This paper uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and dynamic mapping to examine student enrollments in New Jersey charter schools. Consistent with previous research, we find evidence of increased racial segregation. Greater percentages of African-Americans attend charter schools than reside in surrounding areas. We add to the existing charter school literature by examining student enrollments across three geographic scales: school districts, census tracts and block groups. We demonstrate that racial segregation is most severe within charter schools’ immediate neighborhoods (i.e. block groups), suggesting that analyses comparing charter schools to larger school districts or nearby public schools may misrepresent student sorting. This finding results from the tendency of charter schools in New Jersey to locate just outside predominately African-American neighborhoods, encircling the residential locations of the students they are most likely to enroll.

Under a long-standing Progressive Conservative government the province of Alberta, Canada in 1994 became the first and only province in the country to introduce charter schools into its public system. What was cautiously introduced as an innovation and best practice pilot program has become a well sought-after alternative for parents of the public school system. This research is based on a review of the available literature and previous research on Alberta Charter schools and includes a survey of current school documents, websites and government documents pertaining to charter school regulation and governance. Part I of this analysis presents Alberta’s Charter School movement’s design using the analytic framework of finance, regulation and information. Part II will apply these design elements to four criteria for evaluating privatization systems: choice, productive efficiency, equity and social cohesion. Part III looks at some of the political and regulatory constraints facing the charter school movement. Taking into account the three design dimensions and four criteria of charter school evaluation, the result for Alberta in practice is a system that ultimately prioritizes social cohesion over choice and productive efficiency over equity. With a mere 14 charters in operation as of January 2008, Alberta’s charter school system has a bark that is much bigger than its bite. The threat of charter schools has stimulated competitive response from neighboring local school districts in the form of new programs of choice for parents of public schools. It is clear that the idea of choice is very important to Albertans, yet the politics driving the movement’s expansion, renewal and regulatory environment appear to be rooted in the greater philosophy of social service delivery that embodies Canadian socio-political ideology: an ideology of continued public delivery and control of education.

Arizona’s charter school plan has been called the “gold standard” for charter school plans. The plan has been ranked 1st for its policy environment by researchers, and has received an “A+” for financial audits. It is highly deregulated and includes a huge number of charter schools, the most per capita in the nation. Yet no in-depth, comprehensive, non-partisan analysis of the plan has been conducted. In the past decade, the Arizona plan has encountered shifting political realities and has become the subject of contentious fiscal debates. Utilizing Levin’s (2002) framework, this paper looks first at how the policy instruments of finance, regulation, and support services are being used in Arizona by policymakers to achieve charter schools’ goals. The paper then lays out specific measures or benchmarks for assessing the dimensions of freedom of choice, productive efficiency, equity, and social cohesion, and undertakes a discussion of the likely consequences based on these criteria. Based on this analysis, the issue of charter school finance emerges as a litigious and contested issue in Arizona. Concerns with transportation are highlighted. In addition, it is clear that the large number of charter schools in Arizona correlates with a wide range of charter school missions and philosophies. But recent state involvement in the curriculum and restrictions on school sponsorship could set precedents for limiting or reducing freedom of choice. Arizona policymakers have stressed efficiency in intent and on paper, but there is little available evidence that levels of this dimension are high. Together with likely low levels of equity and debatably similar or lower levels of social cohesion, the conclusion is that on balance there is little basis upon which Arizona’s charter schools could claim any significant general advantage over their non-charter public counterparts.

Ireland’s commitment to school choice is expressed in both school admission policies and the ease with which groups can establish new publicly-funded schools. Parents may choose between religion-based traditional ‘national primary schools,’ Irish language immersion gaelscoilenna, or multi-denominational ‘Educate Together’ schools. We describe attitudes and practices substantially more supportive of school choice than those found in America and cite current Irish laws and policy documents on which these practices are established. We present direct quotations and summaries from extensive interviews conducted with parents, that demonstrate an almost universal support for school choice even among groups who might have been expected to feel threatened by it.

Dissatisfaction with schools and student performance has led to the call for different schools and school choice. But do different types of schools produce different outcomes? School choice programs in Connecticut are intended to provide opportunities for curricular diversity, educational innovation, and to “reduce, eliminate, or prevent…racial, ethnic or economic isolation…while offering educational improvement” (Connecticut State Department of Education, 2006). Using the state’s extensive school profile databases and logistic regression, propensity scores were created and used to match choice schools--magnet, technical and charter--with non-choice schools to estimate school level effects of choice schools on academic achievement. In general, performance was not significantly different between the matched choice and non-choice schools.

