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Dual enrollment (DE) is one of the fastest growing programs that support the high school-to-college transition. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence about its impact on either students' college application choices or admission outcomes. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach on data from two cohorts of ninth-grade students in one anonymous state, we found that taking DE credits increased the likelihood of applying to highly selective in-state four-year institutions. Attempting DE credits also increased the probability of gaining admission to a highly selective in-state four-year college. Heterogeneous analysis further indicates that the gains were extended across Black, Latinx, and white student populations.

Specialized high schools are an increasingly popular way to prepare young adults for postsecondary experiences and expand school choice. While much literature ex- amines charter school spillover effects and the effects of specialized schools on the students who attend them, little is known about the spillover effects of specialized high schools on traditional public schools (TPS). Using an event study design, we show that one type of specialized high school, North Carolina's Cooperative Innovative High Schools, initially attracted students who were higher achieving and more likely to be white than TPS students, but these specialized schools became more representative of the district population over time. On average, the opening of specialized schools had a mix of null and positive spillover effects on TPS student achievement. While there is some evidence of negative spillovers from the first schools that opened, the effects become more positive over time.

Catholic schools have seen more than a 30% decline in enrollment over the past 20 years. While some of the decline in enrollment may have been spurred by secular trends or the Church abuse scandal, the increase in schools of choice, principally public charter schools, may explain at least some of this decline. In this paper we estimate the effect of the opening of charter schools in proximity to Catholic schools across the entire U.S. We find that the opening of a nearby charter school has a negative impact on Catholic school enrollment and increases the likelihood that the school will close. We also find that charter openings induce greater racial isolation. Findings are especially pronounced in K8 schools, rather than high schools.

This is the 12th edition of EdChoice's Schooling in America survey. The purpose of this annual survey is to gauge public opinion on a range of issues in K-12 education, including school choice policies and parents' schooling experiences. From April 9 to April 30, 2024, we surveyed 2,319 current school parents and 1,502 members of the general population. We report polling results based on a nationally representative sample of both groups. Nearly 4,000 interviews were conducted online and over the phone. In this year's survey, we also asked new questions related to recent issues in education pertaining to transparency, accountability, technology, and artificial intelligence. The survey yielded many findings including: (1) School safety is now the top reason to choose a school for charter (37%), private (36%) and homeschool (53%) parents; (2) Most Americans (70%) and nearly two-thirds of parents (64%) say K-12 education is on the wrong track; (3) The majority of school parents think standardized tests are an important accountability measure, especially for teachers (67%), schools (65%), and school districts (65%); and (4) Two-thirds of parents (66%) say that schools should teach students how to use artificial intelligence responsibly.

In school choice systems, many families face geographic constraints. Yet, there is limited evidence on the association between school-based transportation and students' school choice, especially in fragmented transportation contexts. Using unique data on Detroit kindergarten students' eligibility and access to school-based transportation, we find that students with access to a bus at a school-- either a traditional or shuttle-style bus--were 4-5 percentage points more likely to enroll in that school. The association was greater for traditional buses in higher-crime neighborhoods and for shuttle-style buses for farther-away choices. We did not find that this association differed by block-group-level household car ownership. Our findings suggest that school-based transportation can increase school choice access, depending on policy design and contextual factors. [This report was written in collaboration with the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research (Detroit PEER).]

Hybrid school enrollments are trending up and many parents express a diverse range of reasons for enrolling their children in hybrid schools. Yet little is known about the pedagogical goals pursued by hybrid schools. We aim to help close this gap in the literature with a stated preferences experiment of hybrid school leaders' perceptions of program success. Sixty-three school leaders participated in a survey experiment in which we randomly assigned attributes to hypothetical programs and asked school leaders to identify the most successful program. We find that hybrid school leaders consider a broad range of student outcomes when evaluating program success, including labor market outcomes, civic outcomes, and family life. Students' religious observance produced the largest effect sizes, a reasonable finding considering that roughly two-thirds of the schools represented in our sample have some religious affiliation. We do not find evidence that test score outcomes and higher education matriculation contribute meaningfully to perceived success.

