Investigating Attitudes About Education In Low-Income Communities
Client: National philanthropic organization
The Challenge: This national, philanthropic organization wanted to better understand the attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions held by low-income students and their families about education. In the city in which this organization was located, families enjoyed an open-enrollment, choice-based program for selecting a public high school. However, low-income students were not taking advantage of the program and the client wanted to understand why.
Our Aproach: We conducted a five-month, mixed method focus group study as part of the client’s ongoing education initiative. The engagement focused on understanding the “school choice” thought process and
behavior of families with children attending schools in the city. Given the dropout rates, and other challenges associated with high school, we explored how families react to their “high school options.” Ultimately, the outreach focused on an area of the city with a high concentration of high school dropouts.
We answered the following research questions: What do families know about their school choice options? What information and other resources are, or could be, most helpful? What school characteristics are most important to families? How involved are students in the process? How can interested stakeholders use this information to improve outcomes for students?
The Work: Through our work with this client, we demonstrated a number of our core business capabilities:
- an extensive literature review and benchmarking analysis of other studies that focused on the experiences of students and parents in educational systems that include school choice;
- focus groups using remote keypads with 40 students and their parents from a low-income community in the city;
- data analysis; and
- a written, publications-ready final report.
Outcomes: Our unique cultural competencies, non-traditional outreach strategies, and unconventional information gathering techniques enabled us to engage respondents from the target populations and extract valuable information from them. We provided the client and city officials with recommendations based on primary research that detailed how they could better serve low-income students and parents in the city. In addition, those recommendations were then used by the client to advocate for improvements to the school choice system in the city.
