Search Results
Working Paper
The Pathway to Enrolling in a High-Performance High School: Understanding Barriers to Access
In 2017, Chicago Public Schools adopted an online universal application system for all high schools with the hope of providing more equitable access to high-performance schools. Despite the new system, Black students and students living in low-socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods remained less likely than their peers to enroll in a high-performance high school. In this paper, we characterize various constraints that students and families may face in enrolling in a high-performance high school including eligibility to programs based on prior academic achievement, distance from ...
Report
University choice: the role of expected earnings, non-pecuniary outcomes, and financial constraints
We investigate the determinants of students? university choice, with a focus on expected monetary returns, non-pecuniary factors enjoyed at school, and financial constraints, in the Pakistani context. To mitigate the identification problem concerning the separation of preferences, expectations, and markets constraints, we combine rich data on individual-specific subjective expectations about labor market and non-pecuniary outcomes, with direct measures of financial constraints and students? stated school choice both with and without financial constraints. Estimates from a life-cycle model ...
Journal Article
Spotlight: Educational opportunity: Does low-income housing tax credit hurt nearby schools?
The largest federal program designed to increase the rental housing supply for poor working families helps them find living space in decent neighborhoods with good schools. It also encounters frequent neighborhood opposition.
Working Paper
The Illusion of School Choice: Empirical Evidence from Barcelona
School choice aims to improve (1) the matching between children and schools and (2) students? educa-tional outcomes. Yet, the concern is that disadvantaged families are less able to exercise choice, which raises (3) equity concerns. The Boston mechanism (BM) is a procedure that is widely used around the world to resolve overdemands for particular schools by defining a set of priority points based on neigh-borhood and socioeconomic characteristics. The mechanism design literature has shown that under the BM, parents may not have incentives to provide their true preferences, thereby ...
Journal Article
Measuring the effect of school choice on economic outcomes
In measuring the returns to education, economists usually focus on the number of years of schooling. But many people would say that the quality of schooling matters, too, even at the high school level. Does the type of high school attended make a difference in future income?
Journal Article
Choice, charters, and public school competition
In the last century, public schools changed in ways that dramatically reduced the control that parents have over their local schools. Regaining that control is one key to improving the quality of our schools, and giving students a choice of schools is one way of increasing the influence that parents have over the way schools are run. Several types of school choice have arisen in recent years, including magnet and charter schools. But when these are reviewed in terms of outcomes and incentives, charter schools are found to have a much better chance of providing the competitive pressure ...
Conference Paper
Choice, charters, and public-school competition
Working Paper
School desegregation, school choice and changes in residential location patterns by race
This paper examines the residential location and school choice responses to desegregation of large public school districts. Unique data and variation in the timing of desegregation orders facilitate the analysis. The 16 percent decline in white public enrollment due to desegregation primarily led to migration to suburban districts in the South and increased private enrollment in other regions. Desegregation caused black public enrollment to increase by 20 percent outside the South largely due to population changes. The spatial distributions of responses by race to desegregation orders closely ...
Journal Article
Vouchers and the Cleveland Scholarship Program: little progress so far
Voucher programs are intended to raise the academic achievement of students, but, unfortunately, so far the evidence suggests that Cleveland?s voucher students perform no better than their counterparts in public schools.
Conference Paper
The toughest battleground: schools
Over four decades ago, Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman 1962). This insightful little book traveled across a broad range of important topics collected around the theme of how government can best operate within a free society. The message was expanded two decades later in Free to Choose (Friedman and Friedman 1980). At the time, the battle of the ideas introduced by these books was being waged by nations, nations that were willing to contemplate war over how societies should be organized. As we look back on how the world has changed since then, I wonder if anybody ...