Research has documented the complexity of parent decision-making within school choice marketplaces, including the ways in which individual preferences, social networks, and geography influence where parents choose to enroll their children in school. Yet, parent choices are constrained by the ways in which these dynamics intersect with existing…

Many school districts consider family preferences in allocating students to schools. In theory, this approach provides traditionally disadvantaged families greater access to high-quality schools by weakening the link between residential location and school assignment. We leverage data on the school choices made by over 233,000 New York City…

In this paper, I study the effect of winning the public school choice lottery on public school enrollment. In particular, I look at how different outside options affect how sensitive students are to receiving their first choice in the public school lottery, focusing on three measures of outside options: "ability to afford" private…

Even though choice is not officially a feature in the German primary school system, some parents intervene in determining which school their child attends. Especially in urban contexts, the informal school market is growing. This demand is based on promises with respect to a certain quality of education as well as on issues that prevail in certain…

This article explores the importance of considering transportation mode when calculating commute time for a child's school choice options. While proponents of school choice argue that students can attend any school that will provide them the best education, several have argued that commute time is as important for families as a school's…

In at least ten cities across the country, there are schools that operate under some sort of partnership school model: a "third way" governance strategy that breaks through district-charter divides that could help improve struggling schools or increase the number of quality school options in a neighborhood. Like charter schools,…

Research has demonstrated that families are consistently willing to pay more for homes situated in catchments with better quality schools. However, few have considered whether other school characteristics are capable of capitalizing home values in this way. Using data from the city of Chicago, we investigate whether traditional magnet schools may…

The Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School in Cambridge--winner of the 2019 Pozen Prize for Innovative Schools--was founded in 1996 by a group of Cambridge-area Black parents and concerned community leaders who acted on the reality that their children did not have access to a rigorous, high-quality education in the traditional neighborhood public…

Far too often, the question of how to improve educational outcomes for minority children living in the United States leads to familiar proposals involving school busing, educational vouchers, or the formation of mixed-community charter schools. The purpose of this report is to note that each of these shares a commonality that should not be…

Social scientists have begun to document the stratifying effects of over a decade of unprecedented charter growth in urban districts. An exodus of students from traditional neighborhood schools to charter schools has attended this growth, creating troubling numbers of vacant seats in neighborhood schools as well as concentrating larger percentages…

This report examines current educational options for U.S. students and the challenges of ensuring that choices are equally available and offer high-quality education. The report suggests what state policymakers can do to create high-quality opportunities that offer each family a system of schools worth choosing. The analysis starts from the…

The District III -- East Area Fine Arts Initiative began during the 2016-2017 academic year in Chavez High School feeder schools, and expanded during the 2017-2018 academic year to Milby High School feeder schools. This expansion extended access to a high-quality fine arts education for approximately 16,301 students across all grade levels within…

To support a high-quality fine arts education, the District III -- East Area Fine Arts Initiative expanded students' access to teaching and learning through participation in off-campus and in-school arts-related activities and events. The initiative will serve as a blueprint for gradual expansion of the program to the Milby feeder pattern in…

The purpose of this inquiry is to consider how the U.S. Department of Education's Promise Neighborhoods (PNs) program can improve persistently low-achieving urban schools by making their "neighborhoods whole again" through community capacity building for education reform. As the "first federal initiative to put education at the…

School districts close schools for many appropriate reasons. School closure has now evolved into a school improvement strategy. Sometimes the strategy is to close the lowest-performing schools rather than low-enrollment schools and move the students into higher-achieving neighborhood schools. School closure also has become a common strategy to…