For more than twenty-five years, public charter schools have served Ohio families and communities by providing quality educational options beyond the local school district. But it's no secret that we've also had a long-standing debate over whether increasing school choice impacts students who remain in traditional districts. In important--and…

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…

Influencing major education policies in the US such as school vouchers and charter schools, market theory assumes that organizational autonomy, parental choice, and competition between schools improve the quality of education. However, whether those policies can influence the instructional core of schools is not well understood. Comparing private…

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…

Every year, thousands of students leave traditional, Houston-area public schools for private schools, homeschools, or non-district charter schools. Some of these students eventually return to the public school setting. To investigate this phenomenon of "returners," the researchers followed two types of leavers in a cohort of Houston-area…

We examine the literature linking private and charter schooling to perceptions of student safety in United States schools. The results are generally positive for student, parent, and principal reports of school safety for the nine studies on safety in public charter schools and the eleven studies on safety in private schools. Eight of the nine…

May 17, 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were "inherently unequal." At the time, North Carolina was one of 17 states that enforced de jure segregation, that is, segregation by law. The state of North Carolina and the school districts within…

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court held in "Carson v. Makin" that Maine violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by excluding religious schools from a private-school-choice program--colloquially known as "town tuitioning"--for students in school districts without public high schools. Writing for the majority,…

Every child deserves the right to attend a school that can best meet his or her individual learning needs. Where the child lives should not be a limiting factor, and no one school is the best fit for every child who just happens to live nearby. Education-choice policies have the potential to expand education options for students in rural areas.…

"Believing in Public Education: A Demographic and State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends" is a new data analysis that examines enrollment trends during the last four school years (2019-2023). Over the last four school years (2019-20 to 2022-23), charter schools have gained more than…

Access to private schools and public charter schools might improve parent and student satisfaction through competitive pressures and improved matches between educators and students. Using ordered probit regression analysis and a nationally representative sample of 13,436 students in the United States in 2016, I compare satisfaction levels of…

We examine the literature linking private and charter schooling to perceptions of student safety in United States schools. The results are generally null to positive for student, parent, and principal reports of school safety for the eight studies on safety in public charter schools and the eleven studies on safety in private schools. None of the…

Massive online user review platforms, with their star ratings and text reviews, are reshaping the information available for consumer and public service decisions. We study the leading K-12 schooling platform, GreatSchools, applying machine learning (Natural Language Processing, NLP) to 600,000 reviews that encompass the vast majority of the…

This document records testimony from a hearing before the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, Secondary Education of the Committee on Education and the Workforce that was held to examine school choice. Opening statements were provided by: (1) Honorable Aaron Bean, Chairman, Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary…

In order to realize all the benefits of parental-choice programs, advocates, policymakers, and participating schools have to pay more attention to implementation challenges, both when designing parental-choice policies and after new programs are enacted. This report discusses both categories of implementation challenges. The first…