While numerous recent authors have studied the effects of school accountability systems on student test performance and school "gaming" of accountability incentives, there has been little attention paid to substantive changes in instructional policies and practices resulting from school accountability. The lack of research is primarily due to the unavailability of appropriate data to carry out such an analysis. This paper brings to bear new evidence from a remarkable five-year survey conducted of a census of public schools in Florida, coupled with detailed administrative data on student performance. We show that schools facing accountability pressure changed their instructional practices in meaningful ways. In addition, we present medium-run evidence of the effects of school accountability on student test scores, and find that a significant portion of these test score gains can likely be attributed to the changes in school policies and practices that we uncover in our surveys.

Education is an essential pre-requisite and basic building block for social capital formation. Pakistan is the sixth most populous country with 160 million people, 33% mired in abject poverty, living below the poverty line. Pakistan is at serious risk of not attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Education For All (EFA) targets by 2015. Government alone will not be able to accomplish the gigantic task of attaining the goal of sustainable quality education and meet the targets of MDGs and EFA. Policy change is necessary to involve and facilitate Non-State Providers for extending access, equity and quality. There is greater sensitivity now to facilitate private sector intervention by financial, administrative and management empowerment and autonomous academic leadership through Public Private Partnership (PPP). The idea is to ensure trust-based synergy and synchronization culminating in a longeval win-win situation. The evidence has suggested that PPP is extremely successful. The central thematic area explored in the paper involves how robust PPP models are in terms of affordability and sustainability. The paper elucidates on evidence-based research findings with multi-dimensional contents and contours. The findings are based on actual data and practices in operational theatrics in the context of PPP models in the largest province of Punjab under the auspices of Punjab Education Foundation (PEF). By now, there is irrefutable and convincing supporting empirical evidence that PPP carries very secure potential not only for long-term viability but also for sustainable quality education at affordable cost to the less-privileged and disenfranchised sections of society. Efficient private sector leadership facilitated by public sector financing securely integrates and bleeds into an optimal level of service delivery, resulting in better learning outcomes, less drop-outs, ensured presence of teachers and no truancy.

Education vouchers might seem like a natural extension of the liberal welfare model of the United States and American society generally; but they might also seem like a contradiction for the social democratic welfare states in Scandinavia with their state and public sector dominated principles of welfare provision. Nevertheless, school vouchers have faced severe resistance in the United States—with no legislative success as a national education reform—but sporadic and limited state level developments can be observed. On the other hand, in the early 1990s the social democratic welfare state of Sweden adopted a universal public voucher scheme. The goal of the present paper is to explain this counter intuitive and counter theoretical empirical puzzle. It is argued that the different ways political institutions affect political decision-making in these two countries affects the varying policy output on school vouchers in the United States and Sweden.

Despite the recent enthusiasm for charter schools as a policy alternative for improving student learning, studies indicate that they are not increasing student achievement over traditional public schools (Bettinger 2005; Crew & Anderson 2003). Nevertheless, legislative activity in the states suggests that charter schools as a policy alternative is gaining support on the public agenda. Agenda setting theory suggests that interest groups, state and citizen ideology, political context, policy entrepreneurs, focusing events and state resources influence the ability of issues to reach the institutional agenda (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Kingdon 1995). This study uses panel corrected cross-sectional time series analysis to explore which of these factors are motivating increased interest in charter school legislative activities at the state level from 2003-2006. The number of charter school bills proposed in state legislatures is the dependent variable (National Council of State Legislatures).

Proponents of charter schools claim that charters provide incentives for non-charter public schools to provide more effort towards improving student performance. However, it is unclear whether schools respond to competition and other mechanisms may counteract competitive impacts. In this paper I investigate how charter schools affect behavior, attendance, and test scores for students in non-charter schools using new data from an anonymous large urban school district (ALUSD). I compare three econometric methods which attempt to account for the endogenous location decision of charter schools - school fixed-effects, school fixed-effects combined with school-specific time-trends, and instrumental variables. Results using school fixed effects with or without school specific time trends suggest that impacts on test scores are statistically insignificant in levels models but significantly positive in value-added models. On the other hand, IV results show consistently negative, and often statistically significant, impacts of charter schools on test scores in both levels and value-added models. However, I also find large and statistically significant improvements in discipline in schools facing charter competition that also differ from the fixed-effects estimates. These results suggest that previous work on this topic may suffer from substantial selection bias.

