Working Papers

This paper readdresses the issue of relative private school effectiveness in the Netherlands. Using both PISA 2006 and 2009 data, the results show that the instrumental variable approach used in Patrinos (2011) is incomplete, highly unstable and unlikely to yield credible school type effects. Therefore, a propensity score matching strategy is proposed instead. The results point to small and statistically insignificant achievement differences between public- and private school students, across all three subjects measured in the PISA data set. The institutional arrangements in the Dutch secondary education sector further support the notion that large achievement differences are not to be expected between school types, despite the extremely large between-school variances in student achievement. The findings are relevant for the ongoing debate on public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education.

As the number of charter schools has grown nationally, there is increasing discussion of the consolidation of such schools into charter districts in which all schools would be charter schools from which parents would have the freedom to choose the school that they wished their student to attend. A major question is how such a charter school district would be organized to support its schools and who would perform the different functions required. It is argued that three economic guidelines need to be an important determinant of the solution to this question: the presence of economies of scale; transaction costs; and externalities. The article describes the application of these guidelines to the formation of a charter school district and suggests the different possibilities for addressing a range of important roles by schools, their districts and intermediate organizations and markets.

As the number of charter schools has grown nationally, there is increasing discussion of the consolidation of such schools into charter districts in which all schools would be charter schools from which parents would have the freedom to choose the school that they wished their student to attend. A major question is how such a charter school district would be organized to support its schools and who would perform the different functions required. It is argued that three economic guidelines need to be an important determinant of the solution to this question: the presence of economies of scale; transaction costs; and externalities. The article describes the application of these guidelines to the formation of a charter school district and suggests the different possibilities for addressing a range of important roles by schools, their districts and intermediate organizations and markets.

-This paper was published in Economics of Education Review , Vol. 31, No. 2, 331-343 (2012)-

This paper examines the policy context of charter school adoption and implementation in Indianapolis -- the only city in the U.S. with independent mayoral authorizing authority. Our study identifies specific implications of this hybrid of mayoral control, including expanded civic capacity and innovation diffusion across Indianapolis area public school systems. This qualitative study utilizes over 30 in-depth interviews conducted with key stakeholders. Legislative, state, and school district documents and reports were analyzed for descriptive evidence of expanded civic capacity, school innovation, and charter/noncharter school competitive pressures. The case of Indianapolis reframes the mayoral role in education reform, and expands the institutional framework for charter school authorizing.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate sharp bounds on treatment effects of education programs that ration excess demand by admission lotteries when selective attrition cannot be ignored. Differential attrition arises in these models because students that lose the lottery are more likely to pursue educational options outside the school district. When students leave the district, important outcome variables are often not observed. Selective attrition implies that treatment effects are not point identified. We provide a new estimator that exploits known quantiles of the outcome distribution to construct informative bounds on treatment effects. We apply our methods to study the effectiveness of magnet programs in a mid-sized urban school district. Our findings show that magnet programs help the district to attract and retain students. The bound estimates demonstrate that magnet programs offered by the district improve behavioral outcomes such as offenses, timeliness, and attendance.

While several studies have considered the outcomes related to KIPP schools, this study examines two key inputs: students and funding. The study finds that while KIPP serves more students that qualify for free and reduced lunch than local schools districts, it serves fewer students with disabilities and students classified as English language learners. The study finds high levels of student attrition in KIPP schools; a finding that is common for high poverty schools and in line with earlier research on KIPP. In its closer examination of attrition data, this study found that African American males were substantially more likely to leave KIPP schools. Alternative explanations for student attrition in grade cohorts over time—such as higher retention rates—could not explain the drop in enrollment since the size and demographic composition of students in entry grades did not change from year to year.

Charter schools have been one of the most important dimensions of recent school reform measures in the United States. Currently, there are more than 5,000 charter schools spread across the 40 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Though there have been numerous studies on the effects of charter schools, these have mostly been confined to analyzing their effects on student achievement, student demographic composition, parental satisfaction and the competitive effects on regular public schools. This study departs from the existing literature by investigating the effect of charter schools on enrollment in private schools. To investigate this issue empirically, we focus on the state of Michigan where there was a significant spread of charter schools in the nineties. Using data on private school enrollment from biennial NCES private school surveys, and using a fixed effects as well as instrumental variables strategy that exploits exogenous variation from Michigan charter law, we investigate the effect of charter school penetration on private school enrollment. We find robust evidence of a decline in enrollment in private schools,—but the effect is only modest in size. We do not find evidence that enrollments in Catholic or other religious schools suffered more relative to those in non-religious private schools.

