School choice policies remain among the most controversial educational reforms in the United States. Although this debate is informed by a substantial body of empirical evidence, much of the literature remains focused on two central questions: whether school choice programs cause positive changes in student outcomes (typically measured by standardized test scores) and whether choice programs draw disproportionately from students with higher levels of previous academic success. 

 In this paper, our objective is to move beyond the debate over whether choice programs “work” in terms of outcomes, and to consider instead the contexts in which students who do choose make their decisions. We argue that the appropriate case for such an inquiry is an environment in which a school choice program is large enough, and well-established enough, to represent a valid educational option for a typical student.  We focus empirically on students in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which operates the oldest and largest urban voucher program in the country. 

 We are interested in one overarching question: do voucher schools draw from better public schools and city neighborhoods in the first place, or do they draw from students most in need of alternative options?  Employing a variety of panel data techniques, including estimation of school value-added, we consider whether voucher students are located in city neighborhoods that contribute more or less to student outcomes. We also consider whether the public schools in those neighborhoods are performing better or worse than those in areas with fewer voucher students. We exploit a particular feature of Milwaukee’s voucher program, namely its high rate of attrition back to public schools (Cowen, et al. 2012; Carlson, et al. 2013) to consider the school and neighborhood contexts of those returning to the public sector.

 Critics of school choice programs have long employed the language of “creaming” away the best students or “cropping” off the worst performers to describe the process by which alternative educational options may exacerbate rather than improve educational inequality. Our paper suggests that the questions of who chooses, and why, are more complex than a simple comparison of individual decision-makers. Our results indicate that in a large and fully mature school choice system—one we observe empirically in areas like Milwaukee—students from particularly disadvantaged neighborhoods may be most likely to use the voucher program, although there are some important exceptions to this pattern.

 We argue that this evidence allows us to consider the academic tradeoffs that students make within a school system that comes as close to providing a competitive market for schooling options as any empirical context in the U.S. As such, this paper provides guidance to both the scholarly and policymaking communities considering school choice policies in general and voucher programs in particular.