This study sought to explore the lived experience of parents concerning school voucher programs and determine whether parental knowledge of funding discrepancies between income-eligible voucher programs and traditional public schools drives parents' advocacy for vouchers. This research is rooted in the interest convergence theory to explore and…

School voucher programs are scholarship initiatives -- frequently government funded or incentivized -- that pay for students to attend private schools of their choice. This study is the first formal meta-analytic consolidation of the evidence from all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating the student-level math and reading test score…

This resource is designed to be a one-stop shop for all the existing research on private school choice in the United States. This year's edition is updated with the research published since the last edition. Since the first modern-day voucher program launched in Milwaukee in 1990, researchers have studied private school choice programs. Few…

This essay queries how ideas about school choice traversed the Pacific in the late twentieth century. Specifically, it reconstructs and deconstructs the visits of two African American proponents of parental school choice, Annette "Polly" Williams and Howard Fuller, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1990s. Drawing…

The expansion of private school choice programs has been accompanied by a growing call for regulation of those programs. Individual private schools decide whether to participate in voucher programs based on expected benefits and expected costs. An unintended consequence of attaching heavy government regulation to voucher programs is that it raises…

I review the literature on how parents select schools when participating in private choice programs in the United States. I address two sub-questions. First, do parents have the incentives and motivation needed to participate in a schooling market? Second, when selecting a school, what school characteristics do parents consider? I find three…

Private school choice programs are rapidly gaining traction, with nearly 450,000 student participants in 2019--an increase of 300,000 students in just 15 years. This report evaluates how well some of these programs prepare students for college by examining college enrollment and completion data from the Florida Tax Credit scholarship program, the…

Both sides of the debate on school choice point to the failure of schools in choice programs as evidence for their position. To opponents of choice, school failures point to the lack of accountability of the voucher sector, and the need for greater governmental control. To choice supporters, failures represent the marketplace working, as…

Using data from the 2015-16 round of the Private School Universe Survey, I examine the types of private schools that decide to participate in school voucher programs in seven locations: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, D.C., and North Carolina. Regression analysis indicates that more specialized private schools tend to be less…

In this article we seek to understand the impacts of a third party governance reform implemented by the nonprofit organization, Partners Advancing Values in Education (PAVE), on school-level performance in Milwaukee's maure school choice environment. Specifically, we compare the performance of PAVE and non-PAVE schools on Wisconsin state tests,…

Do market-based policies, like school vouchers, that provide an exit option enhance or diminish parental involvement? I examine this question using original survey data from parents participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the nation's oldest urban voucher program. Voucher students were matched to a set of public school students…

Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. secretary of education, is a strong proponent of allowing public education dollars to go to private schools through vouchers, which enable parents to use public school money to enroll their children in private schools, including religious ones. Vouchers are advanced under the rubric of "school choice"--the…

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the first modern private school choice program in the United States, has grown from 341 students attending 7 private schools in 1990 to 27,857 students attending 126 private schools in 2019. The MPCP has been subject to extensive study focused largely on student performance on standardized tests. This…

In this article we review the substantial literature on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the U.S.'s oldest and largest urban school voucher program, and use the review to propose an agenda for second generation school voucher research. We review research on student-level impacts, public school response, parental decision-making,…

Teacher retention continues to be a challenge for school districts around the United States. This seems to be also the case for schools in Milwaukee, particularly those that are part of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). The purpose of this quantitative study was to identify the factors that impact teacher retention rates in Choice…