Parents' online school reviews reflect several racial and socioeconomic disparities in K-12 education

Principal Investigator(s):  View help for Principal Investigator(s) Nabeel Gillani, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Eric Chu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Doug Beeferman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rebecca Eynon, University of Oxford; Deb Roy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Version:  View help for Version V1

Name File Type Size Last Modified
Code.pdf application/pdf 20.2 KB 01/14/2021 04:06:AM
Data access file.pdf application/pdf 39.7 KB 01/14/2021 03:58:AM
README.pdf application/pdf 52.1 KB 01/14/2021 04:06:AM

Project Citation: 

Gillani, Nabeel, Chu, Eric, Beeferman, Doug, Eynon, Rebecca, and Roy, Deb. Parents’ online school reviews reflect several racial and socioeconomic disparities in K-12 education. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-01-14. https://doi.org/10.3886/E130621V1

Project Description

Summary:  View help for Summary The files included on this page contain a description of the datasets that were used for this project, along with information about how access can be requested.  They also contain the code repositories used to collect, prepare, and analyze the data.

The abstract for the paper is below:

Parents often select schools by relying on subjective assessments of quality made by other parents, which are increasingly becoming available through written reviews on school ratings websites.  To identify relationships between review content and school quality, we apply recent advances in natural language processing to nearly half a million parent reviews posted for over 50,000 publicly-funded US K-12 schools on a popular ratings website.  We find: i) schools in urban areas and those serving affluent families are more likely to receive reviews; ii) review language correlates with standardized test scores—which generally track race and family income—but not school effectiveness, measured by how much students improve in their test scores over time; and iii) the linguistics of reviews reveal several racial and income-based disparities in K-12 education.  These findings suggest that parents who reference school reviews may be accessing, and making decisions based on, biased perspectives that reinforce achievement gaps.

Scope of Project

Geographic Coverage:  View help for Geographic Coverage United States
Time Period(s):  View help for Time Period(s) 1/1/2009 – 2/1/2020 (There may be some school reviews that occurred before 2009, but most were posted during this timeframe.)
Collection Date(s):  View help for Collection Date(s) 12/1/2019 – 2/1/2020
Universe:  View help for Universe
  1. All reviews posted by those self-identified as parents on GreatSchools.org until approximately December 2019 / February 2020 (due to iterative data collection)
  2. Schools and corresponding characteristics / outcomes measures available in the Stanford Educational Data Archive
  3. All US-based census tracts with available demographics and other relevant characteristics, based on the 2010 census and 2015 American Community Survey (prepared by Opportunity Insights)
Data Type(s):  View help for Data Type(s) administrative records data; observational data

Methodology

Data Source:  View help for Data Source
  1. GreatSchools.org
  2. Stanford Educational Data Archive
  3. Neighborhood characteristics by Census Tract (produced by Opportunity Insights)
Collection Mode(s):  View help for Collection Mode(s) other; web scraping

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Published Versions

V1 [2021-01-14]

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DDI 2.5

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