Local Demand for a School Choice Policy: Evidence from the Washington Charter School Referenda

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean P. Corcoran ◽  
Christiana Stoddard
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Charter Schools ◽  
School Quality ◽  
Standardized Test ◽  
Strong Predictor ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
School Resources ◽  
School Demographics ◽  
The Impact

The expansion of charter schools—publicly funded, yet in direct competition with traditional public schools—has emerged as a favored response to poor performance in the education sector. While a large and growing literature has sought to estimate the impact of these schools on student achievement, comparatively little is known about demand for the policy itself. Using election returns from three consecutive referenda on charter schools in Washington State, we weigh the relative importance of school quality, community and school demographics, and partisanship in explaining voter support for greater school choice. We find that low school quality—as measured by standardized tests—is a consistent and modestly strong predictor of support for charters. However, variation in performance between school districts is more predictive of charter support than variation within them. At the local precinct level, school resources, union membership, student heterogeneity, and the Republican vote share are often stronger predictors of charter support than standardized test results.

scholarly journals Private Schools and Residential Choices: Accessibility, Mobility, and Welfare

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric A Hanushek ◽  
Sinan Sarpça ◽  
Kuzey Yilmaz
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Private Schools ◽  
Private School ◽  
School Quality ◽  
Location Decisions ◽  
School Vouchers ◽  
Locational Choice ◽  
Residential Location Decisions ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Private schools free households from a strict link between residential location decisions and the tax-school quality bundles they consume. In order to study the impact of private schools on educational outcomes, we develop a general equilibrium model that simultaneously incorporates locational choice built on access and locational choice built on tax-school quality attributes of jurisdictions. We conclude that private school choice enhances the welfare of all households—both those attending private schools and those attending public schools—while also working to reduce the amount of housing and school segregation in equilibrium. Investigation of alternative school policies indicates that greater choice, including using targeted school vouchers, can improve welfare and achievement. Finally, we demonstrate how the fiscal burden arising from some households paying less taxes than they consume in public services varies significantly with the structure of school choice options.

The Impact of Principal Attrition and Replacement on Indicators of School Quality

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Marcus A. Winters ◽  
Brian Kisida ◽  
Ikhee Cho
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
School Quality ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
New Principal ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Leadership Transitions ◽  
Principal Attrition ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Transitions to a new principal are common, especially within urban public schools, and potentially highly disruptive to a school's culture and operations. We use longitudinal data from New York City to investigate if the effect of principal transitions differs by whether the incoming principal was hired externally or promoted from within the school. We take advantage of variation in the timing of principal transitions within an event-study approach to estimate the causal effect of principal changes. Changing principals has an immediate negative effect on student test scores that is sustained over several years regardless of whether hired internally or externally. However, externally hired principals lead to an increase in teacher turnover and a decline in perceptions of the school's learning environment, whereas transitions to an internally promoted principal have no such effects. This pattern of results raises important questions about leadership transitions and the nature of principal effects on school quality.

scholarly journals Cracks in the Melting Pot: Immigration, School Choice, and Segregation

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth U Cascio ◽  
Ethan G Lewis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Comparison Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
School Demographics ◽  
Skilled Immigration ◽  
Households With Children

We examine whether low-skilled immigration to the United States has contributed to immigrants' residential isolation by reducing native demand for public schools. We address endogeneity in school demographics using established Mexican settlement patterns in California and use a comparison group to account for immigration's broader effects. We estimate that between 1970 and 2000, the average California school district lost more than 14 non-Hispanic households with children to other districts in its metropolitan area for every 10 additional households enrolling low-English Hispanics in its public schools. By disproportionately isolating children, the native reaction to immigration may have longer-run consequences than previously thought. (JEL H75, I21, J15, J24, J61, R23)

A Look Back: Taking stock of public school choice in Kappan

2021 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-7
Author(s):  
Teresa Preston
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Public School ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Charter Schools ◽  
Alternative Schools ◽  
Private School ◽  
Magnet Schools ◽  
Public School Choice ◽  
Look Back

In this monthly column, Kappan managing editor Teresa Preston explores how the magazine has covered the questions and controversies about school choice. Although many authors across the decades objected to the use of vouchers to pay private school tuition, those same authors lent support to the idea of choice among public schools. Advocates of public school choice have endorsed various models for providing choices, from alternative schools, to magnet schools, to charter schools.

