Learn from Education's Experience

The question of how school choice programs affect the racial stratification of schools is highly salient in the field of education policy. We use a student-level panel data set to analyze the impacts of the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) on racial stratification in public and private schools. This targeted school voucher program provides funding for low-income, mostly minority students in the lowest-graded public schools to enroll in participating private schools. Our analysis indicates that the vast majority (82%) of LSP transfers have reduced racial stratification in the voucher students’ former public schools. LSP transfers have marginally increased stratification in the participating private schools, however, where just 45% of transfers reduce racial stratification. In those school districts under federal desegregation orders, voucher transfers result in a large reduction in traditional public schools’ racial stratification levels and have no discernible impact on private schools. The results of this analysis provide reliable empirical evidence on whether or not parental choice harms desegregation efforts in Louisiana.

Program Design, Incentives, and Response: Evidence from Educational Interventions

School choice initiatives such as open enrollment, magnet schools, charter schools, and voucher plans have been offered as methods of school reform. A publicly funded voucher plan in Florida targeting students with disabilities was considered as a possible model for the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Although the model was not adopted in the reauthorized law, the potential impact of such voucher plans must be examined.. The empirical evidence regarding the impact of vouchers on parent choice, student achievement, and fiscal school management is inconclusive and incomplete. Further, the impact of voucher plans on educational programs for students with disabilities has not been thoroughly studied. Such an examination requires a multiparadigmatic analysis of legal, economic, academic, sociological, and political dimensions.

This study examines the impact of the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), a school-based voucher program, on change in total enrollment and share of disadvantaged students by measuring the effect on timing of treatment: immediate effect, lagged effect, and cumulative effect. By collecting school- and district-level time-varying controls from the Census, Common Core of Data, and Florida Department of Education, this study constructed a panel dataset consisting of 1,945 Florida public elementary schools across 67 districts, spanning 2011 through 2016. In general, this study found a negative impact on total school enrollment change, but positive change on free-reduced lunch (FRL) share in enrollment. The negative effect of OSP was only significant within one more year when additional time indicators were included in the analysis. On the other hand, the FRL share shows no significant change from the immediate and lagged effects. All in all, OSP eligibility has a negative impact on total enrollment change which implies that underperforming schools experienced greater student displacement than other schools.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS PREFACE: By What Means? The Devil is in The Details! (Fenwick English). INTRODUCTION: NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, SYMBOLISM OR REALITY? (Frank Brown and Richard C. Hunter) PART I: EDUCATIONAL EQUITY AND NCLB. Fiscal Equity Under Title I and Non-Title I Schools in Local School Districts. (Jim Lyons). NCLB and Diversity in Schools. (Stephen B. Lawton). School Choice and Equity under NCLB In The Post-Brown Era. (Frank Brown). No Child Left Behind: The Balm of Gilead Has Arrived in American Education. (Philip T.K. Daniel). NCLB and the New ESEA Title I Program: Poverty and Education. (Richard C. Hunter). Reconceptualizing Accountability in Urban Schools. (Carolyn Talbert-Johnson and Charles J. Russo). The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and Charter Schools. (Preston Green and Joseph Oluwole). Struggling to Mend it or End it: Legal and Legislative Issues in the Brief History of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. (Saran Donahoo and Norman Greer). Title VII, Bilingual Education of NCLB and Immigrant Students in Urban Schools. (Reynaldo Contreras). PART II: NCLB AND PROCESS Accountability, High Stakes Testing and No Child Left Behind. (Linda Tillman). Resiliency Among African American male students. (Tawannah Alan). The Achievement Gap and the No Child Left Behind Act: Is There a Connection. (Mark A. Gooden and Teresa Y. Nowlin). Public Education in an Era of Neo-Liberal Globalization: The Broken Promise of No Child Left Behind. (Jite Eferakorho). Democratic Notions Informing Equity in Mathematics Education. (Lecretia A. Buckley). Public School Choice: The New K-12 Desegregation Model? (Dawn G. Williams). The Role of Parents under NCLB. (Richard C. Hunter). Educational Equity, Globalization, and the No Child Left Behind Act. (Frank Brown). Immigration, Urban Schools, and Accountability. (Xue Lan Rong). A Nation Still at Risk: No Child Left Behind and the Salvation of Disadvantaged Students. (M. Christopher Brown II, T. E. Dancy II, & Nicole Norfles).

