Reason Foundation and EdChoice’s Fiscal Research and Education Center offer a calculator as a tool to assist state policymakers and choice advocates in providing more accurate estimates of the expenses of adopting publicly financed private-school choice (i.e., voucher) programs. While the calculator embeds a reasonable set of assumptions, it fails to solve the central problem state policymakers face: How are they to determine estimates of students who will enroll, and what percentage of them will be students leaving public versus private schools? Along with other shortcomings, the calculator and associated materials provide little guidance to help users devise those estimates, and there is little empirical research available on the topic. What is more reliably clear is that using the calculator can reveal to policymakers the high additional expenditures triggered when large numbers of students already enrolled in private schools accept proffered public subsidies through voucher, education savings account, or tuition tax credit programs.

Suggested Citation: Baker, B.D. (2024). NEPC review: K-12 school choice calculator. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/calculator

A report comparing the cost and academic performance of voucher recipients in Wisconsin to public school students concludes that the voucher programs are highly “productive,” achieving better academic outcomes at lower costs than public schools. But the report suffers from methodological shortcomings that undermine its conclusions. It ignores recent literature examining the effectiveness of voucher programs in other states, overlooks important considerations regarding true school funding costs, and fails to assess the voucher program against an appropriate comparison group of students. 

Suggested Citation: Kotok, S. (2023). NEPC review: The cost-effectiveness of Wisconsin’s private school choice programs. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/wisconsin-vouchers

A Heritage Foundation report claims increased competition has improved academic achievement in Arizona’s rural public schools and that similar policies will be good for rural Texas. However, this report overstates the similarities between Arizona and Texas, ignores relevant research literature, and presents simplistic and inaccurate analyses to support its claims. By addressing a narrow set of possible benefits of school choice, it also overlooks issues related to fiscal impacts for district schools, segregation, and exclusionary practices for students who require specialized services in schools. The report is an exercise in advocacy for expanding school choice policies, and its usefulness as a guide for policy and practice is minimal.

Suggested Citation: Potterton, A.U., Rogers, A., & Powers, J.M. (2023). NEPC review: From surviving to thriving: K-12 choice and opportunity for rural Texas students and teachers. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/rural-choice

School attendance boundaries, like the district boundaries that encompass them, are politically and socially constructed, largely determined by state boards of education or local school boards. Two recent reports address issues associated with inequities that result from such tight coupling of housing and schooling. The first specifically focuses on inequitable school resources and educational outcomes tied to residential and school segregation. The second explores families’ use of an address other than their own to enroll a child in a more desirable school—a practice known as address sharing, punishable by law in many locales. Neither report is sufficiently nuanced to directly shape policy, although both can do much to inform it.

Suggested Citation: Castro, A.J. (2023). NEPC review: Integrating housing and education solutions to reduce segregation and drive school equity and When good parents go to jail: The criminalization of address sharing in public education. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/boundaries

An EdChoice report is billed as an overview of the varied and often contested research on outcomes in school choice programs, which it defines narrowly as vouchers plus voucher-style programs that provide public funding for private schools. The report examines research on student achievement, access, competitive effects, and other topics, purportedly to help policymakers and parents weigh the benefits and costs of these voucher programs. It claims to show that school choice “works,” based on finding more positive than negative studies, yet uses a simplistic, flawed approach that obscures important differences in studies and can create a misleading narrative about the research evidence.

Suggested Citation: Lubienski, C. (2023). NEPC review: The 123s of school choice: What the research says about private school choice programs, 2023 edition. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/school-choice

A Fordham report examines whether charter schools impact traditional public schools' finances and efficiency. The report finds mixed impacts on district finances, but suggests that traditional public schools improve efficiency over time when faced with charter competition. However, the report's claims and policy recommendations are untested empirically and unwarranted based on research. It fails to consider other possible explanations for higher expenditures in a charter environment, and downplays the negative impact of public school closures resulting from competition. While the report identifies relevant studies, its unsupported claims and recommendations limit its usefulness to policymakers.

