School Choice and Learning

Opportunities
Megan Austin and Mark Berends

1.1 Background on School Choice

• growing in the United States

• School choice comes in many forms— including charter schools, private schools, magnet
schools, vouchers, tuition tax credits, inter- and intra-district public school schools, virtual
schools and homeschooling.

1.1.1 School Choice and Academic Achievement

what are the effects of school choice on academic achievement? Are students learning more in
schools of choice as measured by their test score gains compared with students in traditional public
schools?

In what follows we focus on studies that rigorously assess the effects of charter schools, voucher
programs, and private schools more generally.

1.1.1.1 Charter Schools and Achievement

• charter schools have received a great deal of attention over the past 10–15 years
• show positive effect on academic achievement gains for students in charter schools
compared with those students who are not so enrolled
• the bulk of the charter school studies reveal mixed results
• in New York City, some charter schools are significantly narrowing the achievement gaps
between racial/ethnic groups.
• charter elementary schools were large enough to close the racial achievement gap across
subjects—i.e., students gained about 0.20 of a standard deviation a year in both
mathematics and English/language arts. Similar large effects of charter school have also
been shown in Boston.

1.1.1.2 Research on School Vouchers

• these programs has increased as well

• The first voucher program was the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which began in
1990, provided scholarships to students from low- and modest-income families to attend
private schools, and included an external evaluation (see Witte 2000).
• Witte’s research found generally no systematic academic achievement differences between
voucher and public school students based on regression models
• subset of voucher participants who had won their voucher via a lottery system to a small
number of oversubscribed private schools, found positive achievement impacts associated
with participation.
 • no effect in reading but positive achievement impacts in math.
• Greene (2001), found positive achievement impacts from an experimental analysis of the
privately-funded voucher program in Charlotte.
• There are a few studies of statewide voucher programs in Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana that
have shown negative effects on student achievement growth.
• Negative effects were also found in a study by Waddington and Berends (2017) of the
Indiana Choice Scholarship program.
• Shakeel et al. (2016) found overall positive effects of school vouchers. The impacts were
larger in reading than mathematics, for programs outside the U.S.

1.1.1.3 Private and Catholic School Effects

• Several researchers argue that private schools (especially Catholic) outperform public
schools (Chubb and Moe 1990;
• Do students who attend Catholic schools score higher on academic achievement tests than
their peers in traditional public schools?
• Students who attend private or Catholic schools may differ from those who attend public
schools according to social background, motivation, values and beliefs, and other factors;
thus there may be selection bias that makes the measurement of school effects difficult
(Berends and Waddington 2018;
• Catholic high school on students’ mathematics achievement is consistently positive.
• Carbonaro and Covay (2010) Catholic school students had higher mathematics achievement
than their peers in public schools.
• Carbonaro (2006) found that kindergarten students in public and Catholic schools
experienced similar achievement gains in mathematics and general knowledge, net of other
characteristics,in the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K).

1.1.2 School Choice and Educational Attainment

The accumulated knowledge regarding educational attainment is more robust in some areas of
school choice (e.g., Catholic schools) than other areas (e.g., charter schools and voucher programs).

1.1.2.1 Charter School

• research that has examined the impact of charter schools on educational attainment is
somewhat limited compared to the charter school research on academic achievement
• For schools in Florida and Chicago, they found substantial positive effects on both high
school completion and college attendance
• If students attended a charter middle school and then went on to a charter high school, they
were 7–15 percentage points more likely to earn a high school diploma compared with
students who attended a traditional public high school.
• students who attended a charter high school were 8–10 percentage points more likely to
attend college than their peers in traditional public high schools.
1.1.2.2 Voucher Program

Several studies of voucher programs have examined not only achievement effects but also effects
on educational attainment.

• The Wolf et al. (2010,2011) longitudinal randomized study of the voucher program in
Washington, DC, revealed significant gains in voucher students’ high school graduation
rates.
• They found that the DC Scholarship Program raised the high school graduation rate by 21
percentage points compared with students in the control group (i.e., 91% of the treatment
group graduated compared with 70% of the control group).

