Charter schools are public schools, free and open to all. Like traditional public schools, charter schools are prohibited from charging tuition, must not discriminate in admissions or be religious in their operation or affiliation, and are overseen by a public entity. There is a growing body of research highlighting the superior performance…

This paper develops and estimates an empirical framework that evaluates the impact of charter school choice on education quality in the aggregate. We estimate the model using student-level data from North Carolina. We find that North Carolina's lifting of its statewide charter school cap raised the average public school's value-added by around…

Charter schools are privately operated public schools funded by the government with oversight from school districts, state education departments, or other government authorizers. This gives charter schools autonomy from many government rules and regulations, allows them to specialize and innovate in particular types of education, and gives parents…

Charter schools began as an experiment to improve public education in the United States of America (Weil, 2000). The theory was that these schools would operate outside of traditional public schools and would be free of the oversight and regulatory requirements constraining the current educational systems, in exchange for increased accountability…

This dissertation consists of two chapters on topics in Industrial Organization. In Chapter 1, I discuss a central question of the policy debate on public education: how to get more for less. Charter schools have been a tool in this arena to pressure traditional public schools to improve or lose students to them. Moreover, charter schools…

In response to concerns regarding school quality, state policy-makers reformed their charter school authorization processes to impose greater regulatory barriers to chartering. These barriers to market entry could impose substantial burdens for Black and Latino would-be charter operators, as well as independent operators, who may lack access to…

This paper explores how parents' COVID-19 safety concerns relate to school governance models (SGMs), instructional modes (i.e. in-person, hybrid, online), and perceptions of school quality during the pandemic. Leveraging two waves of household survey data across 47 states and the District of Columbia, we first conduct a series of multinomial…

As students and communities emerge from the ravages of a global pandemic, authorizing faces a key challenge: embracing its fundamental role of providing high-quality educational opportunities, while evolving to meet new demands and expectations, especially those created by the pandemic. How it navigates this tension will impact millions of…

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…

Public education, at least as it has been known for the past several generations in the US, is under threat. Conservative state legislatures from Arizona to Florida have enacted sweeping voucher legislation, channeling taxpayer dollars to private schools. At the same time, a vicious culture war has engulfed the public education system in…

Drawing upon principles of participatory action research, this study collected input from secondary school stakeholders (teachers, students, caregivers, alumni, staff, and administrators) to create a local definition of quality teaching for students at an urban charter school in the northeastern United States. Analysis of stakeholder input…

School choice advocates argue that choice policies increase access to desirable schools by breaking the link between residence and school placement. However, a growing body of research suggests that the distance from home to school actually influences school choice decisions. In this study, we examine the relationship between residential…

These are the results of the 16th annual "Education Next" survey, conducted in May 2022 with a nationally representative sample of 1,784 American adults. While last year's survey revealed sharp changes in support for a variety of education reforms (EJ1348128), public opinion on most issues has since rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.…

This study used a quantitative survey in the form of an online self-administered questionnaire to explore and describe the views of school leaders on chronic absenteeism in New Jersey public schools. The first of its kind, this statewide survey was designed for the purpose of understanding how school leaders perceive the importance of equity in…

Departing from mainstream accounts of the post-Katrina New Orleans state takeover and the more recent "unification" of schools under local governance, this case study utilizes the plantation (Hartman, 1997; Woods, 1998, McKittrick, 2011) as a theoretical device and the silenced archive (Trouillot, 2015) as a method of inquiry to better…