Suggested Citation: Jabbar, H. (2023). NEPC review: Think again: Do charter schools drain resources from traditional public schools? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/think-again

A Manhattan Institute report presents results of a survey of U.S. adults aged 18-20 to determine the extent to which eight concepts the report equates with “critical social justice” (CSJ) theory—which the report frowns upon—are taught in schools. Because these CSJ concepts are being taught beyond public schools, the report argues that school choice is an ineffective option for shielding children. Given that the report's methods do not adequately isolate exposure in school from the many other sources in which young people encounter these eight concepts, and that no causal relationships are established, there is no support for the report’s highly intrusive policy recommendations.

Suggested Citation: Sleeter, C. & Garcia, D.R. (2023). NEPC review: School choice is not enough: The impact of critical social justice ideology in American education. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/csj

The report advocates for the increased “portability” of school revenues, allowing for “money to follow the students” and, therefore, the expansion of interdistrict choice programs. It attempts to show that many current features of state-level school funding formulas inhibit such portability. While there are sound policy reasons to facilitate greater interdistrict choice, this report’s prescriptions are not sound, in large part because they betray a lack of understanding of a core principle of school finance: Different students in different districts have different costs to achieve educational outcomes. The funding portability systems touted by the report do not account for many factors that determine student costs, and thus the report's recommendations should be avoided.

Suggested Citation: Weber, M. (2023). NEPC review: Public education funding without boundaries: How to get K-12 dollars to follow open enrollment students. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from: http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/portability

A report oversimplifies important equity issues as problems of school zone boundaries. Despite noting mixed research results on how school choice affects housing patterns, the report assumes that eliminating school zone boundaries will necessarily result in wealthy families voluntarily relocating into poorer neighborhoods—ignoring the documented reality that many parents work to ensure that school district boundaries replicate segregation and inequity. In addition, the report offers no solutions to such concurrent problems as transportation for students choosing distant schools or housing for residents displaced by gentrification. The report’s illogical assumptions, lack of evidence, sleight of hand, and improbable leaps of logic make its advice to policymakers useless.

A report considers the chief concerns associated with Ohio’s voucher program: the harm to public school student outcomes through competition, the affect on district financial resources, and increased racial segregation. Finding that Ohio vouchers have had few such harmful impacts, the report concludes that it has effectively dismissed the primary concerns of voucher critics. Yet, while the report is broadly methodologically sound for the narrow questions it poses, the questions it asks are out-of-date with respect to current issues raised by voucher critics, which focus on substantially decreased student achievement among students using vouchers. Thus, the report does little to assuage the primary concerns of those dedicated to serving children through community-based public education.

This report analyzes changes in academic performance as measured by test scores and graduation rates in the Denver Public Schools versus comparable schools in Colorado over 11 years of the district’s experimenting with the “portfolio” approach to school district management. This approach includes central-office oversight of different school types (such as charter schools, innovation schools, and district-run schools), with widespread parental choice under a single enrollment system. The reported academic gains are dramatic and worth drawing attention to, but attributing them specifically to the portfolio reforms seems premature and thus not useful in showing how other districts could replicate that success.

A Heritage Foundation report compares the amount of “wokeness” terminology in parent/student handbooks in charter schools with the level of charter school regulation in their states, and concludes that while charters represent a safe space away from “woke indoctrination” in public schools, further deregulation and less bureaucracy will allow that sector to truly respond to parent desires to avoid “leftist” curriculum. While apparently intended to tap into current turmoil, the report has at least five significant weaknesses. It assumes that parent/student handbooks are good proxies for curriculum; it completely ignores the diversity of parents and relevant research about what large proportions of parents actually want; it conflates correlation with causation; it relies on undefined conceptions of what constitutes “wokeness;” and it possibly uses cherry-picked data and methods that suit ideological bias. These shortcomings render the report useless for understanding or developing policy. 

A Thomas B. Fordham Institute report examines academic outcomes in Ohio’s nonprofit and for-profit charter schools; in addition, it explores whether differences in contracted services in for-profits appear to correlate with differences in their outcomes. Despite the report's claims, it offers little evidence to remove skepticism from the debate over for-profit status. In addition, the report is limited in its focus on only Ohio, which has substantially more transparency than many states require for school choice options. As a result, the report offers little to inform policy and practice in dissimilar or nationwide contexts.

