Charter school quality and parental decision making with school choice

Abstract

Charter schools have become a very popular instrument for reforming public schools, because they expand choices, facilitate local innovation, and provide incentives for the regular public schools while remaining under public control. Despite their conceptual appeal, evaluating their performance has been hindered by the selective nature of their student populations. This paper investigates the quality of charter schools in Texas in terms of mathematics and reading achievement and finds that, after an initial start-up period, average school quality in the charter sector is not significantly different from that in regular public schools. Perhaps most important, the parental decision to exit a charter school is much more sensitive to education quality than the decision to exit a regular public school, consistent with the notion that the introduction of charter schools substantially reduces the transactions costs of switching schools. Low income charter school families are, however, less sensitive to school quality than higher income families.

Markets in Education

“…18 Both the perceived quality by parents as well as objective quality indicators of the local public school are repeatedly found to have an impact on chances that parents opt for schools further away (Lauen, 2007, for the city of Chicago; Garcia et al, 2008, for the state of Arizona). This was found in the urban area of Chicago, in a context where almost one in two students attend a non-neighbourhood school (Lauen, 2007) and also in Texas where options for school choice are more limited and about 1% of pupils attend a charter school (Hanushek et al, 2007). Similar patterns were found for student flows between districts in Minnesota and Colorado, which are both states with an open enrolment programme between districts.…”

“…For example, in Texas no differences in the performance of students in charter and regular public school were found (Hanushek et al, 2007). In London, a broader choice in primary schools was not found to be related to student performance (Gibbons et al, 2008).…”

“…34 The results indicate that parents respond to both kinds of signals (Hanushek et al, 2007). That is, publicised ratings seem to be related to choice behaviour, but parents also seem to respond to their own experiences and informal reputations of schools.…”

“…This has led some to conclude that charter schools are more likely to succeed in getting parents involved. However, longitudinal studies show that parents who choose a charter school were already more involved with their child's education before they attended their school of choice (Ladd, 2002b;Hanushek et al, 2007). Parents who opt for another public school for their children apart from their home school were also found to be more involved (Cullen et al, 2005).…”

“…A sophisticated and elaborate analysis of data on all pupils in Texas illustrates in some detail how school performance information may be related to parental choice (Hanushek et al, 2007;see Case C). The results indicate that quality indicators may have the intended effect if parents have real and accessible alternatives.…”