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"Consider the revealing case of Worcester, Massachusetts. President Bush signed the federal No Child Left Behind law in 2001, with the goal of increasing public school accountability by mandating certain testing standards. (We put to one side the many controversial questions raised by that law.) By June 2003 twelve of Worcesters fifty public schools had been labeled in need of improvement for two consecutive years, and five for three consecutive years. That summer, forty-seven hundred students, almost one-fifth the districts student population, were eligible to transfer, and eighteen hundred students had the right to collect federal money for supplemental education services. But six months later, only one student had switched schools, and only two had taken advantage of supplemental services! Worcester officials themselves were primarily responsible. True, the school system notified parents at underperforming schools about their rights under No Child Left Behind. But it also engaged in what the political scientist William Howell calls friendly discouragement, making parents reluctant to exercise their right to choose.3 The school system qualified its language about the meaning of underperforming, stressed the limitations of the No Child Left Behind evaluation criteria, and highlighted unattractive parts of No Child Left Behind, noting that space limitations might not permit transfers to be processed. The school system also explained that it was trying to improve. For the undeterred, exercising choice was a tedious, multistage process. First, parents had to meet with their schools principal. Few did. Next, they had to attend another meeting at a school information center. The centers director said that two parents expressed interest in such a meeting. At these meetings, district officials again stressed that transfers were not always possible and that there were no guarantees about transportation or school location. And all of that was before parents had to file the transfer paperwork. Even worse, because the school district controlled access to information, tutoring service and test prep companies could not reach students without the districts blessing. The companies essentially depended on positive comments from the school district. As with a 401(k) plan, the average parents know little about their childs school, let alone all the other schools that are available. They might well stick with the status quo or ultimately make poor decisions. The trick is to promote actual freedomnot just by giving people lots of choices (though that can help) but also by putting people in a good position to choose what would be best for their children. Consider a few details. When parents pick schools, status quo bias plays a big role. The neighborhood school that one knows, failing or not, may be preferable to the unknown school half an hour away. In any case, the Byzantine nature of collecting and distributing school data makes it difficult for parents to think through their options. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, parents receive a hundred-page booklet with descriptions of 190 schools written by representatives of the schools themselves, emphasizing each schools positive features. The booklet does not include information on physical locations, test scores, attendance rates, and racial compositionthese are available only on the district Web site. Meanwhile, staff members at a special district-wide application center are instructed to respond to questions like Which school is the best school? by saying that a good school depends on each individual child and advising parents to talk to their children about what their needs are, and to visit the various schools in order to determine which is best for their children. Although this advice is unobjectionable, it is about as helpful as when a waiter responds to an inquiry about what is good by saying: Everything! A creative experiment in Charlotte shows that choices can be improved with better and simpler information.4 Charlotte gave parents the option to apply for admission at multiple public schools besides their default school. Low-income parents tended to put less weight than high-income parents on school quality, as measured by test scores, and rarely tried to enroll in higher-performing schools. A random sample of parents was selected to receive an abbreviated fact sheet about the schoolsmuch in the spirit of the RECAP idea that we have suggested in other areas. Printed on each sheet was a complete listing of average test scores and acceptance rates, from highest to lowest, at schools available to a given child. The experimenters wanted to find out whether parents, and especially low-income parents, would choose better schools. They did. Much better ones. The parents who received the fact sheets made decisions implying that the weight they assigned to school quality (as measured by test scores) had doubled. The schools they selected had, on average, 70 percent higher test scores than the scores at their neighborhood schools. This had the effect of making their choices similar to those of families whose incomes were $65,000 a year higher. Furthermore, when children are lucky enough to switch to better schools, their performance improves considerably. The students who are lucky enough to win the lotteries held to decide who gets to attend the popular better schools are less likely to be suspended and have higher test scores than the students who lost."