Download or read book Expanding School Quality Through Choice Twenty Years of Charters in Newark softcover written by Karen Thomas and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written, debated, and learned about whether the intent of charter schools and their relationship to traditional public schools has been realized. The goal has always been to make things better for all children and to offer parents a quality choice. In the City of Newark both the quantity and quality of offerings made available to families over the past twenty years have brought progress and promise. This book through the voice of various stakeholders is a chronicle of what has taken place in the City of Newark, New Jersey.

Download or read book The Economics of School Choice written by Caroline M. Hoxby and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared school voucher programs constitutional, the many unanswered questions concerning the potential effects of school choice will become especially pressing. Contributors to this volume draw on state-of-the-art economic methods to answer some of these questions, investigating the ways in which school choice affects a wide range of issues. Combining the results of empirical research with analyses of the basic economic forces underlying local education markets, The Economics of School Choice presents evidence concerning the impact of school choice on student achievement, school productivity, teachers, and special education. It also tackles difficult questions such as whether school choice affects where people decide to live and how choice can be integrated into a system of school financing that gives children from different backgrounds equal access to resources. Contributors discuss the latest findings on Florida's school choice program as well as voucher programs and charter schools in several other states. The resulting volume not only reveals the promise of school choice, but examines its pitfalls as well, showing how programs can be designed that exploit the idea's potential but avoid its worst effects. With school choice programs gradually becoming both more possible and more popular, this book stands out as an essential exploration of the effects such programs will have, and a necessary resource for anyone interested in the idea of school choice.

Download or read book Expanding School Quality Through Choice written by Karen Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written, debated, and learned about whether the intent of charter schools and their relationship to traditional public schools has been realized. The goal has always been to make things better for all children and to offer parents a quality choice. In the City of Newark both the quantity and quality of offerings made available to families over the past twenty years have brought progress and promise. This book through the voice of various stakeholders is a chronicle of what has taken place in the City of Newark, New Jersey.

Download or read book Can Families Always Get What They Want Families Perceptions of School Quality and Their Effects on School Choice Decisions written by Helen Marie Miamidian and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sociology

Download or read book Review of Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education written by Janelle Scott and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education" presents a seemingly egalitarian prescription for the federal government to expand school choice. An examination of the arguments and evidence for increasing choice, however, reveals at least three important shortcomings. First, the authors tend to overuse research that is still in progress and research produced by advocacy organizations and think tanks, leading them to be overly optimistic about particular school choice reforms' effects on educational achievement, access and equity. The second oversight is the neglect of important scholarship, causing the authors to fail to acknowledge the complex social and political dynamics informing parental choice processes as well as choice schools' practices that limit and shape their student enrollments. A third shortcoming emerges from this omission: the authors do not sufficiently consider issues of diversity, including the social categories of race, ethnicity, special education, and English Learners. They fail to acknowledge that some school choice reforms have had segregative effects. As such, in the singular pursuit of their goal to universally expand school choice the authors miss an opportunity to affirm the federal role in ensuring the creation of diverse, equitable, and high-quality choice schools that would produce individual and societal benefits. (Contains 22 notes.) [This paper reviews the following document: "Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education" (ED508201).].

Download or read book Choosing Choice written by David Nathan Plank and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first cross-national comparative study on school choice policies, this volume features prominent scholars who analyze experiences in countries around the world, England, Chile, South Africa, the Czech Republic, China, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden. Together, they answer such important questions as: Why are policies that expand educational options being adopted in such a diverse set of countries? Why have governments in widely varying circumstances come to view school choice as an apt response to educational dilemmas? What have we learned about the impacts of these policies on existing educational systems and the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom? The analyses presented here illuminate school choice policies as a critical worldwide development in education, noting both similarities and differences across countries. This volume broadens our understanding of school choice on the world stage while exploring implications for education policy in the United States.

Download or read book Choosing Schools written by Mark Schneider and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.

Download or read book New and Better Schools written by Michael Q. McShane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decade, the number of students enrolled in private school choice programs has grown ten-fold. But granting students access to public financing for their private education has not led to the vibrant marketplace of school options many of its supporters envisioned. If school choice policy is to improve the American education landscape, careful thought must be put in to understand how it can expand existing high quality schools and create new high quality schools to serve more children. New and Better Schools attacks this problem from the perspective of both researchers and practitioners, documenting the hurdles entrepreneurial school leaders face and offering a way forward.

Download or read book Private Schools and School Choice in Compulsory Education written by Thomas Koinzer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marketization and privatization in compulsory education have spread around the globe. School choice is seen by many to be the panacea to develop the quality of schools and improve school systems worldwide. Additionally in many countries several types of private schools expand and change the school landscapes. The articles of the anthology analyse and discuss these changes in several countries and ask to what extent and in which ways school choice and the growth of private school play a role for education policies and education systems. Which political and civil society actors are active in formulating and promoting school choice and private schooling? And to what extent does the expansion of private schools and school choice address questions of educational inequality and social segregation.