School choice is intended to generate competition between schools largely to leverage new and better educational opportunities for disadvantaged students. Yet we know very little about how competition impacts whole populations of schools, or different types of schools, in distributing different educational options across segregated social landscapes. This analysis maps new educational options for families, as different types of charter schools respond to market competition within a highly competitive and segregated environment — examining school and organizational strategies in “positioning” themselves within metropolitan Detroit in order to measure the overall impact of these strategies on alternatives for disadvantaged students. Dynamic mapping illuminates the kinds of charter schools that have opened, relocated, and closed relative to racial and ethnic distributions in neighborhoods, providing a comprehensive picture of supply-side responses to competition since the emergence of choice policies. We offer a brief outline of the policy context, considering the primary equity impetus for choice, and the policy implications as they are expected to reverberate through the organizational behavior of schools. Then we present a more complex theoretical framework for understanding likely strategic responses from organizations in competitive education markets. In doing this, we draw on theories from the literatures on industrial organization and locational theories as they apply to what we are calling “local education markets.” We then describe the geo-spatial analyses, providing graphic maps to represent the patterns evident in this case. The concluding discussion offers a brief overview of the equity implications for employing the profit motive to expand educational access.

This article presents a case study of a U.S. charter high school that was created by an East African community seeking a learning environment for immigrant adolescents committed to an Islamic lifestyle. It describes how such schools are a reaction to concerns from Muslim immigrant parents and community leaders that youth are experiencing rapid assimilation at school and are replacing their ethnic and religious identity with an other-imposed racialized identity. Through an analysis of teacher interviews, this article explores how the school serves as an oasis for Muslim youth who wish to maintain an Islamic lifestyle and resist the powerful social pressures to assimilate. It also uncovers some of the challenges presented by having a teaching staff with a range of teaching philosophies, background experiences and cultures. Finally, this study reveals some problematic differences between the cultural and educational norms and expectations of the white teachers and the East African leadership. In the end, this case study emphasizes the critical need for a meaningful and productive dialogue about culture, teaching, and learning between all stakeholders in the school’s operation and success.

This study examines whether charter schools are having the hypothesized positive competitive effect on traditional public school student achievement in Ohio. The research question for this evaluation is as follows: Does the increased competition for students that is created by an increased supply of charter schools in or near a traditional public school system lead to higher student achievement for traditional public school students in the form of higher math and reading scores on the state’s standardized achievement tests? Ohio provides an ideal setting for a competitive effects study because the law allows for independently authorized charters. These schools are far more likely to create competition for students than conversion charters, which are authorized by local school boards. A pooled time series regression design is used to evaluate data from 2002 to 2006. The amount of competition faced by a traditional public school is measured three ways: a dummy variable for whether at least one charter school is located in the same district, the number of charter schools located in the same district, and the market share of charter schools within each district. The paper finds that charter school competition has a consistently small but significant negative effect on the proficiency passage rates of nearby traditional public schools. This finding may be due to a compositional selection effect from charter schools (as charter schools draw higher performing students, the passage rates at the traditional public schools decrease), or a direct negative impact on the quality of the education provided in the nearby traditional public schools (most likely due to decreased resources).

This paper tests the hypothesis that competition from charter schools improves the efficiency of traditional public schools. The analysis utilizes a statewide school-level longitudinal dataset of Michigan schools from 1994 to 2004. Fixed effect methods and two alternative estimations are employed. The results from three alternative estimation strategies consistently show that charter competition has a negative impact on student achievement and school efficiency in Michigan’s traditional public schools. The effect is small or negligible in the short run, but becomes more substantial in the long run, which are consistent with the conception of choice triggering a downward spiral in the most heavily impacted public schools.

This paper attempts to develop game theoretical models of parents’ decision-making on the consumption of private tutoring (PT). From the individual decision maker’s perspective, investment in PT guarantees a high private rate of return, while from the country’s viewpoint, PT entails a low social rate of return with substantial opportunity and transaction costs. In this respect, Spence’s job market signaling model and Thurow’s job queuing model contain similar implications of investment in education, thus these models were introduced and integrated into PT game models. The Nash Equilibriums from the two PT game models were characterized by the following. First, throughout the two non-cooperative PT game models, when the benefits from PT considerably exceeded the costs of PT, games between parents with symmetrical characteristics had suboptimal Nash Equilibriums that are similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. Second, games between parents with asymmetrical characteristics showed a Nash Equilibrium where parents with competitive advantages in income, their child’s ability, and preference for education spend all of their income on PT while relatively disadvantaged parents do not spend money on PT. The governmental interventions to shift the equilibriums of the PT game are suggested here.

