As an avenue of educational reform and organizational restructuring within public education, school choice has gained in popularity over the last twenty years. The charter school movement, in particular, has enjoyed a high growth rate since its introduction in 1992. Advocates of charter schools claim the schools' regulatory freedom and unique structure foster improved academic performance and educational success. However, the literature shows charter school students' performance is typically below and, at best, on par with that of neighboring public school peers. Given this mismatch of purported academic advantage and observed performance, this study aims to add to the literature by explaining why parents choose charter schools and remain in charter schools. Using the Texas Education Agency's 2006 Survey of Charter School and Traditional School Parents this study will examine why parents consider different aspects of schooling more important than others. Survey responses will be analyzed to explain possible relationships between factors affecting charter school enrollment, race, and socioeconomic status. / Master of Science

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This study considers the contested meaning of public education through a qualitative investigation of Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts, a charter elementary school in Richmond, Virginia. The central research question that guides this study is “How do parents construct the idea of public schools as they explain their choice of Patrick Henry Charter School?” To answer this question I conducted a constructivist inquiry that involved a series of 16 semi-structured interviews with a maximum variation sample of Patrick Henry parents concerning their ideas about the school and about public education. The analysis of these interviews led to a grounded theory of the parents’ ideas as well as a case report constructed from the categorized units of data that explores the core themes of the theory. This study also addresses two sub-questions: (1) “How do the parents’ ideas about public schools reflect the logics embedded in the larger policy discourses concerning charters and the reinvention of public education?” and (2) “How do the parents’ ideas about public schools reflect the local public discourse around the public-ness of the school?” To answer the first sub-question I use my review of literature to develop an understanding of the reform debates around charter schools and their relationship to the contested ideas of public education. To answer sub question two, I present an adapted constructivist qualitative analysis of the public discourse that surrounded the school from April 2007 – when the idea of the school was first proposed at a school board meeting – until December 2011 – a year and a half after the school opened its doors. To capture the public discourse I collected and analyzed articles, editorials and letters from six local print publications (newspapers, weekly magazines) as well as the public comment portion of the minutes from Richmond School Board meetings. This analysis resulted in the construction of two competing narratives about the school, the juxtaposition of which shed light on the how idea of public-ness was constructed in the public discourse.

Thesis advisor: Utku Unver / This dissertation consists of two chapters. The first chapter: Dynamic reserves in matching markets with contracts. In this paper we study a matching problem where agents care not only about the institution they are assigned to but also about the contractual terms of their assignment so that they have preferences over institution-contractual term pairs. Each institution has a target distribution of its slots reserved for different contractual terms. If there is less demand for some groups of slots, then the institution is given opportunity to redistribute unassigned slots over other groups. The choice function we construct takes the capacity of each group of seats to be a function of number of vacant seats of groups considered earlier. We advocate the use of a cumulative offer mechanism (COM) with overall choice functions designed for institutions that allow capacity transfer across different groups of seats as an allocation rule. In applications such as engineering school admissions in India, cadet-branch matching problems at the USMA and ROTC where students are ranked according to test scores (and for each group of seats, corresponding choice functions are induced by them), we show that the COM with a monotonic capacity transfer scheme produces stable outcomes, is strategy proof, and respect improvements in test scores. Allowing capacity redistribution increases efficiency. The outcome of the COM with monotone capacity transfer scheme Pareto dominates the outcome of the COM with no capacity transfer. The second chapter: On relationships between substitutes conditions. In the matching with contracts literature, three well-known conditions on choice functions (from stronger to weaker)- substitutability, unilateral substitutability (US) and bilateral substitutability (BS) have proven to be critical. This paper aims to deepen our understanding of them by separately axiomatizing the gap between the BS and the other two. We first introduce a new “doctor separability” (DS) condition and show that BS, DS and irrelevance of rejected contracts (IRC) are equivalent to IRC and US. Due to Hatfield and Kojima (2010) and Aygün and Sönmez (2012), it is known that US, “Pareto separability” (PS), and IRC are equivalent to substitutability and IRC. This, along with our result, implies that BS, DS, PS, and IRC are equivalent to substitutability and IRC. All of these results are given without IRC whenever hospital choices are induced from preferences. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

This study offers a better understanding of the reasons why parents from six different countries across the Western hemisphere chose private, non-denominational schools for their children’s education. The findings deepen the knowledge in what is currently an underdeveloped field of research in education. The overarching research question was: What are the primary reasons why parents chose a private nondenominational school in Mexico, Spain, Costa Rica, United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa for their children’s education? To explore this question in depth, the researcher considered five sub-questions and employed a grounded theory qualitative research design. Data were collected twofold through focus groups and individual interviews and analyzed iteratively to develop a fresh theoretical perspective on the topic of parent school choice. Extant literature explains that the most frequent reasons to choose a private school include quality of education, location, participation of parents and being able to be heard, financial resources, and parents’ prior educational experiences. Contributing to the literature, this study revealed four major reasons for private school selection: consideration of private education as an investment for the future, smaller class size, the opportunity for students and their families to establish social contacts, and the academic quality of the school. In addition, three reasons specific to certain countries were identified: importance of learning the English language, quality of the facilities, and extended school day. Finally, eight additional secondary reasons were found including: international character of the school, happiness of the students in the school, distance from parents’ home, quality of the environment, prestige or tradition of the school, private management and organization, values and ethos of the school, and the non-denominational nature of the school. These findings can help private—and public—school administrators make better decisions to improve the quality of their educational offerings in knowing what parents most value. Parents may also find value in understanding the factors for consideration when evaluating public versus private school options. Finally, recommendations for practice and research for the field of education are offered. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Wyoming, 2006. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Dec. 21, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-112).