Download or read book Why America Needs School Choice written by Jay P Greene and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2011-07-19 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expanding school choice and competition is the single most important action we can take to improve America's schools. Although school choice faces strong opposition from powerful teacher unions and their entrenched political allies, expanding choice via vouchers, charters, and tax credits has repeatedly been shown to improve student achievement, reduce segregation, promote civic values, and facilitate other productive reforms. This eloquent Broadside outlines the case for school choice and shows how it is the most appealing strategy for anyone serious about educational reform.

Download or read book Handbook of Research on School Choice written by Mark Berends and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated to reflect the latest developments and increasing scope of school-based options, the second edition of the Handbook of Research on School Choice makes readily available the most rigorous and policy-relevant research on K–12 school choice. This comprehensive research handbook begins with scholarly overviews that explore historical, political, economic, legal, methodological, and international perspectives on school choice. In the following sections, experts examine the research and current state of common forms of school choice: charter schools, school vouchers, and magnet schools. The concluding section brings together perspectives on other key topics such as accountability, tax credit scholarships, parent decision-making, and marginalized students. With empirical perspectives on all aspects of this evolving sphere of education, this is a critical resource for researchers, faculty, and students interested in education policy, the politics of education, and educational leadership.

Download or read book The Impact of Public School Choice written by Christopher Campos and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools' academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

Download or read book Expanding Educational Opportunity Through School Choice written by United States. Congress and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expanding educational opportunity through school choice : hearing before the Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourteenth Congress, second session, hearing held in Washington, DC, February 3, 2016.

Download or read book Choosing Homes Choosing Schools written by Annette Lareau and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of policy shifts over the past decade promises to change how Americans decide where to send their children to school. In theory, the boom in standardized test scores and charter schools will allow parents to evaluate their assigned neighborhood school, or move in search of a better option. But what kind of data do parents actually use while choosing schools? Are there differences among suburban and urban families? How do parents’ choices influence school and residential segregation in America? Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools presents a breakthrough analysis of the new era of school choice, and what it portends for American neighborhoods. The distinguished contributors to Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools investigate the complex relationship between education, neighborhood social networks, and larger patterns of inequality. Paul Jargowsky reviews recent trends in segregation by race and class. His analysis shows that segregation between blacks and whites has declined since 1970, but remains extremely high. Moreover, white families with children are less likely than childless whites to live in neighborhoods with more minority residents. In her chapter, Annette Lareau draws on interviews with parents in three suburban neighborhoods to analyze school-choice decisions. Surprisingly, she finds that middle- and upper-class parents do not rely on active research, such as school tours or test scores. Instead, most simply trust advice from friends and other people in their network. Their decision-making process was largely informal and passive. Eliot Weinginer complements this research when he draws from his data on urban parents. He finds that these families worry endlessly about the selection of a school, and that parents of all backgrounds actively consider alternatives, including charter schools. Middle- and upper-class parents relied more on federally mandated report cards, district websites, and online forums, while working-class parents use network contacts to gain information on school quality. Little previous research has explored what role school concerns play in the preferences of white and minority parents for particular neighborhoods. Featuring innovative work from more than a dozen scholars, Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools adroitly addresses this gap and provides a firmer understanding of how Americans choose where to live and send their children to school.

Download or read book School Choice around the World written by Christopher J. Counihan and published by London Publishing Partnership. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays examines the empirical evidence on school choice in different countries across Europe, North America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It demonstrates the advantages which choice offers in different institutional contexts, whether it be Free Schools in the UK, voucher systems in Sweden or private-proprietor schools for low-income families in Liberia. Everywhere experience suggests that parents are ‘active choosers’: they make rational and considered decisions, drawing on available evidence and responding to incentives which vary from context to context. Government educators frequently downplay the importance of choice and try to constrain the options parents have. But they face increasing resistance: the evidence is that informed parents drive improvements in school quality. Where state education in some developing countries is particularly bad, private bottom-up provision is preferred even though it costs parents money which they can ill-afford. This book is both a collection of inspiring case studies and a call to action.

