Co-Principal Investigators: Harris, Douglas; Lambert, Thomas

Partner Institutions: The Orleans Public School Board, Tulane University/Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, and the New Orleans Early Education Network.

Purpose:School choice policies have become increasingly popular in urban districts over the past two decades, and in theory should increase low-income families' access to high-quality schools. However, research is limited on how families engage in school choice application and enrollment processes for early education and elementary school, and on how to design application systems and outreach efforts to support families in achieving the best outcomes for their children. The partnership team will use available and newly collected data to: (1) understand parents' application behaviors in early childhood education and school-choice settings and how to design systems to support them in the process; (2) identify how application behaviors and system design relate to student outcomes; and (3) set a long-term research agenda to study the effects of programs and system policies on young children, birth through 3rd grade, in New Orleans.

Partnership Activities: The partners will launch this project with a half-day kickoff retreat, during which they will review their short-term research plans and discuss each partner's long-term research needs and priorities. Partners will meet bi-monthly to discuss progress, review findings, and develop the long-term research agenda. First, the partners will use application data to identify groups of parents who apply in ways that do not maximize their chances of desired placements. Second, they will interview a sample of these parents to understand their application experiences and needs for support. Third, they will examine short-term outcomes of children with different application paths and identify the causal effects of an application redesign. Key measures include early grade literacy achievement, attendance, grade retention, and suspensions, parent interview findings, school application records, and program assignment mechanisms. Finally, the team will analyze the application data to identify groups of children who are randomly assigned to programs and schools and can be included in long-term causal impact studies.

Setting: This project will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, a racially and economically diverse city with a high-poverty public school system that has the highest charter school enrollment in the nation.

Population/Sample:The project focuses on low-income children in public early childhood education programs and elementary schools, and their parents.

Data Analytic Strategy: The research team will use thematic analysis to analyze interview data. They will use descriptive methods, OLS regression, and logistic regression to analyze administrative data.The team will use the first-choice lottery and deferred-acceptance propensity score methods to examine random assignment to programs and schools.

Outcomes: Partners will collaborate to design an intervention to support parents in the application process and write a grant application to fund the long-term research agenda. The partnership will also produce a report and policy brief for the community and will host a release event to publicize the work and findings of the project.