Unlike vouchers and tax credit scholarships that do not allow parents to customize their children's education, Education savings accounts (ESAs) provide funding to pay for part-time classes at public and private schools, tutoring, curricula, services for special needs, and more. As navigating the opportunities that come with ESAs can be difficult, there is a growing movement to include "choice navigators" as an eligible expense in ESA programs, which can inform parents what educational opportunities are available and help tailor an education program for their children. This paper examines several key elements, including determining the types of navigation services that parents need in the changing education landscape; identifying best practices that states can adopt to simplify ESA navigation; tapping into the experiences of current ESA users and traditional homeschoolers; and deciding whether there are policies that can encourage an adequate supply of navigators without creating counterproductive rules.

Over the past two decades, researchers have spent countless hours studying the impacts of public charter schools--independently-run, tuition-free schools of choice that serve some 3.7 million U.S. students today. Just prior to the pandemic, studies from Ohio and nationally indicated that charters on average delivered superior academic outcomes compared to traditional districts. And the very finest charters in Ohio and around the nation were driving learning gains that gave disadvantaged students the edge needed to succeed in college and career. The pandemic scrambled most everything about K-12 education. But did it upend what we know about charter school performance? The present study examines the post-pandemic performance of Ohio's brick-and-mortar charter schools, which enrolled 81,000 students--mostly from urban communities--during the 2022-23 school year. The results reveal that, in terms of student achievement growth, Ohio's charter schools remain a better educational option for the average charter student.

May 17, 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were "inherently unequal." At the time, North Carolina was one of 17 states that enforced de jure segregation, that is, segregation by law. The state of North Carolina and the school districts within the state have played prominent roles in our nation's history of school desegregation. North Carolina's public school enrollment is increasingly multiracial, and the expansion of school choice means that a growing share of students attends charters and private schools, both of which tend to be more segregated than traditional public schools. On the cusp of this important anniversary, the authors assess where North Carolina schools are now in terms of school desegregation, as segregated schools are systematically linked to unequal educational opportunities and outcomes, while desegregated schools are associated with numerous short-term, long-term, academic, and nonacademic outcomes for individuals and society.

Do residential neighbors affect each others' schooling choices? We exploit oversubscription lotteries in Chile's centralized school admission system to identify the effect of close neighbors on application and enrollment decisions. A student is 5-7% more likely to rank a high school as their first preference and to attend that school if their closest neighbor attended it the prior year. These effects are stronger among boys and applicants with lower parents' education and prior academic achievement, measured by previous scores in national standardized tests. Lower-achieving applicants are more likely to follow neighbors when their closest neighbor's test scores are higher. A neighbor enrolling in a school with one s.d. higher school effectiveness, peer composition, or school climate induces increases of 0.02-0.04 s.d. in the applicant's attended school. Our findings suggest that targeted policies aimed at increasing information to disadvantaged families have the potential to alleviate these frictions and generate significant multiplier effects.

This report analyzes changing racial composition in a comparable subset of schools to enable policy-relevant comparisons between charter and magnet schools. It reports the levels of segregation and diversity in these two systems, which is important because of strong evidence that diverse schools produce educational gains and substantial lifelong benefits in terms of college, employment, and other key life goals. Primary data was acquired from the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Common Core of Data (CCD), and Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data. In the school districts where both forms of choice were tried, magnets have done better than charters at modestly integrating students. An obvious explanation for this is that a basic mission of magnets, especially initially, was to address racial isolation. Policymakers interested in gaining the benefits of integration through choice might look closely at magnet schools. The higher segregation in charter schools observed in this analysis, coupled with other studies with similar findings, suggests that reforming charter schools, if not advancing alternatives like magnet schools or something even more powerful, is needed to address segregation and its well-documented harms.

"Brown v. Board of Education" held that the educational systems of seventeen states that mandated segregated schools violated the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The decision helped set off the civil rights revolution. However, after so many years of backlash, schools of the South are dramatically less segregated than what existed before "Brown." "Brown" brought to a head the conflict between the professed belief in equal opportunity and the reality of clearly inferior schools for Black and Latino children. Many whites saw the desegregation changes that the courts and federal agencies ordered as a threat. From a civil rights perspective, the battle was for connecting young people of color to transformative educational opportunities. Opponents mobilized and they attacked the courts and the law. This report examines the changing patterns of segregation and diversity in U.S. public schools, updating earlier work with contemporary and historical data. At a time when U.S. social and political polarization are severe and race relations are dangerously strained, schools matter even more.