Private tutoring (PT) has been a growing economic phenomenon in South Korea for many years. This study investigated the determinants of the demand for PT in South Korea. Data were collected from 45 proportionally stratified South Korean high schools, and 3,605 questionnaires were analyzed using the Heckman two-stage sample selection correction method. Additionally this study exploited the local government regulation of PT to identify participation in PT, and this serves as an identifier of the selection correction term in the second stage outcome equation (expenditure on PT and hours of PT).

Results of the regression analysis showed that among the students and family background characteristics, students’ achievement level, household income and parents’ education level were positively associated with a higher probability to participate in PT and higher expenditure and spending hours of PT. At the school level, students in schools with higher student-teacher ratio were expected to spend more time on PT. The contextual effect measured by the proportion of classmates receiving PT services were significantly and positively related to expenditure on PT. Residence in urban areas had greater expenditure and hours spent on PT. The implications of these findings are discussed here.

Charter schools are publicly funded schools which, in exchange for expanded accountability, receive more autonomy and experience fewer regulations than traditional public schools. From 1997 to 2006 the number of charters in the US grew from 693 to 3,977. Perhaps surprisingly, given this growth, previous work has found mixed evidence on the impacts of charter schools on student performance. However, these studies focus almost exclusively on test scores as the outcome of interest. Thus, one potential explanation for this discrepancy is that charter schools affect student performance in ways that cannot be measured by test scores. In this paper, I use new longitudinal data from an anonymous large urban school district to assess how charter schools affect student discipline, attendance, and retention and compare these to test score impacts. Using individual fixed-effects analyses I find that charter schools generate improvements in student behavior and attendance but the effects on test scores differ by subject. While I find evidence of selection into charter schools based on changes in outcomes, these results change little after applying interrupted panel strategies. Using Kyriazidou's (1997) estimator, I also find that the results are robust to adjustments for endogenous attrition. Finally, I find little evidence that charter schools generate long-term benefits if students return to non-charter schools.

This longitudinal study of educational reforms in Philadelphia since 2002 uses multilevel change models to analyze the impact of privatization (assignment of schools to be managed by private “Educational Management Organizations” or EMOs) on middle-grades mathematics and reading achievement growth, taking account of the structural reforms (creation of new K-8 schools to replace selected middle schools) occurring simultaneously within the district. Overall,the longitudinal mathematics and reading achievement gains from fifth to eighth grade for students in EMO-managed schools were not larger than those for students in schools managed by the district. Broader systemic reforms, including district-wide increases in the quality and coherence of curriculum and professional development, appear to contribute to broad-based achievement gains in cohorts experiencing those reforms.

In this paper, we quantify the religious factor in private education in the United States by estimating a Random Utility Model of school-choice in which households choose among public, private-nonsectarian, Catholic and Protestant schools. In our model households differ not only in their income levels but also in their religion and religiosity levels. The model is then estimated using multinomial logit and multinomial probit regressions of attendance at different types of private schools using individual data from the General Social Survey . We find that both religion and religiosity have important effects on the demand for the different types of private schools. Further, it is shown that if religiosity is not taken into account (the usual case), the effect of religion on demand is biased. Our results imply that previous studies on the treatment effect of Catholic schools that have not taken into account the selection of high-religiosity youth into Catholic schools overestimate the positive influence of Catholic schools.

Scholars and practitioners are well aware that public policy—the laws, regulations, and programs instituted by governments—establishes the ground rules for educational entrepreneurship.  But the actual policy landscape—the political and policy context within which educational innovators must operate as they attempt to bring new approaches to bear in providing schooling—has received little scholarly attention.  This paper surveys the politics and policies of entrepreneurship in the United States and examines how and why states differ in the kinds of obstacles and incentives which they have created for educational entrepreneurs.  It focuses on charter schooling, teacher and principal licensure, and supplemental services and concludes with an analysis of the effect that accountability reforms, and the federal No Child Left Behind law, may have on promoting new approaches to schooling.

This article discusses the limited use of education vouchers in an era of unprecedented growth in school choice. It is divided into two parts: first, a description of the policy, political, and legal barriers that may limit the expansion of large-scale voucher programs is presented. Discussion then shifts to the efforts of voucher advocates to build support among historically marginalized populations frustrated with the performance of public schools and open to limited forms of private school choice. The authors consider the consequences of these strategies and suggest that the very voucher programs that appeal to disadvantaged families may prove most offensive to middleclass and suburban voters who vigorously object to policies that undermine local authority and redistribute local resources. Specifically, vouchers have the potential to erase municipal boundaries, dissolve neighborhood ties, lower housing prices, and upset student enrollments.

