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I know y’all are going to find this hard to believe, but a press release touting a recent study was over the top and could lead casual readers to misunderstand the paper’s findings. Since this never happens, I’ll give you a moment to take a few deep breaths and come to grips with what happened. […]
Oklahoma helps more than an estimated 2,500 families afford private school through its tax-credit scholarship and voucher programs, but do kids in this fairly rural state actually have nearby private school options to choose from? Which communities have private schools, and which don’t? And how quickly can families in the Sooner State transport their children […]
This week, the Institute for Education Sciences released a new report on the performance of the District of Columbia’s Opportunity Scholarship Program. This is the second report of the second evaluation of the program. To cut to the chase, the topline findings of the study are not encouraging. Two years after application, voucher lottery […]
Introductory courses in economics usually focus on perfect competition and why markets are more efficient than other institutional arrangements, such as monopolies or oligopolies. Under certain conditions, markets will generate the best outcomes for consumers and society. In the words of economists, markets achieve equilibrium when the quantity consumers demand of a good or service […]
In case you didn’t know, Chile has what we call a universal school voucher system. That is, it funds public education by allowing public funds to follow students to whatever public or private schools they choose, and it has operated this way since 1981. As school choice programs gain steam across the United States, it’s […]
When the diocese in Memphis shut down the once promising Jubilee Catholic Schools, I was surprised like many others in the Catholic education community. What happened, and what can we learn from it? There is a range of views, but a diagnosis of lessons learned from what we can see from outside Memphis is in […]
South Carolina already has a tax-credit scholarship and individual tax credit for families of students with special needs, and existing South Carolina private schools seem open to participating in a general education savings account (ESA) program, another form of flexible private school choice. But where exactly are South Carolina private schools located? Which communities have […]
In 2014, Andrew Kelly and I wrote Sector Switchers: Why Catholic Schools Convert to Charters and What Happens Next, an examination of 18 formerly Catholic schools that had “converted” (sorry, we couldn’t help ourselves) into charter schools. With the recent news that the much-vaunted Jubilee Catholic schools in Memphis were looking to pursue the Catholic-to-charter […]
Collin Hitt of Southern Illinois School of Medicine, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas and I have a new working paper out with the American Enterprise Institute that challenges some fundamental assumptions about how we evaluate school choice programs. One of the advantages research on school choice programs has is that we have data […]
School choice research has increasingly focused on educational attainment—that is, measuring the impact on high school and college graduation, higher education enrollment, employment status and income rather than standardized test scores. Two new high-quality studies released recently continue this trend. In this post, we’ll break down those studies, highlight the results and contextualize them within […]