Over the past two decades, researchers have spent countless hours studying the impacts of public charter schools--independently-run, tuition-free schools of choice that serve some 3.7 million U.S. students today. Just prior to the pandemic, studies from Ohio and nationally indicated that charters on average delivered superior academic outcomes…

For decades, charter schools have been promoted as a panacea for increasing competition in the educational marketplace. Supporters argue that increased choice forces neighboring schools to innovate, while opponents contend that charters "skim" students and funds away from traditional public schools (TPS). We test the two differing views…

Even with the increase in virtual learning, there remains a stigma that virtual schools are not successfully supporting students based on traditionally lower graduate rates and state assessment data. The problem is statewide educational decision-makers lacked an understanding of the prior academic performance, specifically credit attainment, among…

The view that empirical strategies in economics should be transparent and credible now goes almost without saying. The local average treatment effects (LATE) framework for causal inference helped make this so. The LATE theorem tells us for whom particular instrumental variables (IV) and regression discontinuity estimates are valid. This lecture…

Americans with more education vote at higher rates. Some studies have found evidence of a causal relationship, while others have not. The available data also tell us little about why and how education increases voting. The authors looked the educational trajectories and adult voting records of students who attend charter schools in Boston. The…

There is a lack of research on African American male adolescents who have progressed socially and academically in charter school systems under the administrative and classroom leadership of African American men. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to gain a deeper understanding of how adolescent African American male students in one…

The performance of public education in Michigan has been significantly below average across the country for decades (US News, 2019). Lawmakers in Michigan sought to remedy this in the 1990's with the introduction of charter schools into the educational landscape. Throughout the years, there has been significant debate around whether charter…

Schools utilize a range of consequences to maintain order and safety. Some employ zero-tolerance policies accompanied by exclusionary tactics like suspension (Martinez, 2009; Muschert et al., 2014). Suspensions are criticized for their disproportionate assignment to students who are Black, male, assigned an IEP, and receiving lunch assistance…

Cyber charter schools may increase access to a range of educational offerings, but they substantially underperform traditional public schools on measured academic performance, as demonstrated in a range of studies with distinct samples and methods. Artificial testing conditions offer a possible explanation. In contrast to face-to-face students,…

We estimate the longitudinal effects of charter schools authorized by different authorizing bodies on student achievement by using student-level data from Indiana. The results of our analysis point to substantial variation, especially between the state's two largest authorizers: Ball State University and the Indianapolis Mayor's Office. Some of…

Most studies of No-Excuses charter schools are distributive in nature. They answer a question of distributive justice: do these schools adequately close the academic achievement gap that exists in America between white and Black or Hispanic students? When discussion of No-Excuses schools is limited to their distributive worth, critics of…

In this critical autoethnography, I reflect on my experience teaching in a KIPP charter school in an urban, racially diverse city in the southwestern U.S. Over the past few decades KIPP has gained both prestige and resentment as a major character in the charter school movement. Their focus on supporting students from underrepresented racial…

The charter school movement encompasses many school models. In Massachusetts in the 2010's, the site of our study, urban charter schools primarily used "No Excuses" practices, whereas nonurban charters had greater model variety. Using randomized admissions lotteries, we estimate the impact of charter schools by locality on college…

Advocates of charter schools hold that the marketization of education compels all schools to be innovative in raising student achievement outcomes. Opponents of charter schools dispute whether the impact of charter schools on student achievement is statistically sufficient to justify taking resources from traditional public schools. Another…

Student achievement has become critical in measuring school achievement. The problem was underachievement in a K-12 public charter school in northwest Ohio. The purpose of this study was to determine whether standards-based assessments (SBAs) improved standardized test achievement in a K-12 public charter school in northwest Ohio. The theories of…