This report analyzes changing racial composition in a comparable subset of schools to enable policy-relevant comparisons between charter and magnet schools. It reports the levels of segregation and diversity in these two systems, which is important because of strong evidence that diverse schools produce educational gains and substantial lifelong…

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…

Public K-12 education is a one-size-fits-all system that cannot meet the diverse needs of students. When parents choose a school, they look at several criteria unique to their situation and make trade-offs between their preferences based on their needs. The purpose of this study was to explore the factors influencing parents to enroll their…

South Carolina's Charter School Act of 1996 was passed for the primary reason of improving education for the state. A part of this improvement would come by way of charter schools providing innovative ways of teaching and learning. In 2017 WCSD was established, in hopes of answering the call of the 1996 Charter School Act by providing innovative…

The traditional K-12 schooling model is a "bundled" product that provides parents with an all-in-one package of services: instruction, transportation, lunch, extracurriculars, and athletics, all delivered by one provider in one location: the school. Historically, parental choice has been limited to selecting from among different…

Over the past two decades, researchers have spent countless hours studying the impacts of public charter schools--independently-run, tuition-free schools of choice that serve some 3.7 million U.S. students today. Just prior to the pandemic, studies from Ohio and nationally indicated that charters on average delivered superior academic outcomes…

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…

In general, controlled school choice policies that aim to integrate schools along the lines of race or ethnicity and socioeconomic status are most often successful in achieving that goal. Unregulated systems of school choice, however, tend to exacerbate school segregation (Cobb & Glass, 2009). This research brief summarizes research about…

School-choice programs may increase schools' incentives for marketing rather than improving their educational offering. This article systematically reviews the literature on the marketing activities of primary and secondary schools worldwide. The 81 articles reviewed show that schools' marketing has yet to be tackled by marketing academics or…

In this article, the authors study family preferences in one of the most competitive school markets ever developed in the United States: New Orleans, where virtually all district students attend a charter school. The vast majority provide transportation from anywhere in the city, and none can charge tuition. Admission is based on parental…

Due to the recent wave of momentum behind universal vouchers and education savings accounts, charter schools have become an afterthought for some conservative school choice advocates. There is a progressive and a conservative vision for charter schooling. The progressive approach to charter school authorization fails to achieve its stated goals…

Little research addresses the schooling experiences of non-binary students; no prior work explores their experiences in cyber schools. Using unique data from a US multi-state cyber charter school, we compare the factors parents of non-binary students and parents of other students stated as reasons for leaving their prior schools to attend a cyber…

A January 2024 survey found that 72 percent of parents had considered a new school for their children in the past year. And in 2025, Texas and Tennessee are poised to become the next states to enact education savings account (ESA) programs, potentially giving millions more students the education options that their parents want for them. As a…

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…

The performance of public education in Michigan has been significantly below average across the country for decades (US News, 2019). Lawmakers in Michigan sought to remedy this in the 1990's with the introduction of charter schools into the educational landscape. Throughout the years, there has been significant debate around whether charter…