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…

With the incidence of autism on the rise, it is imperative to identify factors that contribute to education. Despite the accessibility and low cost of public institutions, many parents choose to educate their autistic children in private and charter school settings. This study examined the difference in beliefs among public, private, and charter…

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) is a powerful predictor of reading fluency, and many digitized dyslexia screeners include RAN as an essential component. However, the validity of digitized RAN has not been established. Using a sample of 174 second-graders, this study tested (1) the comparability between paper and digitized versions of RAN and (2)…

This brief describes how several commonly used per-pupil funding measures derived from federal data include passthrough funding in the numerator but exclude students attached to this funding from the denominator, artificially inflating per-pupil ratios. Three forms of passthrough funding for students not educated by the school district where they…

We describe the levels, trends, and patterns of school closure and restructuring in the United States from 1991 to 2019 across all sectors using a near census of K-12 schools. Focusing on the years with the best available data, 2014-18, we find that the annual closure rate of charter, private, and traditional public schools (TPSs) were 5.1, 2.9,…

The 2023-2024 Indiana Assessments Policy Manual communicates established guidelines regarding appropriate test administration in Indiana for key stakeholders including educators and Test Coordinators. This document contains policy guidance and appendices that delineate specific aspects of test implementation, including test security protocol,…

This study provides the first analysis of closure and restructuring trends for essentially all schools nationwide over the past 30 years. We analyze the annual closure and restructuring rates of all schools across the United States, how these rates changed over time, and what factors predict closure and restructuring. [For the Technical Report,…

This cross-comparative study examines the personal transitions of the leadership from academies in England with the leadership of independent and charter schools in the United States. Findings from this qualitative study revealed the many similarities in how principals from both the U.S. and England processed personal transitions and how those…

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…

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…

This article theorizes how crises and markets shape the responses of consumers and producer organizations. We advance four propositions: 1) if a crisis requires major revisions in operational rules, less-exit sensitive (i.e., monopoly-like) organizations shall revise to aggregate preferences of organized producers; and more-exit sensitive…

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…

We study the total, market-level effects of charter schools, and their mechanisms, on a national level and across multiple outcomes. Using a generalized difference-in-differences method, we find that increasing the charter market share by 10 percentage points increases math and ELA elementary/middle test scores of the entire geographic district in…

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…

A quality learning space provides students with an optimal environment for social relations, collaborative work and participation, thus fostering innovation and incorporating active methodologies. The aim of this study is to analyze whether the design of existing learning environments is suitable for incorporating innovation in classrooms. The…