<This paper was published in Education Policy , Vol. 21, No. 1, 40-72 (2007)>

This paper examines the role of private schools in primary education in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).  All SSA countries have committed to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include gender equity in access in to schooling by 2005, and universal primary education (UPE) by 2015.   Previous research suggests that private schools in countries with low supply provide low-quality alternatives to public schools.  This study examines the use of private schools in primary education in Malawi , Nigeria , Uganda , and Zambia .  The results indicate that the role of private schools varies more than previous theories suggest.  The impact of private markets on the quality and quantity of schooling varies with context of the public education system.

We investigate the effectiveness of Idaho charter schools relative to traditional public schools, using the average difference in test score gains in the two sectors as well as the student fixed effects estimator favored in the literature. Our findings are quite sensitive to the choice of estimator. When student fixed effects are included, charter schools appear more effective than traditional public schools in the elementary grades. When student fixed effects are omitted, this is no longer true. We attribute the difference to biases associated with heterogeneity in schools and in the quality of school-student matches when the fixed effects estimator is used. We find much less evidence of selection bias, the standard rationale for the fixed effects estimator.
 

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it presents a model examining the school choice processes of disadvantaged households accessing the LFP sector in a study on Lucknow District, Uttar Pradesh . The model presents households in the study as engaging in ‘active choice ’. Active choice is seen as the deliberated action of households in making concerted choices about their children’s schooling through a complex process. The process involved assessing competing school sectors (mainly the state and LFP), and analyzing particular household circumstances and local school markets through a systemic set of values, beliefs, and “mental models” (North, 1990) about education. Second, it focuses on the adept employment of engagement strategies specific to the LFP sector by households in the study to interact with their chosen schools. Since the schooling arena is heavily marketised, household behavior was expected to follow Hirschman’s (1970) classic “exit, voice, and loyalty” framework. However, contextual specificities of the LFP sector necessitated a re-examination of this framework when applied here.

Proponents of school choice argue that schools of choice build stronger parent communities. Using data from the National Household Education Surveys Program, a nationally-representitive cross-section of U.S. households, I examine the empirical evidence for this claim. To account for the difficulties in identifying causal effects in cross-sectional observational data, I estimate a model that includes the parent’s unobserved propensity to both participate in school activities and to choose a public or private school other than their geographically assigned public school.

Over two percent of school children are home schooled and eleven percent sent to private school. I estimate models of school choice using household-level data from three rounds of the National Household Education Survey merged to secondary data sets. Families are inclined to avoid low quality public schools. For families leaving the public school system, they are relatively more likely to exit to home schooling rather than private schools if the mother has abundant time but scarce income, and if the state public school finance system is centralized, making Tiebout sorting less efficient and private schooling more costly. These effects are especially strong among well-educated parents and younger children. The home schooling of older children is more sensitive to child-specific behavioral needs.

Choice and competition in education have found growing support from both policy makers and academics in the recent past. Yet, evidence on the actual benefits of market-oriented reforms is at best mixed. Moreover, while the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear, in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts. In this paper, we study whether pupils in Primary schools in England with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited; and whether Primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation. In simple least squares regression models, we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement, but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance. Yet, this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting. In fact, an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited. Only when we restrict our attention to Faith autonomous schools, which have more freedom in managing their admission practices and governance, do we find evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement.

One of the biggest public school reform movements in the past decade has been the passage of charter school laws. Forty states and Washington D.C. have approved legislation that allows charter schools to operate within their jurisdictional boundaries. The academic research thus far has focused on where charter schools have located and the achievement consequences of the schools. This paper addresses a direct effect of charter schools by examining their enrollment consequences. We find that in Michigan approximately 20 percent of the students who enroll in charter schools were previously enrolled in private schools and approximately 80 percent move from the traditional public schools.

This study considers factors explaining why Florida has been the most aggressive state in the country in adopting vouchers and what this implies for the future of vouchers in other states. We find that vouchers represent one step in Florida ’s long progression of aggressive educational accountability policies. These policy directions, in turn, arise from Florida ’s moderate social conservatism, openness to various sorts of privatization, large and growing Hispanic population, and out-of-state “transplanted” voters who have weak ties to the state’s public education system. Even with this fertile political soil, the voucher programs were adopted only after hard-fought political battles and their future is less than secure. They probably would not have been adopted without the efforts of a single individual, Governor Jeb Bush, whose tenure is almost over. Moreover, the Florida voucher programs rest on a shaky legal foundation due to two highly restrictive features of the state’s constitution, the so-called Blaine Amendment and provisions for “public” and “uniform” schools. This leaves the Florida voucher programs on uncertain political and legal ground. Other states face many of the same legal restrictions—and even stronger political impediments. We argue therefore that while the adoption of vouchers in Florida does signal a continued national trend toward school choice, it does not suggest that the trend will continue in the form of vouchers or, more specifically, in forms that allow the use of public funds in religious and other private schools.