For more than twenty-five years, public charter schools have served Ohio families and communities by providing quality educational options beyond the local school district. But it's no secret that we've also had a long-standing debate over whether increasing school choice impacts students who remain in traditional districts. In important--and sometimes impassioned--discussions such as these, rigorous research is critical to ground conversations in facts and evidence. Our latest report offers an analysis of the rapid scale-up of Ohio charter schools during the late 1990s and early 2000s. It finds that charters slightly boosted the graduation and attendance rates of traditional district students, while having no significant impacts on their state exam scores. These results follow a body of research from various locales showing that expanding educational choice--whether via public charter schools or private schools--consistently yields neutral to slightly positive impacts on traditional districts.

Seismic shifts are shaking the landscape of K-12 education. Public school districts across the US have lost over a million students since 2020. Meanwhile, novel educational models--such as microschools and hybrid homeschooling--have more than doubled their enrollments. This paper explores what's driving families to seek these new learning environments by utilizing a theory and methodology called Jobs to Be Done. According to the theory underpinning Jobs to Be Done, people adopt new solutions--such as microschools--when struggling moments in their lives cause them to seek new ways to make progress in the face of those struggles. Through interviews with parents who recently moved their children to microschools, this research uncovered three Jobs to Be Done driving families' decisions: (1) Job 1: When I disagree with decisions at my child's school and I'm feeling unheard, help me find an alternative that will honor my perspective and values; (2) Job 2: When my child is unhappy, unsafe, or struggling at school, help me find an environment where they can regain their love for learning; and (3) Job 3: When my child's school is too focused on academic milestones and neglects other forms of learning, help me find a balanced educational experience for my child. As the educational landscape continues to evolve, the insights in this paper have the potential to empower new educational models with the understanding and tools to successfully navigate these changes. [This report was co-produced with VELA Founder Network and The Re-Wired Group.]

This brief explores the characteristics of the high schools that newcomer students choose to attend in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Using data from the 2007-2008 through 2018-2019 school years, the study compares the high school enrollment patterns between newcomer students who attended Las Americas, a school dedicated to serving newcomer middle school students, and newcomer students from other HISD middle schools. Specifically, this brief examined school characteristics related to potential peer networks, English learner (EL) support and resources, disciplinary climate, and academic context. The analyses show that compared to non-Las Americas students, Las Americas students tended to enroll in high schools that provided more access to potential social networks with similar peers with respect to racial/ethnic diversity as well as foreign-born status. While Las Americas students were more likely to enroll in high schools where they might have greater access to EL support and resources, there were no differences in the disciplinary climate of the high schools attended between former Las Americas and non-Las Americas enrollees. Finally, Las Americas students were more likely than non-Las Americas students to choose high schools with a context potentially more conducive to academic achievement, as measured by end-of-course exam scores.

Unified enrollment (UE) systems were designed to improve efficiency, equity, and transparency in school choice processes, but research has focused on efficiency gains. This study examines whether moving from decentralized enrollment processes to UE mitigates or exacerbates racial segregation that often occurs in choice systems. Specifically, we examine a subset of charter schools in New Orleans that had enrolled disproportionately high numbers of white students prior to entering UE. We find that UE entry was associated with increased enrollment of nonwhite students in these schools without offsetting declines in white enrollment, facilitated by schools also increasing total enrollment after entering UE. We find no meaningful impacts of UE on school accountability measures, student or teacher mobility, or student discipline.

Many cities with school choice programs employ algorithms to make school placements. These algorithms use student priorities to determine which applicants get seats in oversubscribed schools. This study explores whether the New Orleans placement algorithm tends to favor students of certain races or socioeconomic classes. Specifically, we examine cases where families of Black and White or poor and non-poor children request the same elementary school as their top choice. We find that when Black and White applicants submit the same first-choice request for kindergarten, Black applicants are 9 percentage points less likely to receive it. Meanwhile, students in poverty are 6 percentage points less likely to receive a first-choice placement than other applicants for the same kindergarten program. However, these biases are not inevitable. In non-entry grades, where placement policies favor students whose schools are closing, Black and low-income applicants are more likely to obtain first-choice placements than their peers. We examine these priorities and simulate placements under alternate specifications of a deferred-acceptance algorithm to assess the potential of algorithm reform as a policymaking tool.

