School choice is intended to generate competition between schools largely to leverage new and better educational opportunities for disadvantaged students. Yet we know very little about how competition impacts whole populations of schools, or different types of schools, in distributing different educational options across segregated social landscapes. This analysis maps new educational options for families, as different types of charter schools respond to market competition within a highly competitive and segregated environment – examining school and organizational strategies in “positioning” themselves within metropolitan Detroit in order to measure the overall impact of these strategies on alternatives for disadvantaged students. Dynamic mapping illuminates the kinds of charter schools that have opened, relocated, and closed relative to socioeconomic and demographic distributions in neighborhoods, providing a comprehensive picture of supply-side responses to competition since the emergence of choice policies. We offer a brief outline of the policy context, considering the primary equity impetus for choice, and the policy implications as they are expected to reverberate through the organizational behavior of schools. Then we present a more complex theoretical framework for understanding likely strategic responses from organizations in competitive education markets. In doing this, we draw on theories from the literatures on industrial organizations and locational theories as they apply to what we are calling “local education markets.” We then describe the geo-spatial analyses, providing graphic maps to represent the patterns evident in this case. The concluding discussion offers a brief overview of the equity implications for employing the profit motive to expand educational access.
This paper uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and dynamic mapping to examine student enrollments in New Jersey charter schools. Consistent with previous research, we find evidence of increased racial segregation. Greater percentages of African-Americans attend charter schools than reside in surrounding areas. We add to the existing charter school literature by more fully considering the importance of charter school supply and examining student enrollments across three geographic scales: school districts, census tracts and block groups. We demonstrate that racial segregation is most severe within charter schools’ immediate neighborhoods (i.e. block groups), suggesting that analyses comparing charter schools to larger school districts or nearby public schools may misrepresent student sorting. This finding appears to result from the tendency of charter schools in New Jersey to cluster just outside predominately African-American neighborhoods, encircling the residential locations of the students they are most likely to enroll.
This study explores how teacher matters in improving early childhood performance in US kindergartens. We find that it is what teachers do rather than the credentials they hold that matters. Different from previous research on the effect of teacher quality on student achievement, this paper first rejected the common practice of using teacher credentials, such as degree levels and certificate status, to measure teacher quality in the context of early childhood education. Based on the 'overlapping spheres' framework, this study then examines the behavioural aspects of teachers; specifically, we focus on teacher's role in establishing and maintaining a good teacher-parent relationship. Our findings suggest that teacher-parent interaction is a positive determinant of student performance. The behavioural aspects of teaching appear to shape the transformation from a mere 'qualified' teacher into a 'quality' teacher, and should receive more attention in future studies on teacher quality.
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