Despite the prevalence of charter schools in the United States, few experimental studies evaluate the impact of charter school attendance on students in the early elementary grades. Using data from a randomized lottery in which kindergarten students and their parents applied to two oversubscribed and well-established charter schools in Denver,…

This article examines the high school search activities, choices, and final assignments of academically similar, but ethnically and socioeconomically different, eighth-grade students attending one New York City middle school. Despite being comparable candidates for admission to academically competitive high schools, the middle-class children of…

Set in the context of a choice-saturated public school system, this study examines the school choice process of low-income parents who participated in Louisiana's 2008 voucher program. Based on semistructured interviews with 16 parents at 1 Catholic school, we report that spirituality, small class and school size, character/values,…

A special tabulation of individual student scores from the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test allowed a ranking of Texas schools according to test score changes ("value added"). The rankings varied greatly by student subpopulation. That is, the vast majority of schools are much more effective with some kinds of students than others.…

Arizona's interdistrict open enrollment and charter schools laws allow families to send their children to the public schools of their choice. We assessed how public school choice affected elementary school enrollments in 27 metropolitan Phoenix school districts. Student mobility rates varied widely between districts and by location. The higher…

Gendered schooling is growing in the United States, but little research exists on single-sex classes in public elementary schools. This study sought to find out if single-sex classes in two elementary schools made a difference in boys' reading gains in 2008-2009, as judged by scores on the state's annual literacy test. In one school, boys in the…

Since the 2002-2003 academic year, the number of students attending and number of charter schools has grown. Yet, unknown are the comparative performance of charter schools as well as any factors, such as the market-based theory of competition, which may contribute to differences. Using geographic information systems and hierarchical linear…

This article examines the position of charter schools in prospective elementary teachers' job search decisions. Using a labor market segmentation framework, it explores teacher applicants' decisions to apply to charter schools. The data come from a mixed-methods longitudinal study of prospective teachers looking for their first job. This article…

The aim of this article is to outline some major defining aspects of the Swedish controlled school market and to describe and analyze how a number of urban school leaders in the Swedish cities of Stockholm and Malmo define, understand, and respond to the competition they see. Based on interviews with school leaders and research on a wide range of…

Many educational researchers have identified issues on classifying schools and some have made use of ad-hoc classification systems in their analyses; however, these solutions are generally one-dimensional, which prohibits them from capturing the full breadth of variation among schools. To understand the amount of variation that exist in schools…

One of the key claims of choice advocates is that it will take diverse schooling options to engage all children in learning. In a school system truly open to new providers of instruction and diverse schooling options, private schools and public schools of choice can vie for customers by trying different subject themes and pedagogies. If a school's…

Pressing questions about the merits of full-fledged market accountability in K-12 education, and more limited choice programs, have spawned a large scholarly literature. This article assesses what we know from the most prominent studies and the importance of those findings to school system reform discussions. The studies most widely cited in the…

In this paper I develop indices capturing business/market and nonprofit/mission characteristics of charter schools that can be used to explain many of their observed operational and political choices. This improves on earlier research using only a binary variable classifying charter schools as market or mission rather than letting them take on…

School choice is one of the most frequent recommendations for education reform in the United States today. Unfortunately, the debates are hindered by the lack of a common taxonomy or framework for discussing and evaluating the wide variety of school choice programs available in the United States. Furthermore, there is little information on the…

School empowerment and weighted student formula programs continue to grow across the United States. This article explores the key components of school empowerment programs and describes several existing programs from Baltimore to San Francisco. The article examines some of the anecdotal outcomes for these types of public school choice programs.…