Does choice work?

EdChoice just issued a nice summary of research on the impacts of school choice programs, and I think you will find their comments easy to understand and interesting.

Some points from EdChoice:

1. “Given enough time, school choice programs create small, positive test score gains for participating students.”

2. “School choice programs appear to increase graduation rates for participating students.”

3. “There is virtually no evidence that school choice harms neighboring public schools.”

4. Ed Choice sees “no evidence that students who participate in school choice programs are alienated from their communities or show less public-spiritedness than their public school-educated peers.”

5. “Of the 10 studies that have examined school choice’s effect on integration in schools, nine found positive effects. One was unable to detect any effects, and none found negative effects.

EdChoice has been very candid about some of the limitations to their study, and you can find that in the web link above. Still, the study is built around mostly higher quality randomized control trials, which generally are more reliable for education research due to the incredible amount of unknown variables that impact such research.

You can access the slideshow here:

School Choice Research To Date

from

EdChoice