Download or read book School Choice School Quality and Human Capital written by Christopher R. Walters and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays covering topics in the economics of education. Two common threads connect these essays: first, a focus on the inputs and practices driving variation in effectiveness across educational programs; and second, an interest in the relationships between students' preferences, characteristics, and returns to human capital investment. In the first chapter, I develop and estimate a structural model of school choice that links students' decisions to apply to and attend charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts to their potential achievement test scores in charter schools and public schools. This chapter is motivated by a growing literature that uses randomized entrance lotteries to show that urban charter schools, including those in Boston, substantially increase test scores and close racial achievement gaps among their applicants. A key policy question is whether charter expansion is likely to produce similar effects on a larger scale. To address this question, I use the structural model to predict the effects of charter expansion for the citywide achievement distribution in Boston. Estimates of the model suggest that charter applicants are negatively selected on achievement gains: low-income students and students with low prior achievement gain the most from charter attendance, but are unlikely to apply to charter schools. This form of selection implies that lottery-based estimates understate gains for broader groups of students, and that charter schools will produce substantial gains for marginal applicants drawn in by expansion. Simulations suggest that realistic expansions are likely to reduce the gap in math scores between Boston and the rest of Massachusetts by up to 8 percent, and reduce racial achievement gaps by roughly 5 percent. Nevertheless, the estimates also imply that perceived application costs are high and that most students prefer traditional public schools to charter schools, so large expansions may leave many charter seats empty. These results suggest that in the absence of significant behavioral or institutional changes, the potential gains from charter expansion may be limited as much by demand as by supply. The second chapter, written jointly with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak, seeks to explain differences in effectiveness across charter schools. Using a large sample of lotteried applicants to charter schools throughout Massachusetts, we show that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We then explore student-level and school-level explanations for this difference. In an econometric framework that isolates sources of charter effect heterogeneity, we show that urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond that of urban public school students, while non-urban charters reduce achievement from a higher baseline. Student demographics explain some of these gains since urban charters are most effective for non-whites and low-baseline achievers. At the same time, non-urban charter schools are uniformly ineffective. Our estimates also reveal important school-level heterogeneity within the urban charter sample. A non-lottery analysis suggests that urban charters with binding, well-documented admissions lotteries generate larger score gains than under-subscribed urban charter schools with poor lottery records. Using a detailed survey of school practices and characteristics, we link charter impacts to inputs such as instructional time, classroom techniques and school philosophy. The relative effectiveness of urban lottery-sample charters is accounted for by these schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to urban education, a package of policies that includes strict discipline, increased instructional time, selective teacher-hiring, and a focus on traditional skills. In the third chapter, I use data from the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS), a nationwide randomized trial of the Head Start program, to study the relationship between site-level treatment effects and educational inputs within Head Start. Studies of small-scale, intensive early-childhood programs, including the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project, show that such programs can have transformative effects on human capital and economic outcomes. Evidence for larger-scale programs like Head Start is more mixed. I use the HSIS data to ask whether Head Start centers using practices more similar to successful model programs produce larger short-run effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. My results show that while there is significant variation in effectiveness across Head Start centers, centers that are more similar to the Perry Preschool Project on observed dimensions are not more effective. Specifically, Head Start centers using the High/Scope curriculum, the centerpiece of the Perry experiment, do not produce larger gains relative to other centers. Other inputs often cited as essential to the success of the Perry Project, including teacher education, teacher certification, teacher/student ratios, instructional time, and frequency of home visiting, are also unrelated to effectiveness in Head Start. These results suggest that replicating the success of small-scale programs may be difficult, as the effectiveness of such programs may be due to idiosyncratic, unmeasured inputs. JEL Classification: 121, C51, J24

Download or read book Governed by Choice written by Jonathan Michael Valant and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How families choose schools for their children can shape those children's social, academic, and cultural experiences. It can also shape the schools that educate and socialize our young. Increasingly, school choice is being used as an education reform strategy, with charter schools, magnet schools, private school vouchers, and open enrollment programs providing low-cost opportunities for families to select from an assortment of nearby schools. School choice advocates often invoke a type of market logic whereby loving parents who know their children intimately make careful, informed school choices, generating pressures for schools to offer appealing, high-quality programs or risk succumbing to under-enrollment. However, these "demand side" pressures can go wrong, yielding education systems that poorly serve the goals that societies have for their schools. First, families could make choices that are inconsistent with their desires. For example, if school choosers are uninformed or misinformed about their options, they might choose schools that are poorly suited to their children's needs while their aggregated choices fail to support and reward high-quality schools. Second, families' desires for their own children's schools could be inconsistent with the broader public's goals for its education systems. For example, if families choose schools that intensely focus on advancing their own children's private success, then schools might underserve more collective interests related to society's political, social, and economic wellbeing. This dissertation explores the desires and behaviors of school choosers, examining where demand side pressures might go wrong and how school choice policies and programs can be strengthened. The dissertation features three empirical articles. The first two articles use experimental and quasi-experimental methods to assess the effects of providing school choosers with information about their options. I find that school choosers' beliefs and behaviors are highly malleable but do not always respond to the provision of information about schools in predictable ways. Parents and children respond differently to the same information, and while formal government ratings can change opinions of schools, they are less influential than the types of comments that people regularly hear through their social networks. The third article examines what school choosers and the American public desire from schools, testing the hypothesis that parents would like schools to pursue their children's private wellbeing -- at the expense of our collective political, social, and economic wellbeing -- to a much greater extent than the public would like. Using randomized experiments with a large, nationally representative sample, I show that parents' and the public's desire for schools are more similar than what is commonly hypothesized. In an era when school choice is a cornerstone of many education reform efforts, improving our understanding of how people choose schools -- and how we can support them as they do -- improves our ability to construct sensible education policies and programs.