Working Papers

Private K-12 education in the developing world has mushroomed over the past decade and in the process generated significant controversy over the role of for-profit school operators and public-private partnerships. In “Tiptoeing Around Private Schools in the Global Partnership for Education,” Francine Menashy summarizes the current debate and assesses the difficulty opposing groups have had in finding common ground. For more about this working paper, see the NCSPE announcement.

Scholars have paid significant attention to the academic achievement as well as special needs of students who apply to charter schools, enroll, and stay. Scholars have likewise delved into the academic gains of students who stay and leave. Yet the topic of application, enrollment, and retention by gender has gone unexplored. With “The Gender Gap in Charter School Enrollment,” Sean P. Corcoran and Jennifer L. Jennings fill this void. For more about this working paper, see the NCSPE announcement.

The literature argues that families who exercise their ability to choose private schools tend to be better off, more educated, and more informed. There is also some evidence that private schooling may be demanded disproportionately for male children in the Indian context. As more private schools become available across India, will these differences in family attributes and child demographics of those who do and those who do not access private school diminish? Using a nationally representative dataset from rural India, we find that these gaps in private school access, especially at the lower-primary level, may persist or in some cases even widen.

We discuss how a group of philanthropic foundations combined financial and cultural-political resources to elevate a new and divergent organizational form within the California charter school field. Foundations simultaneously pursued three activities that are often considered to be the realms of different types of institutional entrepreneurs. Foundations recombined cultural elements to establish a new organizational form, enforced evaluative frameworks to assess the new form, and sponsored new professionals to populate the form with desired expertise. We argue that foundations are a distinct type of institutional entrepreneur based on their simultaneous endowment of material and cultural-political resources. 

- An updated version of this paper was published in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Vol XX(X), 2013.Link to published study - 

School choice programs continue to be controversial, spurring a number of researchers into investigating and evaluating them. When possible, researchers evaluate these program using randomized designs to eliminate possible selection bias. Randomized designs are often thought of as the gold standard for research, but this approach can have limited inferences in the context of evaluating school choice programs. In this paper, we examine whether these limitations apply to previous evaluations of voucher, charter schools, magnet, and open enrollment programs. We establish the legitimacy of these concerns of inferences and then look at data from an anonymous district to examine whether students admitted to magnet middle schools via lottery have similar student characteristics (including prior achievement and achievement growth) as students admitted outside of a lottery. The point of the analysis is not so much whether these groups are different in our particular case, but that they could be and there are simple sensitivity analyses that researchers could conduct to see if there are reasons to be cautious about the breadth of inferences researcher can make. 

In the academic and policy debates over the merits of charter schools, two things are clear: first, they are here to stay, and second, their quality varies widely. Policymakers therefore need to understand how to design charter laws that promote the creation of high-performing schools. Crucial to this discussion is the charter authorizing process, which varies across the nation. In some states, authorizing power is held exclusively by local school districts, while other states allow a range of authorizers that may include not only local districts, but also nonprofit organizations, counties, higher educational institutions, or a state agency. In this paper we use individual student-level data from Ohio–which permits a wide range of organizations to authorize charter schools—to examine the relationship between type of authorizer and charter-school effectiveness as measured by students’ achievement trajectories.

- An updated version of this paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Education Finance and Policy -

This study examines the Swedish national educational voucher scheme and changes in social cohesion. We suspected that social cohesion would decline because vouchers in other countries have typically resulted in segregation, and also because Sweden’s private schools were not required to teach civics. We conduct a statistical analysis using data from the 1999 and 2009 rounds of the IEA Civic Education Study of 14-year-old students and their attitudes toward the rights of ethnic minorities and immigrants. Using regression models, we do not find evidence of a decline in civic attitudes and therefore social cohesion. We attribute the results to Sweden’s voucher design and context that minimized segregation and preserved civics curricula in all schools.

Private schools represent a significant part of the education sector and provide an opportunity for children to attend schools, at cost, that may offer benefits unavailable in the public school system. Parents might choose to send their children to private schools for a variety of reasons, including the availability of academic programs and extracurricular activities, religious reasons, dissatisfaction with the local public schools, and school characteristics such as class size and student-teacher ratios. Over the last decade, government statistics seem to show that private school enrollment has declined. Although the trend has been noted (Aud et al., 2011), the phenomenon has not been examined in detail. Since private schools represent a sizable portion of the education sector, a decline in enrollment would warrant attention. Specifically, is the decline the result of a particular data collection system associated with a specific survey, or a real trend? Does the trend hold for various socio-demographic subgroups? If so, what are potential underlying causes? This paper seeks to provide relevant background information on the topic by comparing trends across datasets and subgroups and exploring possible underlying causes of the decline in private school enrollment.

Recent reforms in education emphasize the use of charter schools as a viable strategy to improve student achievement. It is, therefore, important to understand which types of charter schools are effective. I study this question utilizing longitudinal data covering all public school students in the large urban school district of Milwaukee which has a long history of charter schools. Using student fixed effects to deal with self-selection, I find that charter schools, on average, have no significant effect on student achievement. However, I show that this average effect masks important heterogeneity in the effectiveness of charter schools across types of charter schools. Charter schools with higher autonomy from the district in terms of financial budget, academic program, and hiring decisions, are effective. I show that students in these charter schools would read at a grade level higher than similar students who attend traditional public schools in three years.

Lagos is documented as a centre of spontaneous development of private schooling targeting families from the ultra-rich, to the relatively poor. There is much debate in the literature on the potential of private education as part of a solution for achieving Education for All, in terms of equity in access to these schools, and also their quality and other aspects. It is not even concretely known in most contexts how prevalent private schools are, and this paper provides the answer to this question in the context of Lagos State, Nigeria. Having found 12,098 private schools, the paper goes on to explore the reasons for the massive growth in the sector, through the school choices, perceptions and aspirations of parents living in two slum communities in Lagos.

In this paper, we present the results of our analysis on the impacts of the increasing presence of charter schools on the racial composition of traditional public schools in the Little Rock, Arkansas metropolitan area. We find that charter schools in the region are currently less likely to be hyper-segregated than traditional public schools, but traditional public schools have racial compositions that more closely reflect the regional averages. In each of these cases, however, the differences are slight. When we use student-level data to follow students who exited Little Rock traditional public schools for charters, we find that the majority of these transfers improve the levels of racial integration at the schools from which they transferred. This finding is attributed to the fact that the majority of transfers involve minority students leaving above-average minority schools or white students leaving above-average white schools.

Given the budgetary strain that school districts have been facing in recent years and the impetus to increase the number of charter schools, concerns about the fiscal impacts of charter schools are more salient than ever. However, very little research has addressed this issue. Using the city school districts of Albany and Buffalo in New York, this brief addresses this gap in the literature by demonstrating how fiscal impacts on local school districts can be estimated and offering a way to conceptualize fiscal impacts that is useful for framing charter school policy objectives. We find that charter schools have had negative fiscal impacts on these two school districts, and argue that there are two reasons for these impacts. First, operating two systems of public schools under separate governance arrangements can create excess costs. Second, charter school financing policies can distribute resources to or away from districts. We argue that charter schools policies should seek to minimize any avoidable excess costs created by charter schools and ensure that the burden of any unavoidable excess costs is equitably distributed across traditional public schools, charter schools, and the state. We offer concrete policy recommendations that may help to achieve these objectives.