we understand several dimensions of educational decision making: the decisions of district officials confronted with a perhaps unwanted, but important and serious, task; the decisions of parents (and children) at the schools where choice is now available, who must decide whether to leave or to stay; and finally the actions and decisions of children and parents at the receiving schools, whose own characteristics and demographics affect both the policymakers’ decisions and the decisions of the parents and students offered school choice. It is a story told here through the re-creation of the decision-making processes of these individuals, as informed by the information they had at their disposal. The story does not pretend to depict any individual’s actual conduct but is drawn from an in-depth quantitative and geographic analysis of the effects of their decisions over the past two years. The reconstruction of their logic is drawn exclusively from the aggregate data produced by the completion of those tasks and their decisions about schooling choices.