Research from countries with broad school choice initiatives has become particularly relevant with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the potential for all students in failing schools to gain access to new schooling options.  A new paper by Cathy Wylie examines school choice policies in New Zealand .  First, the history of school choice in New Zealand is discussed.  Wylie reveals that 91% of primary students and 84% of secondary students attend their first choice school.  However, roughly 30% of students do not attend schools closest to their homes, suggesting some competition for students between schools.  Second, the impact of school choice on student achievement is examined.  Wylie reports that low-income schools are less likely to produce qualified students and that competition does not appear to have induced these schools to improve.  Third, the paper discusses why competition has not lead to superior student outcomes.  Wylie argues that most schools in New Zealand do not face structural competition, defined as five or more competing schools in close proximity, and most school leaders are not threatened by consistent competition.  Out of 157 schools whose principals were surveyed in 1999 and 2003 by the New Zealand Council of Educational Research, only 17% reported facing competition in both years.  Wylie concludes that it is important to distinguish between offering choice and encouraging competition.

Voucher advocates argue that the introduction of educational vouchers can make improved educational opportunity available to the most disadvantaged children.  Critics contend that vouchers increase the risk of exacerbating inequities based on race and socioeconomic status. They fear that in order to remain competitive and save costs, private schools will have incentives to skim off the highest performing students who are usually least demanding in terms of resources.  Most evidence suggests that unrestricted choice in Chile has exacerbated stratification. Researchers have found that private voucher schools “cream skim” off the high income students while relegating disadvantaged students to public schools.  What has been overlooked, however, is stratification levels within public and private school sectors and variation within private school for-profit and nonprofit (religious and secular) sectors.  In this paper we examine public and private school enrollment practices in response to vouchers.  We find that public schools are more likely to serve disadvantaged student populations than private voucher schools. We also find that the typical public school is more internally diverse with regard to parental income and education than the typical private voucher school.   While differential behavior is also found across private school ownership types, the differences do not always comport with theory. 

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), I examine ethnic and racial patterns of private school attendance. I find that at both the 8th and 10th grade levels, blacks and Hispanics are substantially less likely to attend private schools than are whites. I also find evidence that racial sorting between the private and public school systems is partly due to preferences over the racial composition of schools. In particular, white and Hispanic students enroll in private schools in response to large concentrations of black students, although the underlying causes are unknown. I also examine whether ethnic and racial income disparities contribute to the large differences in private school attendance rates. I find that lower levels of income among black and Hispanic families contribute substantially to the under-representation of these two groups in the private school system. My estimates indicate that racial disparities in income levels explain 34.9 to 56.7 percent of the white/black gap in the private school attendance rate and 49.7 to 57.5 percent of the white/Hispanic gap in the private school rate. Finally, I find that whites attend private schools that are less integrated than public schools, and blacks and Hispanics attend private schools that are slightly more integrated than public schools.  

We estimate the impact of attending a magnet school on student achievement for a mid-sized Southern district, using admissions lotteries to sort students into “treatment” and “control” groups.  We find a positive magnet school effect on mathematics achievement until we add controls for student demographics and prior achievement.  This suggests that despite random assignment in the lotteries, treatment and control groups differ with respect to student characteristics that have an independent impact on achievement.  The most likely explanation is differential patterns of attrition among lottery winners and losers.

This research examines the effects of charter schools on traditional public schools. A premise of charter school initiatives has been that these schools have direct benefits for students attending these schools and indirect benefits for other students by creating competition for traditional public schools to improve their performance. Using California data, the analysis examines the responses to a survey of principals in a sample of traditional public schools. In addition, the research assesses how charter school competition affects student-level achievement trends in traditional public schools. The survey results showed that public school principals felt little competitive pressure from charters. Similarly, the student achievement analysis showed that charter competition (measured in a variety of ways) was not improving the performance of traditional public schools.

This paper estimates the impact of private education on low-income students in Chile . We attempt to reduce selection bias by using reduced-tuition paying, low income students in private schools as the treatment group, based on our finding that these students were, to some extent, randomly selected out of the public school control group. Propensity score matching is then used to calculate the difference in academic achievement of students in the treatment group versus their counterpart in the control group. Our results reveal that students in private voucher schools with tuition score slightly higher than students in public schools. The difference in standardized test scores is approximately 8 points, a test score gain of almost 0.15 standard deviations.