Reforms that expand school choice have been the focus of considerable policy interest, not least as a possible means of improving public school performance. According to the standard argument, increased choice will intensify competition, forcing public schools to improve quality in order to retain enrolment. Yet in principle, increased choice need not always raise performance, pointing to the need for careful empirical analysis. A key challenge in measuring the effects of greater choice on school performance is that convincing variation in choice is often hard to come by, especially in cross-sectional studies. And while school choice policy experiments have the advantage that choice increases in a clear way, few large-scale school choice policies have been implemented in North America. An important exception is the 2002 Ontario tuition tax credit, which eased access to private schools throughout Canada's most populous province. Analyzing the effects of the tax credit reform provides the focus of this thesis. The thesis begins by presenting the literature and gaps in existing research. The next chapter presents a model to clarify the link between increases in competition and school performance, and to motivate the empirical identification strategy. To set the stage for the main empirical analysis, I also provide some relevant institutional background relating to the Ontario education policy environment and the Ontario tuition tax credit as well as a descriptive analysis on the Ontario private school market. I then present an initial examination of the possible performance effects of the Ontario tuition tax credit using a difference-in-differences setup, before turning to the main empirical analysis, which exploits the differential competitive effects for public schools in districts with relative to those without a significant private school presence. The empirical results indicate that public school performance improved for schools facing the greatest competitive pressures following the introduction of the policy, controlling for a host of other relevant factors. To assess whether the effect is due primarily to increases in productivity, the analysis controls carefully for a series of alternative mechanisms. Overall, the Ontario findings are consistent with increased choice giving rise to productivity improvements in public schools.

Despite promotion by well-known economists and supporting economic theory, econometric analyses of voucher systems often find that they have been unsuccessful in improving traditional measures of educational success. This paper examines a possible explanation of this phenomenon by comparing the drivers of educational achievement and of school popularity by examining private school choice. The findings of this paper indicate that there is a disconnect between school success and school popularity, which adversely effects both the demand and supply-side benefits of voucher systems. Additionally, this paper reviews matching mechanisms that seek to efficiently match students with schools based on both student and school preferences.

Reforms that expand school choice have been the focus of considerable policy interest, not least as a possible means of improving public school performance. According to the standard argument, increased choice will intensify competition, forcing public schools to improve quality in order to retain enrolment. Yet in principle, increased choice need not always raise performance, pointing to the need for careful empirical analysis. A key challenge in measuring the effects of greater choice on school performance is that convincing variation in choice is often hard to come by, especially in cross-sectional studies. And while school choice policy experiments have the advantage that choice increases in a clear way, few large-scale school choice policies have been implemented in North America. An important exception is the 2002 Ontario tuition tax credit, which eased access to private schools throughout Canada's most populous province. Analyzing the effects of the tax credit reform provides the focus of this thesis. The thesis begins by presenting the literature and gaps in existing research. The next chapter presents a model to clarify the link between increases in competition and school performance, and to motivate the empirical identification strategy. To set the stage for the main empirical analysis, I also provide some relevant institutional background relating to the Ontario education policy environment and the Ontario tuition tax credit as well as a descriptive analysis on the Ontario private school market. I then present an initial examination of the possible performance effects of the Ontario tuition tax credit using a difference-in-differences setup, before turning to the main empirical analysis, which exploits the differential competitive effects for public schools in districts with relative to those without a significant private school presence. The empirical results indicate that public school performance improved for schools facing the greatest competitive pressures following the introduction of the policy, controlling for a host of other relevant factors. To assess whether the effect is due primarily to increases in productivity, the analysis controls carefully for a series of alternative mechanisms. Overall, the Ontario findings are consistent with increased choice giving rise to productivity improvements in public schools.

As charter schools continue to proliferate across United States, their impact on the public education system is becoming an increasingly important public policy question. Charter school proponents argue that combined pressures of consumer choice and market competition will induce traditional public schools to respond by providing higher quality education and promoting innovation and equity. Skeptics worry that charter schools pose risks of segregating students by race and economic level, and reducing per-pupil resources available to traditional public schools. This dissertation provides a comprehensive evaluation of the effects of charter schools on regular public schools by addressing the following questions: 1) How do the charter schools affect the racial, ethnic and cosio-economic distribution, student-teacher ratios and achievement of traditional public schools? 2) How do the size and scope of competitive effects vary according to different measures of competition? Using two-period panel data from the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core Data (CCD) for traditional public schools in Florida, New Jersey, Texas and Ohio, I compare changes in racial and ethnic distribution, student-teacher ratios and achievement in public schools that do and do not face competition. I use a variation of the difference-in-differences (DD) estimation strategy to study the effect of charter schools on the outcome measures. The findings from the study suggest that introduction of charter schools in the educational landscape has affected student distributions, and at least in some cases, student-teacher ratios and the performance of traditional public schools. Charter schools seem to contribute to declines in the share of non-Hispanic white students in traditional public schools in all four states. The results show variation in other outcome areas across states and competition measures. The findings highlight the importance of monitoring what will happen to non-choosers in traditional schools as well as the role of considering state context and empirical measures while generalizing from charter school studies.