Parents know if their child's school is a good one

And from the Fall 2010 edition of Educationnext comes the novel notion that parents do, in fact, know if their child's school is a good school or not:

Our results indicate that citizens’ perceptions of the quality of their local schools do in fact reflect the schools’ performance as measured by student proficiency rates in core academic subjects. Although citizens also appear to take into account the share of a school’s students who are poor when evaluating its quality, those considerations do not overwhelm judgments based on information about academic achievement.

So, schools where many of the kids are poor are overjudged as a bad school, but not so much as to overwhelm the judgment based on academics. Note also that the diversity of a school did not have an effect on the perception of the school. Middle schools, however, are judged more harshly than their elementary feeder schools:

-Even after controlling for proficiency rates and other school characteristics, middle schools receive ratings that are, on average, 18 percent of a letter grade lower than comparable elementary schools. In other words, proficiency rates explain some, but by no means all, of the lower perceived quality of middle schools. This finding is of interest given recent research suggesting that middle schools have adverse consequences for student achievement

(I'm beginning to think that "what to do about middle school?" is the question to be asking.)
So it turns out that the old-fashioned "ask the neighbors what they think of the school" method (as well as the newer, online versions of the same thing) isn't such a bad way of judging a school after all!