The education landscape is rapidly evolving as state policymakers enact and significantly expand private education choice initiatives. These initiatives, currently operating in 29 states and counting, provide public dollars directly to families to support approved educational purchases, including, but not always limited to, private school tuition.…

School choice is often utilized in school districts for access and opportunity. Researchers have found that school choice does not inherently provide access to students. The goal of this mixed methods study was to determine if implementing a new platform for families to use in applying to magnet programs in an urban district would mitigate…

Finland has traditionally had a universal early childhood education and care (ECEC) system like the other Nordic countries, but in the last 15 years this system has undergone considerable marketisation and privatisation suggested to enable parental choice of ECEC. Much of the existing research on parental ECEC decisions has been conducted in…

Advocates often predict that school choice policies will expand access to high-quality schools, particularly for marginalized communities. To interrogate this assumption, we employed a sequential mixed-methods analysis examining the state of charter reform in the District of Columbia. We observed that stakeholders consistently defined equity as…

Public PreK programs are an increasingly popular policy tool to equalize early learning opportunities. Programs can be universally available or targeted to support children's readiness. At the intersection of early childhood and K-12 education, their hybrid status can be difficult for families to negotiate. Based on interviews completed in 2018,…

Parents desire several features when choosing a school, but they often compromise on some preferences in favor of others. We develop a novel measure of aggregate preference compromise by examining the discrepancy between ideal preferences and those specified under real-world constraints. Relying on data from a representative sample in Kansas City,…

School choice can segregate schools by academic ability, income or ethnicity, but is this because of households' choices, or constraints in access to good schools? We examine whether segregation is by choice, finding that households' school choices are segregating in most areas. Through counterfactual simulation, we find that implementing a policy…

Socioeconomic differences among low-income and racially minoritized students may be consequential for understanding the dynamics of school choice--especially in high-poverty and racially segregated urban contexts that are often targeted by school choice policies. Yet school choice research largely focuses on differences between groups and relies…

This document records testimony from a hearing held to examine the benefits of charter schools for students and families. Member statements were presented by: (1) Honorable Aaron Bean, Chairman, Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education; and (2) Honorable Suzanne Bonamici, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Early Childhood,…

In a time of proliferated school choice, how do families choose a K-12 setting for their child(ren) in the state of Missouri? For many families the decision may be easy, but for others, they had to experience one educational setting before choosing another to know what they value and prioritize in their child(ren)'s education. This qualitative…

Purpose: We describe charter school leaders' beliefs and practices as they relate to student transportation in three choice-rich cities. Research Methods/Approach: Data come from a multiple comparative case study of district and charter school leaders' perceptions and implementation of transportation policies in three choice-rich cities with…

School choice is spreading across the U.S. at the same time that scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) are stagnant. We examine the association between education freedom and 8th grade student NAEP score levels and gains in states in 2019. We construct the 2019 Education Freedom Index as a composite measure of the…

We define educational access as the component of a neighborhood's value that is determined by the set of schools available to its residents. This paper studies the extent to which educational access is determined by sorting based on heterogeneous preferences over school attributes, or local institutions that constrain residential location and…

District leaders in school choice contexts tend to overlook the many hidden costs of selecting schools in terms of mobility, time, liquidity, and labor. Meanwhile, a body of literature on school choice policies and cultural, social, and political capital shows that middle-class parents use the resources they possess to get the school access they…

Researchers have considered how school choice policies affect student achievement, but less inquiry explores how the organization of schools may change in the presence of choice. This descriptive and exploratory paper analyzes a state representative sample of school mission statements at two time points: before the enactment of choice policies in…