The prevailing argument for school choice in metropolitan cities has been that children from economically disadvantaged communities need opportunities to access better quality schools than the traditional public schools assigned to them based on their address. However, as these cities experience gentrification, more economically advantaged parents are taking advantage of school choice policies for their children - despite already living in the catchment zones for highly desirable traditional public schools. This study explores the intersection of community and school gentrification and the motivations for supporting and participating in the school choice process for parents in Washington, D.C., a highly gentrified city with a robust school choice landscape. Leveraging a relatively robust school choice system, the author interviewed 25 professional-class, low-income, and working-class parents in Washington, D.C. who completed applications for the citywide school lottery. The findings show that parents have vastly different priorities when choosing schools, depending largely on race, class, and whether they are a gentrifier or native Washingtonian. The findings reveal contradictions between the stated values and the actions among White professional-class parents, a pursuit of equality of conditions for low-income and working-class Black parents, and tensions between gentrifying and native parents in communities as gentrification changes the complexion and culture of schools.

Many school districts in the United States allow parents to choose which school their child attends ('school choice’ or ‘magnet schools’) while other school districts require students to attend their nearest (‘neighborhood’) school. Such policies influence children's transportation. We survey elementary-school parents in St. Paul and Roseville, Minnesota, to discover how children travel to school and underlying factors influencing parent's choice of their child's travel mode. From this information we develop a statistical model of travel mode choice. We find that children's commute mode and parental attitudes towards school selection differ by school type (magnet versus neighborhood), income, and race. Relative to neighborhood schools, magnet schools draw from broader geographic regions, have lower rates of walking, bicycling, and commuting by automobile, and higher busing rates. Parent attitudes towards transportation also differ by race and school type. For example, parents of nonwhite and magnet school students placed greater-than-average importance on bus service and quality. This paper highlights the potentially unintended influence of school district policy on school commute mode.

This study examines county-level variation in participation in North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship program. Using regression models, we find that counties with higher support for Donald Trump in the 2024 election have lower rates of voucher use, particularly among high-income recipients. These patterns persist after accounting for income, population size, and school quality. The findings point out that the communities where school choice may be most popular are the communities where its benefits are least available, perhaps indicating political shifts on the issue in the future.

Following Brown v. Board of Education, schools known as “segregation academies” that were created for the purpose of allowing White students to be educated without contact with Black students proliferated in the southern United States. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited such segregation, these schools remained in existence for decades. In this case study, Michael Shaffer and Bridget Dincher contend that the Choice Scholarship Program in Indiana, a school voucher program, re-creates the segregation academies. Data demonstrate that while White student percentages have climbed since the inception of the program, Black student percentages have declined sharply, creating a large number of schools that meet the definition of a segregated school. And because these schools are private, despite receiving government funds through the voucher program, students do not receive the same federal protections from discrimination that they do in traditional public schools.

Over the past few decades, school choice has been a widely debated issue around the globe, following the development of pluralism, liberty, and democracy. In many countries, school choice systems were preceded by residence-based school assignment systems, creating a strong connection between a neighborhood and its schools’ demographic compositions. However, schools often remain highly segregated. School segregation is thus seen as a major problem and is supposedly driven by three main factors: residential segregation, parental school choice, and schools’ selection of pupils. This paper aims to shed light on what research should be focusing on as regards school choice and residential segregation with the following two research questions: What are the links between neighborhood and school choice in the literature? How are neighborhood and school choice connected to school segregation in the literature? Two main findings emerged: (1) the neighborhood-based social networks that parents developed had limited their school choices and (2) neighborhood segregation is one of the most important factors that contributes to school segregation and is related to multi-ethnic and socioeconomic contexts.

