Do Charters Pose a Threat to Private Schools? Evidence from Nationally Representative Surveys of U.S. Parents

ABSTRACT

Charter schools increasingly challenge both district and private schools for student enrollments in the United States. With more parents able to choose among the sectors, the success of each in attracting students will turn in part on the levels of satisfaction provided to families who enroll. We analyze data from two nationally representative surveys of parental perceptions. Private school parents are the most satisfied with the climate, student behavior, and school-to-parent communications in their child’s school, but the gap between private school parents and charter parents is much less than the one between private school parents and those in district schools. We find little difference across sectors in satisfaction with school infrastructure and in school–parent communications about student behavior. Because charters, like district schools, are free, this narrowing of the satisfaction gap between the tuition-based and free school sectors may erode the size of the private sector.

KEYWORDS:

• parents
• public charter schools
• private schools
• public opinion

Acknowledgements

We thank Ron Zimmer and Emmerich Davies for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also thank participants at the Association for Education Finance and Policy 42nd annual conference and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance’s Learning from the Long-term Effects of School Choice in America conference for their comments. Support for this research was received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, William E. Simon Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Charters, chosen-district, and assigned-district schools all claim to be public schools; to avoid confusion, we avoid that term and identify each sector by more specific terms.

2. We recognize that families are able to choose their assigned district school by moving to the neighborhood of that school’s catchment area. However, we limit the use of the term chosen-district to refer to district schools in cases where respondents said their child did not attend a school that had been regularly assigned to them. Magnet schools and open enrollment district schools are examples of chosen-district schools (Noel et al., 2016).

3. For more information about the survey methodology employed by Knowledge Networks see http://www.knowledgenetworks.com/knpanel/docs/knowledgepanel(R)-design-summary-description.pdf

4. In the EdNext2016 sample, we are unable to differentiate between parents in assigned and nonassigned district schools. We, henceforth, refer to parents belonging to either of these two groups simply as those in district schools when referring to the EdNext2016 sample.

Additional information

Funding

We thank Ron Zimmer and Emmerich Davies for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also thank participants at the Association for Education Finance and Policy 42nd annual conference and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance’s Learning from the Long-term Effects of School Choice in America conference for their comments. Support for this research was received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, William E. Simon Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.