The Washington Scholarship Fund Pilot Program (WSF) was established as a privately funded voucher program for low-income families in the District of Columbia. The WSF awarded its scholarships by lottery, making it possible to evaluate it as though it were a randomized experiment. The responses of qualified families with children in public schools…

America's public education is often cited as an example of America's commitment to equality, yet it is supported primarily at the local government level, the level least able to further the redistribution of wealth. Data in the Coleman Report, misrepresented in the report itself as indicating that schools have little effect on the development of…

This paper examines the impact of vouchers on student test scores in Dayton, Ohio, New York, New York, and Washington, DC, highlighting New York City parental assessment of private and public schools to investigate why vouchers seem to have differential effects depending on the students' ethnic background. Researchers collected baseline test…

Uses Milwaukee's school choice/voucher initiative to illustrate how politically motivated evaluation and compromise legislation can dilute potentially beneficial educational innovations. The initiative's success despite counterproductive legislative tampering and biased evaluation is addressed, along with a discussion of the evaluation's…

This study of policy making is set in Chicago's school system during the late 1960's. The three case studies presented here identify a school board's response to core issues faced by school policy makers in the largest of the central cities in the United States. After applying both bargaining and unitary models to the Chicago school board's policy…

This report presents third-year findings from an evaluation of the School Choice Scholarships Foundation Program. In 1997, this program provided scholarships via a lottery to low-income, New York City children in grades 1 through 4 that allowed them to transfer to private schools. The evaluation compared scholarship to control students, using test…

This paper examines the relationship of urban reform and school reform to class conflict and assesses the adequacy of a class conflict model for explaining school reform in Atlanta in 1897. A model which explains urban reform (including school reform in urban areas) in class conflict categories is based on an ideology protective of middle-class…

In fall 1997, the Washington Scholarship Fund expanded its privately funded school voucher program in Washington, D.C., and in 1998, over 1,000 students were offered scholarships by lottery. This evaluation examined the impact of the first 2 years of the program on students who completed baseline testing and were in grades 1-7 in spring 1998. It…

Afterschool programs, the heart of the supplemental service provision of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), take on increasing significance in the implementation of the historic federal law. As more and more schools fail to make their NCLB-mandated Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals, the demand for supplemental education services, such as tutoring,…