A Review of the Empirical Research on Private School Choice

Abstract

Parents in the United States have had the legal right to choose the school their child attends for a long time. Traditionally, parental school choice took the form of families moving to a neighborhood with good public schools or self-financing private schooling. Contemporary education policies allow parents in many areas to choose from among public schools in neighboring districts, public magnet schools, public charter schools, private schools through the use of a voucher or tax-credit scholarship, virtual schools, or even homeschooling. The newest form of school choice is education savings accounts (ESAs), which make a portion of the funds that a state spends on children in public schools available to their parents in spending accounts that they can use to customize their children's education. Opponents claim that expanding private school choice yields no additional benefits to participants and generates significant harms to the students “left behind” in traditional public schools. A review of the empirical research on private school choice finds evidence that private school choice delivers some benefits to participating students—particularly in the area of educational attainment—and tends to help, albeit to a limited degree, the achievement of students who remain in public schools.

Notes

Specifically, homeschooling accounts for 3.6% (Snyder & Dillow, 2015), charter schools account for 5.1% (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2015), and tax credit/voucher programs account for 0.6% (Frendeway et al., 2015).

For instance, a student entering 9th grade in a town in which the public schools only serve kindergarten through 8th grade would qualify for the town tuitioning program.

We consider acceptable research methods to be any technique that might plausibly account for the “endogeneity” problem in evaluating the effect of choice-based competition on the performance of schools (see Figlio & Hart, 2014 for a thorough explanation). The essence of this problem is that schools of choice tend to locate, and participation in choice programs tends to be more popular, around low-performing public schools. If one simply measures the average performance of the public schools most affected by choice-based competition, one would be tempted to conclude that more choice leads to lower performance in affected schools. That conclusion might be incorrect, since low public school performance produces the need for alternative school choices in the first place. Social scientists use a variety of methods, such as instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, natural experiments, and school fixed-effects to address this endogeneity problem. We accept all of the studies that use any of these techniques into our sample for review.

Table 2 Competitive Effects of Private School Choice Programs in the United States