U.S. public schools provide substantially different educational opportunities to students--even within school districts, where attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) shape most children's access to schools. The (re)drawing of AZBs is therefore a highly consequential policy decision. In this paper, I study how AZB changes in the Washington, D.C.…

Charter schools' autonomy and flexibility provides them with the opportunity to find ways to close the performance gap between students with and without disabilities, but deep-seated, systemic challenges often cause individual charters to struggle to do so on their own. For cities with an established charter sector, a city-wide, collaborative…

This study examines the role of the college access intervention program College Bound as a means of building human capacity in underserved youth. The need to prepare underserved youth to remain competitive in a global economy gained momentum as a consequence of diminished national high school graduation rates and ineffective education public…

The D.C. School Choice Incentive Act created the first private kindergarten-through-grade-12 school-choice program supported by federal funds. The program was named the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP). The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to assess the (1) accountability mechanisms governing the use of…

This report describes the issues to be considered and the decisions required for developing a plan to equalize resource distribution in District of Columbia schools. It compares the specifications for equalization under the court-ordered Wright Decree with those of Title I. It considers concepts of equality, resources to be equalized, definition…

In the fall of 1953, the Supreme Court of the United States received the case of "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka" (347 U.S. 483, 1954) that raised essential questions, including whether separate but "equal" facilities in education can be provided for black students in the United States or whether the consideration of…

On January 23, 2004, President Bush signed the DC School Choice Incentive Act into law. This landmark piece of legislation included $14 million in funding for what would come to be called the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP). The OSP is the first federally funded K-12 scholarship program in the country and is designed to provide…