This paper is a chapter from a book project with the title Educational Goods: Values, Evidence and Decision Making, by the four listed authors.  Because this chapter focuses specifically on charter schools (and similar types of semi-autonomous schools of choice in other countries), it fits well into this session. The authors define educational goods as the knowledge, skills, attitudes and dispositions that enable an individual to flourish and to contribute to the flourishing of others. Importantly student achievement is only one of many educational goods.  

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how careful thinking about the level of various educational goods and their distributions, in conjunction with a small number of other values that are relevant for education decision making, can be useful for policy making related to charter schools.   Importantly, While the authors discuss a number of policy such as those related to the size of the sector, how much autonomy to give to charter school operators, who should have power to authorize them, or who should be allowed to operate them, they do not advocate for one set over another.  Instead the goal is to highlight the value tradeoffs with particular reference to the evidence.  Of interest for this session is what the new evidence presented in the two empirical papers implies about the ability of charter schools to realize the valued goals of increasing the level of and improving the distribution of educational goods.