Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: School Choice and Public Policy

(Education)

School choice has been proposed as a way to broaden educational alternatives and improve access to quality schools for disadvantaged children. A central argument for expanding school choice is that it generates competitive pressures to improve quality across all schools. But critics argue expanding school choice leads to sorting that can be harmful to disadvantaged students. A pressing concern is that advantaged and informed students will choose better schools while disadvantaged students remain isolated in traditional public schools. The most vocal opponents argue that choice schools discriminate against students who are the hardest to teach. Our panel directly addresses several issues on the governance and efficacy of school choice programs such as vouchers, intra-district choice programs, and charter schools. In the first paper, “School Choice and Heterogeneous Beliefs,” Adam Kapor, Christopher Neilson, and Seth Zimmerman survey parents in a large, urban open-enrollment district, where seats in highly-demanded schools are rationed by lottery. They collect novel data on how households acquire information to choose schools and their subjective beliefs on admissions chances. These data are incorporated into a structural model of school choice that allows the research team to make comparisons of the effects of altering school choice policies to other types of interventions such as reducing class size. The next paper investigates whether school choice programs may limit access to high-quality schools. In the paper, “An Experimental Analysis of Cream Skimming in Charter Schools,” Peter Bergman and Isaac McFarlin conduct an experimental assessment on whether charter schools impede access to students that they may perceive as more costly to educate. In their study, they pose as parents of disadvantaged students and contact charter schools to make inquiries about the application process. How much charter school responses differ by student attributes compared to baseline messages reveals critical information on whether systematic discrimination exists. In the third paper, “School Vouchers and Student Achievement: First-Year Evidence from the Louisiana Scholarship Program,” Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walters investigate the effectiveness of a school voucher program for disadvantaged students to attend private schools of their choice. The vouchers are awarded by lottery for schools in high demand. The authors find strikingly perverse effects on student achievement that are robust across several subgroups. In the final paper, “Can Successful Schools Replicate? Evidence from Boston’s Charter Schools,” Sarah Cohodes, Elizabeth Setren, and Christopher Walters address whether charter schools with proven track records in improving student achievement can reproduce achievement gains in new schools and schools that are converted to charter schools. Strong causal evidence in support of this question can offer policymakers invaluable information on best practices on whether and how best to authorize new charter school campuses. The panel includes a diverse group of scholars with respect to race and ethnicity, gender, nationality, geography, and career stage.