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…

Education refers to school choice as the opportunity for students and their families to create high-quality, personalized paths for learning that best meet the students' needs. For Indian students, school choice can be a means of accessing instructional programs that reflect and preserve their languages, cultures, and histories. For many years,…

Students and families in Chicago are increasingly taking up school choice options offered by the school district. Prospective high school students and their families have 160 high schools to choose from. These options include a broad variety of schools in governance, size, academic approach, and programs offered. To streamline the school…

Existing research highlights that families face geographic, social, and psychological constraints that may limit the extent to which competition can take hold in school choice programs. In this paper, we address the implications of such findings by creating a network of student flows from 11 cohorts of eighth-grade students in the Chicago Public…

Drawing on interviews with 88 middle school counselors tasked with implementing New York City's high school choice policy, we show that counselors largely question the policy's legitimacy and the equity of the high school assignments it produces. By highlighting issues of transparency and procedural fairness that threaten counselors' acceptance of…

In this study, the author makes the connection between school and district provided information and families' use of this information. Prior studies have found that over half of families eligible for school choice have information to make their decision. However, little is known about if and how families actually use formally provided information.…

Giving parents and students the ability to choose their school is promoted by supporters as the key to improving American education overall. On the surface, the idea has great appeal. Who, after all, opposes having choices? Indeed, both Democratic and Republican policymakers, including President Trump, have embraced school choice as a reform…

The first round of this year's high-school-match notifications in New York City's massive, district-wide school choice process went out to students this month, sparking celebration, consternation, and a renewal of concerns about unequal access to the city's best schools. The Big Apple's school-matching system is certainly on a New York scale, with…

Notwithstanding dramatically low levels of professed religiosity in Western Europe, the religious school sector continues to thrive. One explanation for this paradox is that nowadays parents choose religious schools primarily for their higher academic reputation. Empirical evidence for this presumed denominational advantage is mixed. We examine…

Part of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) research series titled "Teachers' Time: Collaborating for Learning, Teaching, and Leading," this case study looks at the Santa Monica Alternative School House (SMASH), a K-8 public school in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD). It is a school of…

There has been a long-standing concern among education researchers and policy makers that public school choice may lead to increased racial isolation. Improving on aggregate comparisons, I examine the sorting of students into charter schools by tracking individual students from their charter school of enrollment back to the school they were…

In the past several decades, Boston has been a proving ground for new strategies such as mayoral control, charter schools, and expanded access to early childhood education. Located in a state known for rigorous standards and accountability, Boston Public Schools (BPS) has consistently ranked among the top-performing large public school districts…

This study examined the effect of public school choice on adult crime and school-based outcomes. Prior to the 2002-03 school year, the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district switched from forced desegregation to a district-wide open enrollment lottery. This study focuses on more than 2,000 male students in grades 6-11 who participated in the subset…

The School Choice Demonstration Project has published a series of reports written in the fifth and final year of its evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). This review is of Report #32, which compares the test performance of MPCP students to that of a sample of students from the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). The comparisons…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a statewide initiative offering publicly-funded vouchers to enroll in local private schools to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012.…