K-12 education policy has recently received much scrutiny from policymakers, taxpayers, parents, and students. Reformers have often cited increases in spending with little noticeable gain in test scores, coupled with the fact that American students lag behind their foreign peers on standardized...

In this article, I evaluate the effects of the EdChoice voucher program on the academic performance of traditional public schools. Specifically, I investigate how exposure to the threat of losing students to the voucher program affected standardized test performance in traditional public...

There is a persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than do small independent schools. Skeptics counter that large, centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster...

Charter schools are publicly funded schools that have considerable independence from public school districts in their curriculum development and staffing decisions, and their enrollments have increased substantially over the past two decades. Charter schools are changing public and private...

Policy makers periodically consider using student assignment policies to improve educational outcomes by altering the socio-economic and academic skill composition of schools. We exploit the quasi-random reassignment of students across schools in the Wake County Public School System to estimate...

Expanding parental choice in education may increase system-wide productivity if parents select schools that form a specifically good match with their children. I investigate the effect of attending a preferred school on student achievement in London primary schools. I exploit as good as random...

This paper's study of Connecticut's education costs can serve as the foundation of an equitable and adequate state education aid formula. To the best of the author's knowledge, it is the first cost function study of Connecticut public K–12 education. The author uses a regression model to...

In the past 15 years, four-year-olds' enrollment in state-funded pre-kindergarten in the United States has doubled, and advocates have pushed for further expansion. Although research has shown that pre-K programs can have important benefits, most existing studies have focused on small or...

This paper explores the dynamic relationship between school choices made at different educational stages and how it affects racial segregation across schools. We use New York City public school choice data to ask: "How does the middle school that a student attends affect her high school...

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging three alternative identification strategies, we explore how increase in access to charter schools in twelve districts in Florida affects students remaining in traditional public schools (TPS). We...