This paper identifies supporters and opponents of charter schools at all levels of government and describes their motivations and behaviors.  The author explains that state and local support for charter schools is most often determined by educational needs and material incentives.  Different political contexts produce different charter school policies.  For example, charter school legislation in Michigan was designed to increase competition among public schools.  Legislation in Georgia served to deregulate public education after a period of increased state centralization.  The paper concludes that there is no cohesive state or local charter political pattern, given the variations in charter schools and their contexts.  It remains unclear whether national charter school advocates have enough influence to expand the number of charter schools significantly.  Local policymakers in areas with few educational pressures, such as some suburban communities, may resist change.  Charter schools could end up as a marginal reform that impacts small numbers of students in urban centers, or continue their impressive growth, but it is state and local politics that will decide.

In the national effort to improve educational achievement, urban districts offer the greatest challenge as they often serve the most disadvantaged students. Many urban leaders, including mayors and school district superintendents, have initiated charter schools, which are publicly supported, autonomously operated schools of choice, as a mechanism of improving learning for these disadvantaged students. In this analysis, we examine the effect charter schools are having on student achievement generally, and on different demographic groups, in two major urban districts in California . The results show that achievement scores in charters are keeping pace, but not exceeding those in traditional public schools. The findings also show that the charter effect does not vary systematically with the race/ethnicity or English proficiency status of students.

This paper examines who is likely to gain and who is likely to lose under a universal voucher program.  Following Epple and Romano (1998, 2003), and Nechyba (2000, 2003a), we focus on the idea that gains and losses under a universal voucher depend on two effects: changes in peer group composition and changes in housing values.  We show that the direction and magnitude of each of these effects hinges critically on market structure, i.e., the amount of school choice that already exists in the public sector.  In markets with little or no Tiebout choice, potential changes in peer group composition create an incentive for high-socioeconomic (SES) households to vote for the voucher and for low-SES households to vote against the voucher.  In contrast, in markets with significant Tiebout choice, potential changes in housing values create an incentive for high-SES households to vote against the voucher and for low-SES households to vote for the voucher.  Using data on vote outcomes from California's 2000 voucher initiative, we find evidence consistent with those predictions.

Much of the recent literature on improving education in the United States seeks to promote entrepreneurship as the solution to raising educational quality and equity. But, the historical record documenting substantial and sustained departure from conventional educational practices is scant despite numerous attempts at entrepreneurial innovation. This paper contends that the challenge of entrepreneurially induced change is not due to a deficit of ideas or lack of volition on the part of those who seek change. Rather it is due to intrinsic features of the educational system which defy modification. These include not only such matters as a stubborn school culture, but also the very role of schools as organizations that must serve other organizations and depend upon them for resources. The paper evaluates the record of new forms of organization such as charter schools and educational management organizations as well as other well-intentioned strategies for transforming American education. It concludes that successful educational entrepreneurship must overcome a deeply-rooted institutional conservatism that is largely explained by modern institutional theory. Finally, we should bear in mind that resistance to change can be a valuable safeguard against bad policy initiatives.

Prepared for Conference on Educational Entrepreneurship at American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, November 14, 2005 and to be published in Frederick Hess, ed., Educational Entrepreneurship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2006).

Public charter schools are one of the fastest growing educational reforms in the U.S., currently serving more than one million students.  Though the movement for greater school choice is widespread, its implementation is uneven.  State laws differ greatly in the degree of latitude granted charter schools-and-holding constant state support-states and localities vary widely in the availability of and enrollment in charter schools.  In this paper, we use a panel of demographic, financial, and school performance data to examine the support for charters at the state and local levels.  Results suggest that growing population heterogeneity and income inequality-in addition to persistent low student outcomes-are associated with greater support for charter schools. Teachers unions have been particularly effective in slowing or preventing liberal state charter legislation; however, conditional on law passage and strength, local participation in charter schools rises with share of unionized teachers.

This paper examines the academic achievement effects of the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program (CSTP), within the context of existing research on education vouchers. Extant evidence on the demand for private schooling shows religion, race, and family education levels are the most important factors. Extant evidence on school supply shows reasonable supply elasticity from the religious sector and positive (but small) competitive pressures. However, voucher programs show very modest gains in achievement for recipients; and studies highlight the many potential biases when identifying the treatment impacts of vouchers. Turning to the Cleveland program, we find a number of practical similarities between the CSTP and other voucher programs in terms of demand and supply. Overall, we find no academic advantages for voucher users; in fact, users appear to perform slightly worse in math. These results do not vary according to: adjustments for prior ability; intention-to-treat versus treatment effects; and dosage differences. Contrary to claims for other voucher programs, the CSTP is not differentially effective for African American students.

