Homeschooling is generally understood to mean that a child's education takes place exclusively at home--but homeschooling is a continuum, not an all-or-nothing choice. In a sense, everyone is "home-schooled," and the ways that families combine learning at home with attending school are many. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the…

For decades, social theorists have posited--and descriptive accounts have shown--that students isolated by both social class and ethnicity suffer extreme deprivations that limit the effectiveness of equal-opportunity interventions. Even educational programs that yield positive results for moderately disadvantaged students may not prove beneficial…

At the turn of the century, the United States was trying to come to grips with a serious education crisis. The country was lagging behind its international peers, and a half-century effort to erode racial disparities in school achievement had made little headway. Many people expected action from the federal government. George W. Bush and Barack…

Children raised in families with higher incomes score higher on math and reading tests. But is parental income the "cause" of a child's success? Or is the connection between income and achievement largely a symptom of something else: genetic heritage, parental skill, or a supportive educational setting? The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, a…

Stigma and school voucher threats under a revised 2002 Florida accountability law have positive impacts on student performance. Stigma and public school choice threats under the U.S. federal accountability law, No Child Left Behind, do not have similar effects in Florida. Significant impacts of stigma, when combined with the voucher threat, are…

Examined the effects of school vouchers on student test scores in three U.S. cities. Data from randomized field trials indicated that after 2 years, African Americans who switched from public to private schools improved academically relative to their public school peers in all three cities. These effects were not significant for other ethnic…

This paper reports on first-year results for an evaluation of the New York School Choice Scholarships Foundation program, which was designed to provide scholarships for children from low-income families currently attending public schools to transfer to private schools. Families won scholarships through a lottery. Researchers examined data from…

This book presents the results of research on the effects of vouchers on African American students' achievement in Washington, DC, New York, New York, Dayton, Ohio, and San Antonio, Texas. At the conclusion of a 3-year evaluation, test scores of African American students in New York City's privately funded voucher programs were substantially…

The voucher intervention sponsored by New York City's School Choice Scholarships Foundation (SCSF) has been a valuable source of information about such programs. It began in 1997, when K-4 public school students were invited to apply to SCSF for a voucher to help defray costs of private school tuition. Over 1,200 of 20,000 applicants were offered…

This report presents a fresh analysis of data from an earlier study (Brookings 2002) on the test scores of African American students in a small, targeted voucher program. This new analysis was undertaken in response to an unpublished paper by Krueger and Zhu (Princeton University) disputing some of the findings of the original study. In 1997 some…

In August 1996 Jay P. Greene, Paul E. Peterson, and Jiangtao Du, with Leesa Boeger and Curtis L. Frazier, issued a report called "The Effectiveness of School Choice in Milwaukee." The report, referred to as GPDBF, presented data that indicated that low-income minority students in their third and fourth years of participation in the…

This report presents third-year findings from an evaluation of the School Choice Scholarships Foundation Program. In 1997, this program provided scholarships via a lottery to low-income, New York City children in grades 1 through 4 that allowed them to transfer to private schools. The evaluation compared scholarship to control students, using test…

In fall 1997, the Washington Scholarship Fund expanded its privately funded school voucher program in Washington, D.C., and in 1998, over 1,000 students were offered scholarships by lottery. This evaluation examined the impact of the first 2 years of the program on students who completed baseline testing and were in grades 1-7 in spring 1998. It…