1.1.2.3 Private/Catholic School

• these studies collectively find that students attending Catholic high schools are more likely
than their public school counter parts to graduate from high school and attend college.
• Evans and Schwab (1995) found that students who attended a Catholic high school were
about 10–13% more likely to attend college compared with their public school peers
• showed that Catholic school students were more likely to graduate from high school and
attend college even though they found little evidence of a Catholic school effect on student
achievement.
• Freeman and Berends (2016) found that students who attended a Catholic high school
were more likely to continue their education

the effect of Catholic schools on educational attainment may be decreasing over time.

1.1.3 School Choice and Satisfaction

In addition to school choice effects on achievement and attainment, an important question is

whether or not parents and students are satisfied with their choices.

• Existing research has found that parents of children in schools of choice are more satisfied
than parents of children in traditional public schools.
• parents who choose charter schools or select private schools with a voucher tend to be
more satisfied than parents in traditional public schools
• Gleason et al. (2010) and Tuttle et al. (2013) show that charter school parents are more
satisfied than traditional public school parents
• they also found no effects on student achievement or other student outcomes, such as
parent- and student-reported effort in school
• Another explanation for why parents are more satisfied in schools of choice is that parents
have invested time and energy into making the choice, so they view the schools through
“rose colored glasses” (Schneider and Buckley 2003; Teske et al. 2007).
• Based on Buckley and Schneider’s (2006) findings, future research should measure parent
satisfaction over time and pay attention to the social context of the schools.
• evidence shows that charter schools attract families with higher socioeconomic status
compared with traditional public schools (Butler et al. 2013). Other evidence from charter
school studies suggests that urban and suburban charters may differ.
 • Moreover, suburban parents with high educational attainment may be more difficult to
satisfy

1.2 Theories of School Choice

1.2.1 Market Theory

The theory behind market-based choice program predicts that expanding choice options and
competition will benefit students because their families will seek out high-quality schools and
schools that fit particular student needs (Chubb and Moe 1990; Friedman 1955, 1962).

1.2.2 Institutional Theory

• sociologists have pointed to institutional theory, which characterizes schools as institutions

with persistent patterns of social action that individuals take for granted
• Institutional theorists agree with market theorists that school bureaucracies dominate the
public education sector, but they point more to the sociological environment
• market theory predicts that students attending schools of choice will experience more
positive student outcomes because of parents’ freedom to choose and the resulting
competition that holds all schools to a higher level

1.2.3 Competition

Analyzing state-level data from the Census and the U.S. Department of Education, Arum (1996)
examined measures of the size of the private school sector, student/teacher ratio, income per
student, and percent of the population in a metropolitan area.

1.2.3.1 Charter Schools and Competition

Generally, the competitive effects of charter schools are mixed, either showing no effects or some
positive effects (Betts 2009).

1.2.3.2 Voucher Programs and Competition

In Milwaukee, with the oldest voucher program in the U.S., Chakrabarti (2013) relied on a difference-
in-differences approach and found that competitive effects were mixed; there was a positive
significant effect in reading in the second year, but no other competitive effects of the program.

Thus, generally across the studies of charter schools and voucher programs the evidence of small
effects does not robustly support market theory. However, with neutral to positive effects found in
most studies, the evidence may be more consistent with market theory than institutional theory.

1.2.4 Innovation

This would be consistent with market theory, which holds that school choice (particularly charter
school choice) will result in greater school autonomy that will produce organizational innovations
promoting structures and processes that lead to changes in instructional practices.

However, innovation may also mean the implementation of instructional designs that change
schools on every level—teaching and learning; the organization of time, curriculum, and instruction;
a governance partnership with a non-profit charter management organization (CMO) or a for-profit
educational management organization.

Lubienski (2003) found that although some charter schools were organizationally innovative,
classroom practices were quite similar in charter and traditional public school.