The Push and Pull of School Performance: Evidence from Student Mobility in New Orleans.

Abstract

Economic theory suggests that choice-based school reforms lead to competition among schools that increases school performance. In this study, we analyze student mobility in a competitive environment, New Orleans, to better understand how that competition takes place and how it plays out differently across subgroups. In contrast to typical analyses of mobility, our approach distinguishes the effects of incumbent school characteristics (“push” factors) from those of the potential destination schools (“pull” factors). We find that school performance plays both a push and a pull role, but the push of low performance at incumbent schools is stronger than the pull of high performance at potential destination schools. Further, this asymmetry is driven by students in the lowest third of statewide achievement distribution. Although school performance is a significant push factor for both low and high achieving students, low achieving students display a much weaker tendency to move towards high performing schools. This has important implications for our understanding of how families make school choices and for the equity effects of the competitive process.