In 2005 there were about 120 schools in New Orleans. Catering mostly to a poor and minority population, the schools were financially bankrupt as well as academically impoverished. In October 2005 Katrina hit New Orleans with such devastation that 80 percent of its population fled their homes, one third of the schools were destroyed, and most were damaged. The schools of New Orleans were charged with recovering quickly, not only rebuilding structures and staffing them to accommodate returning students, but also improving vastly their academic performance. This article documents the changes that took place through the state’s Recovery School District, charter schools, and magnet schools. By 2010-11 more than 60 percent of the schools were charter schools with future plans to convert almost all of the schools to function as charter or magnet schools. This transformation has not been without challenges as the local community of educational professionals that had been discharged after Katrina has been replaced substantially by outsiders hired through national organizations funded through national philanthropic foundations. Many members of the local community also feel undermined by the lack of presence of a central school authority that is able to provide overall governance, coordination, policy, and community involvement. After almost six years, the New Orleans schools are still evolving into what is planned eventually as a “school choice district”. 

This article investigates cross-national mathematics and science achievement differences between public and private schools. Using the TIMSS 2003 data, we empirically examine differences through a set of multilevel models that attempt to control for select student background factors. We also attempt to correct for selection bias using propensity score matching methods. A number of methodological issues including the treatment of missing data and the construction of a quality student background measure are also addressed. While our analysis generally supports previous findings of higher private school achievement, we have found that higher private school achievement is not uniform across educational systems or the content domains analyzed. This variation is significant in light of the blanket privatization policy currently promoted by large international organizations.

We study the effects of private school competition on public school students’ test scores in the wake of Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship program, now known as the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which offered scholarships to eligible low-income students to attend private schools. Specifically, we examine whether students in schools that were exposed to a more competitive private school landscape saw greater improvements in their test scores after the introduction of the scholarship program, than did students in schools that faced less competition. The degree of competition is characterized by several geocoded variables that capture students’ ease of access to private schools, and the variety of nearby private school options open to students. We find that greater degrees of competition are associated with greater improvements in students’ test scores following the introduction of the program; these findings are robust to the different variables we use to define competition. These findings are not an artifact of pre-policy trends; the degree of competition from nearby private schools matters only after the announcement of the new program, which makes nearby private competitors more affordable for eligible students. We also test for several moderating factors, and find that schools that we would expect to be most sensitive to competitive pressure see larger improvements in their test scores as a result of increased competition.

We evaluate the integrating and segregating effects of school choice in a large, urban school district. Our findings suggest that open enrollment, a school-choice program without explicit integrative objectives which does not provide busing, segregates students along three socioeconomic dimensions – race/ethnicity, student achievement and parental-education status. Using information on expenditures to promote integration at the district, we back out estimates of the social cost of open enrollment realized in terms of student segregation. Our estimates vary widely depending on several assumptions, but a social-cost estimate of roughly 10 million dollars per year is on the high end of our range of estimates for this single district. Although this number represents a sizeable portion of the district’s integrative-busing budget, it is a small fraction of the district’s total budget (≈1.4 billion dollars). Further, we note that this cost may be offset by benefits not related to integration. 

To better understand how school information influenced urban and suburban parent decisions about public school choice, the authors collaborated to create and disseminate the SmartChoices website in metropolitan Hartford, Connecticut. SmartChoices uses a family’s home address tool to show all of eligibile district and interdistrict schools on an interactive map, with the ability to sort and compare results by distance, racial balance, and test scores. This paper analyzes patterns in the 3,385 distinct searches conducted during a five-month window, and focuses on in-depth interviews and user statistics from 93 parents who participated in SmartChoices workshops. The workshop experience led about one-third to change their top-choice school and one-third to clarify their choice, while the remaining third remained unchanged. Among the 32 workshop participants who changed their top-choice school, they tended to select those with greater test scores and racial balance, but also frequently sorted results by distance. Our conclusion underscores the role that the “digital divide” plays on public school choice in Hartford.