Over the past two decades, state and federal education policies have tried to hold schools more accountable for educating students by tying rewards and sanctions to test scores and other measurable outcomes. A common criticism of these policies is that they may induce schools to “game the...

The Milwaukee voucher program, as implemented in 1990, allowed only nonsectarian private schools to participate in the program. However, following a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, the program was expanded to include religious private schools in 1998. This second phase of the voucher program led...

This paper examines the effects of constraints in a Tiebout framework applied to school finance reforms. We use data from Michigan, which enacted a comprehensive school finance reform in 1994 that, in effect, ended local discretion over school spending. This scenario affords us a unique...

This paper examines the impact of vouchers in general and voucher design in particular on public school performance. It argues that all voucher programs are not created equal. There are often fundamental differences in voucher designs that affect public school incentives differently and induce...

This paper analyzes the effect of school vouchers on student sorting--defined as a flight to private schools by high-income and committed public-school students--and whether vouchers can be designed to reduce or eliminate it. Much of the existing literature investigates sorting in cases where...

Charter schools have been one of the most important dimensions of recent school reform measures in the United States. Currently, there are more than 4,500 charter schools spread across forty U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Though there have been numerous studies on the effects of...

This working paper considers how two existing policy tools--investment tax credits and charter schools--could be combined to raise operating funds for charter schools that successfully close the poverty-related academic achievement gap. Some charter schools have succeeded in dramatically...

The No Child Left Behind law mandated the institution of adequate yearly progress (AYP) objectives, on which schools are assigned a pass or fail. Fail status is associated with negative publicity and often sanctions. In this paper, I study the incentives and responses of schools that failed AYP...

While there is a rich literature that investigates whether accountability regimes induce schools to manipulate their test-taking population by strategically excluding weaker students, no study thus far investigates whether voucher programs induce schools to engage in similar strategic behavior....

In this paper, I analyze the behavior of public schools facing vouchers. The literature on the effects of voucher programs on public schools typically focuses on student and mean school scores. This paper tries to go inside the black box to investigate some of the ways in which schools facing...