In their NBER Working Paper, “Does Choice Increase Information? Evidence from Online School Search Behavior,” Michael F. Lovenheim and Patrick Walsh find that that parents collect more information about schools when offered educational options.  The authors write,

Taken together, our results point to parents responding to increasing school choice options by collecting more information about local school quality. This is a novel finding and has several important policy implications. First, it implies that for many families, the availability of publicly-provided school quality information is not sufficient to get them to pay attention to it. Parents must also have the incentive to seek and use this information. It is perhaps not surprising that families who have few school choice options are less likely to access the available information about other schools in the area. This finding can help explain why, even in the information-rich post-NCLB world, some parents appear to have incomplete information about schools. These results have implications for how the information components of school accountability policies operate.

While this is a pretty common sense finding, it is important.  The availability of high-quality, easily accessible information is an essential prerequisite to the expansion of school choice.