When Parents Don’t Choose

A new survey sheds light on a different kind of school chooser

Last week, our friends at Step Up For Students released a novel and fascinating new survey of Florida school parents. These were not just any parents, they were specifically parents whose children were awarded a state scholarship to attend private school but who did not use it.

As it turns out, around 12% of scholarship awardees in Florida never enroll in private schools. Because Step Up administers the program, they have contact information for everyone who applies. So, they were able to email 32,283 parents who received a scholarship and did not use it. After a few follow ups and questions built into the survey to weed out families that received other types of scholarships, they ended up with 2,739 valid responses.

So what did they find? A few interesting data points stood out to me.

Choice curious parents don’t hate their kid’s school

Step Up asked parents what they thought about their child’s school at the time that they applied for the scholarship. Our intuition might be that parents applying for a scholarship program would be dissatisfied with their current school. That intuition would be wrong (for this population at least). It turns out that 55% of the parents who applied for the scholarship program described themselves as either somewhat or very satisfied with their child’s school. Only 30.2% said that they were somewhat or very dissatisfied. Now, families that actually used their scholarships might be more likely to be dissatisfied, but this information nonetheless underscores an important point. People can be satisfied but still curious. They can be open to finding something even better than what they currently have.

Why and why not?

When parents were asked why they applied for a scholarship, they gave familiar answers. The most popular was, “needed help paying for the school I wanted my child to attend.” Makes sense. That was followed by wanting more individual attention, wanting stronger academics, desiring a school that reflected parents’ values, wanting a religious school, concerns about their child’s emotional health, concerns about their child’s physical safety, and finally concerns about their child’s mental health. For those familiar with the school choosing literature, these are right in line with what other surveys tell us.

But the answers that parents gave for why they didn’t use the scholarship are novel. Here is a chart from the paper depicting them.

The most popular response was that there wasn’t space at the school that parents want. The second most popular response was that scholarships were not large enough. (In a follow-up question, the most popular response for how much more money families needed was between $2,000 and $5,000.) There were some issues with the scholarship process itself, but for less than 10% of families, and the rest of the reasons (like transportation or distance) were also shared by less than 10% of families.

Parents Still Want Options, Even if They Don’t Use Them

Step Up found that 87.6% of parents said that getting the scholarship was very important to them and that 66.7% would apply for the scholarship again, even though they did not use it. This is a subtle but important point. People want to have options, even if they don’t use them. People want to have multiple homes in their price range when they are buying, even though they’ll only end up choosing one. People would prefer to get accepted into multiple colleges rather than just the one that they end up attending. Options are good. They provide a safety net of alternatives if the ideal doesn’t work out.

We are close to a time (if we haven’t reached it yet) where we can consider every family in Florida to be a choice family. There are still gaps in information where some families might not realize that they are eligible for choice programs or areas where choices are constrained, but those deficits are closing and our mindset needs to change as that happens. Many public school parents should be considered choosers because they are making the active choice of that school when other options are available.

But Florida needs more than just a mindset shift. Parents who decided not to take up their scholarships are quite clear: They need more good options. Florida is moving the ball down the field in a variety of ways to try and encourage more educational entrepreneurs to get involved, but more needs to be done. Larger scholarships could be part of the answer, but steps can also be taken to bring down the cost of education. Accessing facilities is a challenge and educators in Florida have story after story of issues with zoning and other land use regulations. That could be a first step to helping meet the needs of Florida parents.

Whatever is done to facilitate more choices, I hope to see more surveys like this one.

This blog was originally published to our Substack.