We don't know what parents regard as important but we argue that they are wrong

This goes to an observation I have made a number of times.

Do Parents Value School Effectiveness? by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg, and Christopher R. Walters. From the Abstract.

School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents’ choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City’s centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants’ rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores, high school graduation, college attendance, and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. Preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality.

My argument has been that while most psych and social research indicate that family environment has marginal impact on life outcomes, in fact there is more to it than that. Genetics are a big influence on outcomes followed by peer group influence, followed by family.

I have argued for years that this is too simplistic. That family has a dramatic influence by its strategic decision-making in terms of neighborhood, schools, social networks, church, etc. When the family chooses these elements, they are de facto choosing the social networks as well. We are discounting family influence when we ignore that they choose the environments in which their children will be influenced.

It seems pretty clear that the research team wished to find data which might hobble the home-schooling or school choice momentum. If it can be shown that giving parents choices does not drive improvements in school effectiveness, then the researches would have produced good oppo research.

What they found is that parents chose schools based on perceived peer quality rather than on abstract factors such as "school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality." Parents are pretty bright compared to researchers apparently.

And then there is this clanger"

we cannot rule out the possibility that preferences are determined by effects on unmeasured outcomes.

Basically, we don't know what parents regard as important.