Many U.S. cities with school choice programs have adopted unified enrollment systems to manage their application and placement processes centrally. Typically, these systems use placement algorithms to assign students to schools. These algorithms make placements based on families' rank-ordered requests, seat availability in schools, and various priorities and lottery numbers that determine students' standing at each school. This study examines the placement algorithm--and broader school request, placement, and enrollment patterns--in New Orleans, which has a citywide system of charter schools. The authors explore whether the priority categories in the New Orleans placement algorithm tend to favor students of certain races or socioeconomic classes. Specifically, the authors examine cases where families of Black and white children, or lower-income and higher-income families, submit the same first-choice requests for kindergarten (a key entry grade for elementary school). In addition to examining whether certain groups of students are more likely than others to get school placements when they vie for the same seats, the authors run simulations to assess how placement patterns might differ with different policies.

Black Mothers Forum (BMF) was founded in 2016 to combat institutional racism, including disproportionate discipline, unrepresentative curricula, and racial bullying in Phoenix-area schools. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted public education, the organization launched a network of microschools as outposts of this mission. These microschools were able to start quickly, make frequent course corrections, and sustain their efforts after the pandemic, thanks in part to Arizona's growing ecosystem of diverse education options. The initial pandemic-era effort to launch these microschools was documented in a case study published by the Center on Reinventing Public Education in 2022. This followup brief revisits the initial case study with an eye toward the pedagogical tensions and questions of sustainability that it brought to light. This brief is based on in-person classroom observations, a new round of interviews with BMF microschool leaders and educators, and an analysis of Arizona's education policy landscape.

"Believing in Public Education: A Demographic and State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends" is a new data analysis that examines enrollment trends during the last four school years (2019-2023). Over the last four school years (2019-20 to 2022-23), charter schools have gained more than 300,000 students, an increase of 9%. Meanwhile, district public schools have been unable to recover the 1.5 million students they lost during the pandemic, a 3.5% loss. The report examined data for White, Black, and Hispanic students in 26 of 42 states included in the analysis. All three groups are continuing to choose charter schools--and, in some cases, charter school enrollment growth is even outpacing expected numbers based on population growth trends.

The National Longitudinal School Database (NLSD) comprises three files, making up a near-census of all schools and districts in the United States from school years 1990-91 to 2019-20. The three files are the Public School File, Private School File, and District File. As evident by the titles, the first two files report data at the school-level for both public and private schools. The District File reports data at the public school district-level. We have set up these files so that they can be easily merged together in a variety of ways. This data set is unique in that it allows researchers to examine various aspects of school choice across traditional public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, and private schools. These data have been used to examine changes in and effects of charter schools over time (Chen & Harris, 2022) as well as trends and predictors of school closures (Harris & Martinez-Pabon, 2023). This Codebook provides documentation on the sources and methods used to create the first release of the NLSD. It is organized into three sections, corresponding to the three NSLD files (Public, Private, District). Each of the three data files are in a "long" format, such that each row observation provides data for a given school (or school district) in a given school year (1990-1991 through 2019-2020). The accompanying Appendix spreadsheet describes the variables in each data set in more detail, including information on years available, number of observations, ranges, blanks and missing data, and data source. In future releases, we expect to augment the NLSD with additional data beyond the 2019-20 school year and from other sources relevant to its users. Potential developments include integrating data from the Office of Civil Rights, incorporating state-level charter and school take over policies, and exploring methodological refinements to the existing data.

Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This essay broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, while prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I provide a more comprehensive list. Second, with an up-to-date literature review, I show that all of these conditions fail to hold to an unusual extent in schooling relative to other markets. Third, because of these failures, I argue that the most potent critique of the free market approach to schooling comes from the intellectual home of markets--economics. Fourth, I show that the issues leading to inefficiency are the same ones leading to inequity. Fifth, I argue that the analysis points to specific roles for government, which go well beyond those included in new universal school voucher policies but are also narrower than the roles of government encompassed in traditional public education. For these reasons, the current policy direction is off-track and apparently inconsistent with the main criteria on which we evaluate education policy and even with the values that voucher advocates profess.

