The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) offers publicly funded vouchers to moderate- and low-income students in low-performing public schools to enroll in participating private schools. Established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP expanded statewide in 2012. Drawing upon the random lotteries that placed students in LSP schools,…

In the first study, using a randomized experiment to measure the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment, Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, examine the college-going behavior through 2011 of students who participated in a voucher experiment as elementary school students in the late 1990s.…

In 2002, New York City embarked on an ambitious and wide-ranging series of education reforms. At the heart of its high school reforms were three interrelated changes: the institution of a district wide high school choice process for all rising ninth-graders, the closure of 31 large, failing high schools with an average graduation rate of 40…

One crucial decision that middle schoolers (and their families) make is where they will attend high school. Many districts employ school choice systems designed to allow students to pick a high school that will meet their needs and interests. Yet most students prefer high schools that are close to home, and for youth in low-income neighborhoods,…

Connecticut's interdistrict magnet schools offer a model of choice-based desegregation that appears to satisfy current legal constraints. This study presents evidence that interdistrict magnet schools have provided students from Connecticut's central cities access to less racially and economically isolated educational environments and estimates…

The District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act of 2003, passed by Congress in January 2004, established the first federally funded, private school voucher program in the United States. Since that time, more than 8,400 students have applied for what is now called the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), and a rigorous evaluation of the…