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AbstractPublic institutions seeking to facilitate effective decision making by boundedly rational constituents often must determine what information to provide and in what form to provide it. Ideally, this determination would reflect an understanding of how different kinds, forms, and sources of information are processed by constituents and influence constituents' beliefs. However, research on this topic—especially in the context of educational institutions, and with a focus on official numerical information versus electronic word of mouth—has been minimal. Considering the case of state governments wishing to inform citizens about their schools, we examine how parents and the US public evaluate schools after receiving two increasingly abundant kinds of school quality information: numerical government ratings and online parent comments. Using an online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample, we find that perceptions of school quality are heavily influenced by parent comments even when these comments appear alongside official ratings. By contrast, the effects of official numerical ratings appear modest. Additional findings suggest that the comments' influence results from preferences for the information's source (parents over government) and style (narrative over numerical), and that nonprofit organizations are more trusted messengers of performance information than state governments. These results advance our theoretical understanding of the effects of different kinds of information on belief, and we conclude the article by discussing their implications for how public institutions disseminate information to their constituents.

The majority of American students who successfully complete high school today reach graduation without satisfying even the minimal qualifications for admission to a four-year college or university (Green and Forster, 2003). For some students, this is neither surprising nor troubling, as they understand the paths ahead of them and have little interest in pursuing postsecondary education. In this paper, the authors explore the transition between American secondary and postsecondary institutions and how it is shaped by intra- and intergovernmental relations. At its core, the authors claim that the problem is one of failed governmental coordination. Then, greater coordination between state agencies and across local, state, and federal governments could hold the key to ensuring that students are prepared to succeed in college and the workforce. ; Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA)