Floreat Scuola: An International Analysis of Parental Satisfaction with Schools

This paper provides an international perspective to the question of parental satisfaction by analysing a rich, and relatively recent, set of data from the Programme for International Student Assessment's 2006 survey of the knowledge and skills of 15-year olds (hereafter, PISA 2006). A new feature of PISA 2006 (absent from PISA 2000 and PISA 2003) was a questionnaire, administered in some of the participating countries to the parents of the children who were tested, which asked parents a detailed set of questions about their perception of the quality of the school in which their children were studying. After marrying the answers to these questions to related information, also provided by PISA 2006, about the schools and the socio-economic position of the parents, this study uses econometric methods (logit models allied to probability decompositions) to examine the relative strength of a range of factors which influenced parental views about schooling. The results showed that while parental views were inevitably coloured by how well their children were doing at school, these "performance effects" were swamped by parental attributes (particularly their occupational class) and school characteristics (particularly state versus private schools and the role of academic selection in admissions to schools). A noteworthy feature of the results was the country effect: ceteris paribus levels of satisfaction varied considerably between countries with Northern European and Asian parents being the least satisfied.