The 15th annual "Education Next" survey, conducted in June 2021, yields a host of specific results that reveal one large fact about the current state of public opinion on American education: The public is cautious--extremely cautious. In the presence of a still-circulating COVID-19 virus, a large percentage of parents and the broader…

The 2020 Education Next Survey reveals a paradox related to what American parents think about the quality of the instruction their children received after schools closed their doors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The parents of a substantial majority of school-aged children--71%--think their kids learned less than they would have in school.…

Charter schools increasingly challenge both district and private schools for student enrollments in the United States. With more parents able to choose among the sectors, the success of each in attracting students will turn in part on the levels of satisfaction provided to families who enroll. We analyze data from two nationally representative…

Estimates of school voucher impacts on educational attainment have yet to explore heterogeneities in socioeconomic status among disadvantaged minority students. We theorize reasons for these heterogeneities and then estimate experimentally the differential impacts of voucher offers on college enrollment and graduation rates for minority and…

All four sectors in K-12 education compete for the support of their customers--that is, the parents of their prospective students. Those parents have more choices today than in decades past: they may send their children to the public school automatically assigned to them by their school district, or opt for a private school, charter school, or…

President Joe Biden has made reopening a majority of K-8 schools for in-person instruction a priority for his administration's first 100 days, with the goal of getting more American students safely back into the classroom. Yet neither information gathered so far by researchers, nor data reported by the federal government and the states, can say…

Over the past 25 years, charter schools have offered an increasing number of families an alternative to their local district schools. The charter option has proven particularly popular in large cities, but charter-school growth is often constrained by state laws that limit the number of students the sector can serve. The charter sector is the most…

This first report of charter school parents' perceptions based on nationally representative samples finds that charter parents, as compared with parents from district schools, are less likely to see serious problems at their children's school, report more extensive communications with the school, and are more satisfied with most aspects of the…

We provide the first experimental estimates of the long-term impacts of a voucher to attend private school by linking data from a privately sponsored voucher initiative in New York City, which awarded the scholarships by lottery to low-income families, to administrative records on college enrollment and degree attainment. We find no significant…

At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. This is the second study of student achievement in global perspective prepared under the auspices of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). In the 2010…

This paper presents first-year results of an evaluation of a Children's Scholarship Fund (CSF) program which provided scholarships enabling low-income families nationwide to send their K-8 children to private schools of their choice. Families won scholarships through a lottery. Telephone surveys of parents/caretakers of children who took advantage…

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 an evaluation of the Cleveland Scholarship Program (CSP) after two years in operation. The program provided low-income families with scholarships that they could redeem at any participating Cleveland private school. The evaluation of the program involved a survey of two groups of parents in 1998: parents of children in grades…

This paper is a report on the estimated effects on students and families of the offer of a voucher (the "intention-to-treat" effect) and the effects of switching from a public to a private school (the "treatment-on-the-treated" effect). Specifically, the report estimates the impact of voucher programs on student test scores,…

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…