Journal Article: Parents in Voucher Program Prefer Catholic Schools

The Catholic school "brand" is attractive, familiar and generally accurate, according to an article published in Education Finance and Policy by a University of Arkansas alumna and professor.

Julie R. Trivitt and Patrick J. Wolf used data from a scholarship program in Washington, D.C., to study the usefulness of a corporate brand when parental choice is expanded through K-12 tuition scholarships. Trivitt, an assistant professor of economics at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, earned a doctorate and a master's degree from the University of Arkansas. Wolf holds the Twenty-First Century Chair in School Choice in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas.

The data for the study came from parent surveys and administrative records from a privately funded scholarship program that preceded the government-funded school voucher program that currently operates in DC. Whether privately or publicly funded, such programs allow disadvantaged students to attend private schools. The study's findings were presented in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Finance and Policy published by MIT Press for the Association for Education Finance and Policy.

After a discussion of education reform efforts that include expanding school choice and competition among schools, Trivitt and Wolf contend that, in the current market for private K-12 education, only Catholic schools enjoy a well-known brand identity. They found evidence to support their hypotheses that parents prefer private schools that provide high-quality academic programs and religious instruction, particularly, but not exclusively, in the parents’ preferred religion. They also found evidence that Catholic schools possess a brand reputation of high academic quality to the point that many Protestant Christian families prefer a Catholic school as their private school of choice. Students whose parents chose to send them to well-branded Catholic schools were more likely to persist in the voucher program over time and the parents whose children left Catholic schools generally did so because the school failed to live up to expectations regarding one or more distinctive elements of the Catholic school brand, the authors found.

Trivitt and Wolf reported two primary conclusions from their study:

• Parents do appear to use brand reputations as informational shortcuts in choosing schools. Schools that lack a clear and well-known brand are likely to be at a competitive disadvantage relative to Catholic schools when a school choice program is launched in a major city like the District of Columbia, they wrote.
• It is important that schools live up to their brand reputation. According to the authors, although the evidence suggests that parents who were attracted to the Catholic schooling brand were in general sufficiently satisfied with their actual experiences and likely to continue in the program, some families apparently experienced brand disappointment, particularly with the academic quality and level of discipline in contemporary Catholic schools.

The journal article can be read at the MIT Press website.