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Richard Buddin is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. His research focuses on how school choice, teacher quality, and education reforms affect student outcomes. E-mail: buddin@rand.org [V]ouchers have not gained traction in the United States and … advocates have gravitated toward charter schools as a means of introducing competition into the provision of educational services.… A premise of charter school initiatives has been that these schools have direct benefi ts for the students attending them and indirect benefi ts for other students by creating competition for traditional public schools to improve their performance. Th is study uses a two-pronged approach to assess whether California charter schools are having indirect eff ects on students in traditional public schools. First, we examine how traditional public school principals react to the introduction of charter schools. Second, we assess whether competition from nearby charters is aff ecting student achievement outcomes for students that remain in traditional public schools. Th e survey results show that traditional public school principals felt little competitive pressure from charters. Similarly, the student achievement analysis shows that charter competition was not improving the performance of traditional public schools. Th ese results suggest that California charter schools are having little eff ect on the climate of traditional public schools.

Since the inception of charter schools over a decade ago, policymakers have wanted to know how charter schools are performing. This is difficult to answer because there is no single charter school approach to educating students. By design, charter schools have innovative and distinctive education philosophies. In this research, we capture some of the uniqueness of charter schools by clustering them into four major categories: charter schools that convert from conventional public schools, charter schools that start from scratch, charter schools that rely primarily on classroom-based instruction, and charter schools that have a significant portion of instruction outside of the classroom. Based on these four distinctions, we find significant differences in performance. These differences suggest that policymakers may want to focus greater resources on certain types of charter schools versus others. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

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In many states, investments in school capital must be approved by bond referenda. Consequently, voter preferences can directly impact the quality of school facilities and their infrastructure. Researchers have often analyzed the causal mechanisms of referendum passage, but they have not examined whether the type of capital project affects the outcome of the referendum itself. In this paper, we use data from the state of Michigan to examine whether voters are willing to provide more or less support for specific types of capital investments. We focus on the relationship between voter support for maintenance versus the construction of a new building or additions to existing buildings. Our analysis suggests there is a higher approval rate for maintenance of existing facilities than the construction of new school buildings or additions.

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