As current trends across the country indicate widespread declining student enrollment and attendance, EdChoice is interested in how states respond. It enlisted Hanover Research to summarize publicly available information for each of the 50 U.S. states about the role enrollment plays in state funding formulas, as well as any state-level policies that may reduce the impact of declining enrollment on education funding. This report presents an analysis of the policy scan and summarizes the key findings of the policy scan including trends in education funding formulas, funding, and enrollment protections across the United States. Key findings covered in this report include: the type of education funding formulas in each state; the metrics these formulas use to measure enrollment; as well as the declining enrollment; hold harmless, and temporary provisions for enrollment and funding protections identified in the initial policy scan. This policy scan analysis is part of a series of studies that will enable EdChoice to examine the broader landscape of the impact of declining enrollment on school funding and related policies across the United States. The full version of the policy scan can be found in "How States Protect Funding for K-12 Public Schools. State Profiles Index."

During the pandemic, a number of states instituted hold-harmless funding policies to protect school district financially from declining enrollments (Center for Public Education, 2021). In addition, some school choice policies have protected traditional public schools financially from declining enrollments. Together, these policies raise the question of whether competitive effects can exist in a policy environment of reduced financial pressure. Theoretically, despite the lack of financial pressure, schools could feel competitive pressure in other ways including a loss of reputation as students move to schools of choice (Epple, Romono, & Urquiola, 2017; Friedman, 1962; MacLeod & Urquiola, 2009; Urquiola, 2016). To provide insights on whether schools can improve without the threat of financial loss, we examine the Seoul school choice program which introduced autonomous private high schools (APHSs) in the context in which there is equalized funding across schools. More specifically, we examine whether competition induced by APHSs affects the achievement of students attending traditional public and private schools. The effect of APHSs is identified by exploiting plausible exogenous APHSs' entry through the random assignment of students. We find a small and positive effect of APHS penetration on the Korean and English achievement of private school students while finding no effects for traditional public schools, which have limited ability to respond.

Implementation of ESA programs will not be easy. The ESA model is novel and foreign to most state education agencies, which have little to no experience with helping families purchase a wide variety of educational goods and services using government funds. Even if agencies had the relevant experience, ESA programs are complex, involving millions of individual transactions as thousands of families make purchases from thousands of schools and other education providers. EdChoice developed this guide to help state agencies succeed as they roll out ESA programs. EdChoice's goal is to ensure that ESA programs achieve their purpose: to empower families to choose the best education for their children.

Americans are dissatisfied with the public school system--and student academic outcomes have fallen to historic lows. Increasingly, state lawmakers are responding by giving parents more options for their children's education. Some of these new opportunities, such as in Arkansas and Iowa, allow every child in the state to apply. Policymakers also took crucial steps to protect parents' rights as the primary caregivers for their children. Several states adopted new parent bills of rights or prohibited attempts by schools to withhold information from parents about their children. All these reforms, including efforts to eliminate the racial prejudice caused by colleges' so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, are crucial changes that will give students more opportunities to succeed in school and in life. This "Backgrounder" lists the new state policies and describes the features of these laws.

The growth of homeschooling from a somewhat fringe movement during the 1970s and 1980s to a more widespread and socially accepted approach in recent decades has provided a strong foundation of flexible learning models. When Florida's school choice expansion, House Bill 1, was introduced in January 2023, one of its goals was to allow more homeschoolers to participate in the education savings account (ESA) program. But many homeschoolers and homeschool advocacy groups balked at the proposal. Having worked hard to achieve independence, they were loath to be linked to government funding. Even if the program were optional, they feared that associated regulations would eventually extend to traditional homeschoolers. In the end, the bill passed with new language that satisfied traditional homeschoolers by creating a new option for parents to educate their children at home. As states continue to enact and expand education savings accounts, Colleen Hroncich argues that it is crucial that policymakers craft bills in a way that maximizes freedom and minimizes roadblocks.