<publication forthcoming in the winter issue of American Education Research Journal>
Common wisdom holds that private schools achieve better academic results than public schools.  Assumptions of the superiority of private-style organizational models are reflected in voucher and charter programs, and in the choice provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act.  However, most studies that compare achievement between private and public school students either fail to account for differences in student background characteristics or are based on assessments of students who have since graduated from high school.  This analysis compares student achievement in traditional public, private, and charter schools on the 2003 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) mathematics exam.  Hierarchical linear modeling is used to control for demographic characteristics and school location.  Findings reveal that demographic differences between students in public and private schools account for the relatively high raw scores of private schools on the NAEP.  Indeed, after controlling for these differences, public school students generally score better than their private school peers.   Three other findings warrant mention.  First, Lutheran schools are the highest performing private schools.  Second, Conservative Christian schools, the fastest growing private school sector, are the lowest performing private schools.  Third, fourth graders in charter schools scored below public school students, but eighth graders in charter schools scored above public school students.  This suggests that assessments of charter schools must pay careful attention to the sample population that is being examined.

Few topics in education inspire as much debate as charter schools, which first appeared on the educational landscape in 1992 and now include some 3,500 schools operating in 40 states. Fueling this debate are recent studies of charter school student achievement (Buddin and Zimmer, 2005; AFT, 2004; Booker et al., 2004; Sass, 2005; Hoxby, 2004; Bifulco and Ladd, 2005a; Hanushek et al., 2002). While these studies have been informative, they generally have not shed light on a broader set of questions, including the effect charter schools have on the distribution of students by race/ethnicity and ability. Charter school critics argue that charter success might be illusory if charter schools are simply recruiting the best students from traditional public schools and that charter schools may further stratify an already racially stratified system. One way to address these concerns is to analyze the effect of the redistribution of students to charter schools on the dynamics of peers within traditional public schools. In this study, we examine charter and traditional public schools in California and Texas . In both states, we have student-level data over time with unique identifiers, which allow us to track students as they move between traditional public schools and charter schools. We find that black students in both states are more likely to move to charter schools and tend to move to charter schools with a higher percentage of black students, and those schools are more racially concentrated than the public schools they leave. We also find that students who move to charter schools are on average lower performing than other students at the public schools they leave and that this performance gap is largest for black students.

Critics of school choice argue that cream-skimming will worsen outcomes for those left behind in public schools, a dynamic that relies on a substantial degree of within-school heterogeneity.  Since "high quality" families may have already sorted themselves, or may represent a small fraction of the total, this paper will examine whether existing within school heterogeneity leaves any scope for cream-skimming to operate. The first empirical section shows that the assumptions made by simulation studies over estimate within school heterogeneity by at least 20% to 40%, thus initiating the cream-skimming effect. The second empirical section asks, “given the current level of within-school heterogeneity, how strong would peer effects have to be to significantly worsen outcomes for those left behind?". In order for cream skimming to lower math test scores by a decile, the peer effect would have to be larger than the effect of converting both parents from college graduates to high-school dropouts. In order for cream skimming to substantially worsen dropout rates or college attendance rates, the peer effect would have to be two to three times larger than the strongest estimated predictor of these outcomes. The required peer effects would be smaller, but still unreasonably large, if family types started from a uniform distribution. These results indicate that current levels of within school heterogeneity are so low that peer effects would have to be unrealistically strong to give cream skimming any bite.

The very small literature explaining (1) how citizens have voted in two California voucher referenda, (2) how legislators have voted on voucher bills in the State of Florida and the US Congress, and (3) the variation across states in charter school provisions is summarized. New empirical evidence documenting the cross-state variation in the success of voucher referenda and voucher bills is examined. Voucher bill characteristics and state characteristics play important roles. Voucher bills have been passed only in the more conservative Republican states, and almost all of the successful voucher programs have been targeted at large, struggling school districts.

Lifelong learning has prominently risen to the top of policy agendas in many countries.  Interest has been fueled, in part, by industry, which considers lifelong learning an appropriate skill formation strategy for economic growth.  Policymakers have been pressured to implement and finance lifelong learning programs.  However, there has been difficulty in estimating the approximate cost of lifelong learning, as well as determining a viable funding scheme that distributes costs across various stakeholders.  This paper concentrates on the financing issue.  First, the main characteristics and models of lifelong learning are discussed.  In a second section, the main financing systems that have been suggested for a lifelong learning system are presented and analyzed.  Thirdly,  more recently emerge