School voucher and education tax credit programs have proliferated in the United States over the past 2 decades. Advocates have argued that they will enable families to become active consumers in a free and competitive education marketplace, but some fear that these programs may bring a heavy regulatory burden that could stifle market forces. Until now, there has been no systematic, empirical investigation of that concern. This article aims to shed light on the issue by quantifying the regulations imposed on private schools within and outside school choice programs and then analyzing them with descriptive statistics and regression analyses. The results were tested for robustness to alternative ways of quantifying private school regulation and to alternative regression models, and the question of causality is addressed. The study concludes that vouchers, but not tax credits, impose a substantial and statistically significant additional regulatory burden on participating private schools.

While the merits of vouchers have been the subject of intense public debate in recent years, there has been very little available evidence upon which to gauge their efficacy. The first publicly funded voucher plan involving private schools wasn't established until 1990 in Milwaukee; before then, the only data on school choice came from a small, poorly designed program in California. Voucher programs grew dramatically in the latter half of the 1990s. In 2000, about 60,000 students participated in seventy-one programs, most privately funded. This growth is now providing researchers with the ability to measure the impact of vouchers for the first time in multiple cities. The Education Gap is the first book to gather a significant body of data on vouchers in multiple locations, and it reveals startling new evidence that voucher programs benefit African-American students more than participants from other ethnic groups. To explain this phenomenon, the authors point out that residential selection is the most common form of school choice available in American public education today. Since this process is likely to leave African Americans in the worst public schools, new forms of choice directed toward low-income families are most likely to benefit black students. The authors examine the effects of school vouchers on test scores, parental satisfaction, parent-school communications, and political tolerance among students and parents participating in four pilot programs in New York City; Dayton, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; the Edgewood school district in San Antonio; and a program that offered vouchers to 40,000 low-income families nationwide. Though the programs operated in a wide variety of settings, the findings were surprisingly consistent. After two years, African-American students who used vouchers to switch from public to private schools scored substantially better on math and reading tests. By contrast, no significant positive effects on the test scores of other ethnic groups were detected. While parents in all ethnic groups were generally more supportive of private education, African-American parents expressed particularly high enthusiasm for the private schools their children attended. The authors also report information on the kinds of students and families who take advantage of a voucher opportunity, allowing them to seewhether only the i??degreebest and brightesti??i?? public school students were able to take advantage of school voucher programs. The results documented in The Education Gap shed new light on the effects of school vouchers on students in poor, urban environments. This information will be important to policymakers, scholars, and citizens are they continue to search for ways to improve education in urban areas.

Parent choice in education is enjoying growing support among both minorities and whites. The greatest practical impetus to the extension of parent choice in public schools has been the use of magnet schools in desegregation plans. This study analyzes the history of parent choice in Cambridge, Mass. and its outcome. Parent choice in the Cambridge public schools has produced greater interracial exposure than the prior mandatory reassignment plan, as well as increased student achievement.

ABSTRACTFew evaluations have focused on the supply and demand within the education marketplace in a school choice environment. Because traditional public schools are not subject to the same level of competitive pressures as private schools, we expect that measures of school quality—enrollment, academic achievement, and safety—will be more likely to predict closures for private schools and public charter schools than Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). We employ survival analysis using data from private, traditional public, and public charter schools in Milwaukee from 2005 to 2016. Data on enrollment trends, demographics, and academic performance from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction were combined with data from other sources on school safety and closure. Results from our models suggest: (a) enrollment losses drive school closure in all three sectors, (b) low academic achievement only predicts closure for private schools, (c) families choose schools based on academics in all three sectors, and (d) academics and school safety are positively correlated.

One form of parental involvement in a child's education is choice of a school. Many parents exercise choice of their children's schools as part of deciding where to live—;;in what part of the city, in which suburb, in which neighborhood. This chapter examines which parents take advantage of school choice opportunities in either the public or private sectors and what effect expanded choice might have for increasing equality of educational opportunity for disadvantaged students. A major question regarding school choice concerns the effect expanded choice will have on inequality of educational opportunity. In elementary schools, there is a little choice among public schools, other than through choice of residence. The constraints on attending private school are quite different from those on public school choice. Cost of attending a private school is the greatest constraint. Unlike public school choice, the constraints on private school choice include financial cost as well as availability of a private school.