The Squandered Brilliance of Our Disposable Youth

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-109
Author(s):  
Jim Freeman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Public School ◽  
Charter Schools ◽  
The United States ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Public School Systems ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
The Impact

This chapter addresses the education inequities in the United States, and distinguishes between “public schools” and “charter schools.” Though the chapter recognizes that this is itself controversial, and charter schools have taken to referring themselves as public schools, for the sake of clarity it is important to be able to distinguish between the two. While the charter schools' efforts have been primarily directed at Black and Brown communities thus far, the chapter unveils the school privatizers' ultimate targets, which are set much more broadly than that. It examines the impact of school privatization on public school systems and the harms caused by school privatization in communities of color. The chapter then takes a look at Corporate America and Wall Street, and analyses how they can always profit from new markets and expandable markets. Ultimately, it reveals how the ultra-wealthy maintain education inequities to ensure that there will be millions of poorly educated, low-skill individuals who are essentially forced to accept the low wages to survive.

scholarly journals Teaching to the Student: Charter School Effectiveness in Spite of Perverse Incentives

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah R. Cohodes
Keyword(s):  
Charter Schools ◽  
Charter School ◽  
School Effectiveness ◽  
Standardized Test ◽  
School Attendance ◽  
Item Type ◽  
Test Preparation ◽  
Assessment System ◽  
Type I ◽  
The Impact

Recent work has shown that Boston charter schools raise standardized test scores more than their traditional school counterparts. Critics of charter schools argue that charter schools create those achievement gains by focusing exclusively on test preparation, at the expense of deeper learning. In this paper, I test that critique by estimating the impact of charter school attendance on subscales of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System and examining them for evidence of score inflation. If charter schools are teaching to the test to a greater extent than their counterparts, one would expect to see higher scores on commonly tested standards, higher-stakes subjects, and frequently tested topics. Despite incentives to reallocate effort away from less frequently tested content to highly tested content, and to coach to item type, I find no evidence of this type of test preparation. Boston charter middle schools perform consistently across all standardized test subscales.

scholarly journals Teacher Turnover, Teacher Quality, and Student Achievement in DCPS

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Adnot ◽  
Thomas Dee ◽  
Veronica Katz ◽  
James Wyckoff
Keyword(s):  
Student Achievement ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Student Performance ◽  
Teacher Turnover ◽  
School Quality ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Policy Regime ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Quasi Experimental

In practice, teacher turnover appears to have negative effects on school quality as measured by student performance. However, some simulations suggest that turnover can instead have large positive effects under a policy regime in which low-performing teachers can be accurately identified and replaced with more effective teachers. This study examines this question by evaluating the effects of teacher turnover on student achievement under IMPACT, the unique performance-assessment and incentive system in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). Employing a quasi-experimental design based on data from the first years of IMPACT, we find that, on average, DCPS replaced teachers who left with teachers who increased student achievement by 0.08 standard deviation ( SD) in math. When we isolate the effects of lower-performing teachers who were induced to leave DCPS for poor performance, we find that student achievement improves by larger and statistically significant amounts (i.e., 0.14 SD in reading and 0.21 SD in math). In contrast, the effect of exits by teachers not sanctioned under IMPACT is typically negative but not statistically significant.

Creaming Versus Cropping: Charter School Enrollment Practices in Response to Market Incentives

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Lacireno-Paquet ◽  
Thomas T. Holyoke ◽  
Michele Moser ◽  
Jeffrey R. Henig
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Charter Schools ◽  
School Enrollment ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Public School Systems ◽  
Special Education Needs ◽  
Cream Skimming ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Student Composition

Proponents of school choice present market-based competition as a means of leveling disparities between race, class and performance in public school systems. Opponents see school choice as threatening to exacerbate this problem because competition for students will pressure individual schools into targeting students with the highest performance and the least encumbered with personal and social disadvantages. We suggest that some charter schools, by background and affiliation, are likely to be more market-oriented in their behavior than others, and test the proposition that market-oriented charter schools engage in cream-skimming while others disproportionately serve highly disadvantaged students. Comparing student composition in market-oriented charter schools, nonmarket-oriented charter schools, and traditional public schools in Washington, DC, we find little evidence that market-oriented charters are focusing on an elite clientele, but they are less likely than the other two types of schools to serve some high need populations. Rather than skimming the cream off the top of the potential student population, market-oriented charter schools may be “cropping off” service to students whose language or special education needs make them more costly to educate.

scholarly journals The impact of school choice on student outcomes: an analysis of the Chicago Public Schools

2005 ◽  
Vol 89 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 729-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Berry Cullen ◽  
Brian A. Jacob ◽  
Steven D. Levitt
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Student Outcomes ◽  
Chicago Public Schools ◽  
The Impact

A NOTE ON THE IMPACT OF VOUCHER PROGRAMS WHEN THERE ARE NONLINEAR PEER GROUP EFFECTS

2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 685-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
HUNG-JU CHEN
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Private Schools ◽  
School Quality ◽  
Peer Interactions ◽  
Peer Group ◽  
Voucher Programs ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Group Effects ◽  
Peer Group Effects

This study constructs a dynamic model of the coexistence of public and private schools to study the impact of voucher programs when there are nonlinear peer group effects. The government provides public schools as well as tuition vouchers for households attending private schools. School quality depends on expenditure per student and peer quality within the school. When peer quality is nonlinear, more agents will choose public schools if peer quality is more substitutable, whereas more agents will attend private schools if peer quality is more complementary. We find that vouchers will typically create a “cream skimming” effect and the impact of voucher programs on economic performance is sensitive to the way in which peer interactions affect school quality.

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