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We examine the impact of charter schools on school integration in the Little Rock, Arkansas metropolitan area. We find that charters are less likely to be hyper-segregated than traditional public schools (TPS), but TPS have compositions more closely reflecting the region. However, differences in each case are slight. Using student-level data to follow students who left TPS for charters, we find that most transfers improve integration levels at the schools they left. This finding is attributed to the fact that most transfers involve minority students leaving predominately minority schools or White students leaving predominantly White schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the primary aims of choice policies is to introduce competition between schools. When parents can choose where to send their children, there is pressure on schools to improve to attract and retain students. However, do school leaders recognize market pressures? What strategies do they use in response? This study examines how choice creates school-level actions using qualitative data from 30 schools in New Orleans. Findings suggest that school leaders did experience market pressures, yet their responses to such pressures varied, depending in part on their perceptions of competition and their status in the market hierarchy. Some took steps toward school improvement, by making academic and operational changes, whereas others engaged in marketing or cream skimming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a long-standing concern among education researchers and policy makers that public school choice may lead to increased racial isolation. Improving on aggregate comparisons, I examine the sorting of students into charter schools by tracking individual students from their charter school of enrollment back to the school they were enrolled in immediately prior to the switch to a charter school, allowing for a direct comparison of school racial demographics between the two sectors. I find evidence that the process of charter school choice in Indianapolis leads to higher degrees of racial isolation and less diversity within schools than is present in the underlying process of student school transfers in the public school district from which a majority of these students came. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper builds upon prior research attempting to answer the question ‘Does money matter?’ in public education by offering some insight into the potential advantages of charter schools over their district counterparts. In order to develop an accurate model of the true relationship between resources and performance, Adkins and Moomaw [(2003). “The Impact of Local Funding on the Technical Efficiency of Oklahoma School.”Economics Letters81(1): 31–37] suggest the use of a technical inefficiency model. Along these lines, we employ panel data of Ohio public schools to measure the potential technical efficiency gains of charter schools over traditional public schools using a stochastic frontier production model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author analyzes the revealed school preferences of parents in the Washington, D.C., and asks, “What is the main determinant of charter school choice and how does it create racial, economic, and linguistic segregation?” The author first establishes a theory of choice, which incorporates past research and adds an additional variable to our understanding of school selection—school location. Through a multivariable regression, the author tests the new proximity variable against other possible determinants and finds that parental preference for neighborhood schools significantly correlates with racial segregation. The results indicate that school-choice markets, as they currently exist, reinforce the de facto segregation patterns found in urban neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article assesses the impact of K-12 charter schools on education in Ohio, analyzing public school test scores to find potential systemic effects of school choice. Topics include the difference between participant effects and systemic effects, the use of independent and instrumental variables in studying systematic effects, and the impact of the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on results. It is said that academic achievement at public schools increased due to the threat of charter schools taking away students.

Data from one urban school district is analyzed to examine equity-based arguments about school choice as they pertain to intradistrict transfer policies. We specifically examine which factors influence the propensity for parents to participate in choice, and how choice schools differ from the schools that students are zoned to attend. We find that advantaged and disadvantaged parents make similar choices in that they are both likely to choose more affluent schools with better academic records than the schools they are zoned to attend. However, these choices operate in different spheres, as advantaged parents choose the most affluent schools with the best academic records, and disadvantaged parents choose away from the least affluent schools with the worst academic records to schools that are slightly better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of charter schools credit them with many advantages over traditional schools. One claim is that school choice yields increased parental participation in voluntary school activities-which we shall call education-related social capital. In this article we test for the independent effect of school choice on education-related social capital, controlling for general social capital and other potentially confounding variables. Studies of school choice invariably show that choosing parents have a greater level of general social capital than non-choosing parents. Consequently, any increase in education-related social capital could be spurious-due to the fact that choice parents start with atypically high levels of general social capital. We find under controlled conditions that school choice has a small but statistically significant effect on education-related social capital. However, its effect is considerably smaller than for general social capital, as well as for other traditional predictors such as parental education and the school-related home resources that parents may provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]