Like many cities across the nation, New York City has expanded school choice as a means to educational improvement. In NYC, all rising freshmen are required to rank up to 12 high school programs, and are centrally assigned. The admissions process is complex, with programs varying in screening method (selective to non-selective), curricular themes, and admissions preferences. In theory, school choice policies like the one in NYC have the potential to dramatically alter the playing field of educational opportunity for low-income students. On the one hand, these policies decouple school assignment from neighborhoods, enabling families with historically poor access to higher performing public schools to seek better schools outside of their own neighborhood. They may also help students find the best educatio nal “match” for them, given their interests and abilities. On the other hand, these policies rely heavily on the capacity of families to navigate the process and select the best school for their children. For school choice to work as a lever for improving student outcomes and reducing inequality, low-income students and their families must have the resources, information, and supports to select schools that will help them graduate and prepare for life beyond high school.

This paper presents the results from a school-level randomized control trial, which provided low-income NYC middle school students with informational tools and lessons on how to use them in over 170 schools in the 2014-2015 school year. Schools were randomly assigned to one of three informational interventions or a control group. These interventions were delivered in 40 minute lessons given by trained research assistants.

Initial school-level analysis of the interventions indicate that students in schools who received an intervention were more likely to be matched to their first choice school than students in control group schools and to apply to schools supplied in the intervention lists. These effects were concentrated among schools that received the simplest version of the school list. The interventions did not increase match to schools with higher graduation rates or reduced travel time.