School Transparency is a Trust Booster

But Only for the Best

A recent study has revealed that releasing information about school district performance improves trust, support for taxes, and the perception of efficiency in higher-performing districts. However, in lower-performing districts, providing this information doesn’t significantly influence perceptions.

Performance information about school districts has become more readily available in recent years. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 boosted transparency about school districts, while websites like SchoolDigger publicize information like test scores. As transparency increases, it’s more important than ever to understand its impact.

Public perception is particularly relevant for education since spending makes up a high percentage of the government’s public expenditure. In 2018-19, 45% of public education revenue came from local governments, 36% of which was derived from property taxes. As a result, many people care about whether the money is used efficiently. Past research has suggested that providing tax or cost information lowers support for local taxes, with a few exceptions. It is therefore crucial for policymakers to understand factors that can affect support for taxes and other perceptions.

This is especially true given the decline in public trust in government over the last few decades. In 2024, only 22% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right, compared to 73% in 1958. Currently, trust is close to an all-time low, which could potentially have a negative knock-on impact on various social outcomes. These include the stability of society, financial sustainability, and willingness of people to engage with their government.

Four researchers from the University of Connecticut (Eric J. Brunner, Yusun Kim, Mark D. Robbins, and Bill Simonsen) investigated the impact of school performance by giving survey respondents the test scores of their school district and the state average.

Their results suggest that high-performing school districts should advertise their performance, while lower-performing districts should provide more context to explain the relatively poor results.

How Awareness Of School Performance Influences Perception

In the top third of highest-performing districts, those who said they trust “just about always” or “most of the time” increased by 5.2% after viewing results, alongside improvements in efficiency perceptions and support for increased school spending. Meanwhile, informing respondents in school districts with the worst performance didn’t have a significant effect on perceptions.

Iuliia Shybalkina, an Assistant Professor at the Martin School at the University of Kentucky (who wasn’t involved in the research) said of the findings: “I find the discovery that information was impactful in high-performing districts but not in low-performing ones quite surprising. This seems counterintuitive, given humans' well-documented negativity bias, where negative information tends to resonate more strongly than positive information.” She also points to previous research that has found strong effects of positive information, alongside an impact from negative information.

However, there are various mechanisms through which performance information can influence perception, which may explain these results. The researchers outlined these as follows:

• Citizens might have no prior knowledge of their school district’s performance

• Citizens might have some accurate ideas but incomplete

• Citizens might be completely aware and info confirms what they know

• Citizens might have inaccurate perceptions

As Bill Simonsen, a Professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut who co-authored the paper, explains: “It’s not clear what the mechanism is that causes performance information to matter to people …. I suspect, although we did not study this, that for poorer performing districts residents may have been more likely to fall into categories 2) and 3) above, and so providing performance information might simply have confirmed what they already know.”

In addition to the core results, there were some interesting findings about subgroups.

Boosting awareness significantly reduced the number of people who said they “never” support increases in local taxes, and this group tends to be conservative and Republican.

Simonsen says: “Information makes a difference to how people react. Accurate information can help citizens make more reasonable decisions.” He also references past research that suggests people may prefer to remain uneducated about the government due to the cost of obtaining the information compared to the benefits of knowing it.

Another subgroup-specific finding was that positive information had more influence on respondents who were highly educated, without children, homeowners, and males.

The Transparency Dilemma

The main policy takeaway for higher-performing schools is self-evident: They should show their results to benefit from increased trust and support for spending.

However, there is more of a challenge when it comes to approaching lower-performing districts.

As Shybalkina points out: “The findings from the paper suggest the existence of a vicious cycle: high performance fosters greater trust, which in turn drives even higher performance. Conversely, lower-performing areas remain trapped in a cycle of low trust and continued underperformance.”

Policymakers should also keep in mind the potential risk of exacerbating inequality between higher- and lower-performing districts by showing results. There are often already wealth gaps in place, which may result in some districts receiving more funding. This can lead to a trade-off between transparency and equity, and it’s far from obvious which one is more important.

The researchers suggested a potential solution: Providing more context alongside the results. For instance, the schools could compare the results to those of another district with comparable income, language, and disability status to create more favorable judgments.

Simonsen explains: “Some of the lower-performing districts may look better when compared to similarly heterogeneous districts in the state that face similar challenges. Essentially, we suggest school districts think hard about how they benchmark themselves.”

Difficult questions remain about the information citizens have before information on school performance is revealed, and how policymakers should present performance data. Finding these solutions is crucial for keeping citizens engaged and trusting in government, at least in the education realm.

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This research appeared in issue 44(2) of Public Budgeting & Finance.

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