This report presents descriptive analyses of the enrollment patterns, background characteristics, test scores, and graduation rates of students enrolled in three types of public high schools in Philadelphia: alternative disciplinary schools; alternative accelerated schools for students who...

Vouchers and charters are two of the most ambitious attempts to improve school performance through parental choice and privatization of governance. The updated edition of this book (which was first released in 2001) summarizes new empirical evidence on the achievement impacts of voucher programs...

This report presents trends on the implementation of Title I parental choice options from the National Longitudinal Study of No Child Left Behind and the Study of State Implementation of Accountability and Teacher Quality Under No Child Left Behind. In 2006-2007, 6.9 million students were...

The federal Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students (PLUS) program provides loans to parents of dependent undergraduate students to help pay for education expenses. To bring the standards in line with those used by banks, the U.S. Department of Education tightened the credit standards for PLUS...

The primary lever American policymakers have used to improve school performance is “accountability” in the form of high-stakes testing. But the behavioral literature, overlooked in the education policy debate, shows that accountability exists in a variety of forms that evoke different...

Since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,000 in 40 states, serving more than 2 million students. Various studies have examined charter schools’ impacts on test scores, and a few have begun to examine longer-term outcomes including graduation and...