A Buckeye Institute report recommends sweeping policy reforms in response to COVID-19 academic disruptions and what the report asserts to be declining confidence in public schools. The report recommends the state rapidly expand three types of school choice or voucher-like policies—education savings accounts, public school choice, and tax credits for private school scholarship programs—combined with fiscal transparency. The report does not support its recommendations with evidence or consider potential unintended consequences, such as reduced student achievement, increased racial segregation, and reduced funding for public schools, instead relying on tenuous assumptions about predicted impacts of policy reforms.

A report from Bellwether details what the authors call, “assembly-based education,” a hypothetical ecosystem that removes schools as a central education component. Instead, the plan proposes giving families the ability and funding to choose among varied learning opportunities. The approach is presented as helping to remove some barriers for lower-income families and to facilitate new communities based on shared interests rather than geography. The report also argues that the approach is timely and practical, pointing to the recent growth of school choice and supplemental learning. The concept, however, undermines societal investment in neighborhood schools and therefore runs counter to research demonstrating that many families, youth, and communities work hard to protect and improve their neighborhood schools, especially in marginalized communities. As such, this approach fails to genuinely center equity and educational excellence and instead elevates choice as the greatest good in an education system.

Families across the U.S. experimented during the COVID-19 pandemic with new educational models in response to school closures. This review examines the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s two recent reports on two related strategies that exemplify such experimentation: microschools and learning pods. The first report analyzes engagement patterns and success rates of a digital platform used at one microschool in Nevada. The second report praises learning pods’ staffing features and argues that these approaches might be adopted in traditional schools. Both reports paint the new strategies in positive light, but both have methodological and analytical shortcomings that limit their utility for policymakers. 

A report claims that the Michigan Student Opportunity Scholarship neovoucher program has the potential to create fiscal benefits for the state of Michigan and its school districts. It comes as state policymakers consider both the impact of school neovouchers on student achievement and the financial cost of a neovoucher system. However, the report is more misleading than it is useful, relying overwhelmingly on problematic reports and approaches produced by think tanks that regularly advocate for school choice.

Summit Public Schools reports that its alumni graduated from college at nearly double the national average and self-reported high levels of well-being, fulfillment, and workplace satisfaction. It also reports that alumni from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds now make more than $60,000 per year on average working full time. Although the study may provide some information useful to Summit’s internal decision-making, its serious methodological issues prevent it from having any implications for practice or policymaking in general.

A Mackinac Center report recommends changes to the state’s current approach to financing public and charter schools, to move toward a system where more funding follows the student to either public, charter, or private schools—or to other service providers. The report provides some useful, albeit insufficiently researched, guidance on shifting categorical funding into core funding and modifying the state’s approach to financing programs for children with disabilities. However, several key elements of the report and its proposals are built on false promises and assumptions and are not helpful for policymakers.

Advocates for increased privatization of public schools have long contended that private schools could provide equal or better outcomes at lesser costs. To bolster that argument, this EdChoice report asserts that voucher and voucher-like (tax credit scholarship and education savings account) programs have saved state and local treasuries some $12.4 to $28.3 billion dollars as student “switchers” use those programs to leave public schools and enter private schools. However, the report’s findings do not provide a sound base for policy decisions. Included in this review are suggestions for more detailed accounting procedures and more nuanced methodologies for calculating reliable variable student costs.

A Bellwether report attempts to examine the availability of low-income rental units in school districts to understand whether districts in the largest 200 metropolitan areas are accessible to families in poverty. While the report’s focus on the intersection of housing and education policy for students’ opportunities is commendable, it suffers from significant methodological shortcomings. One problem is that the report’s approach is disconnected from federal housing policy and research. In addition, and particularly problematic, the report is silent on how race and racism relate to housing access and educational opportunity. These concerns and others severely limit the report’s utility for informing social policy.

A report released by the Manhattan Institute addresses the question of how private school voucher programs should be regulated. That is, if private schools are to receive public funds, what accountability mechanisms can fairly and reasonably safeguard taxpayer dollars? The report advocates for relaxing accountability mechanisms that presently constrain some voucher programs, asserting that “more and better” private schools will participate in response, benefitting students academically. Such claims, however, are supported by a selective reading and intentional misreading of educational research. Insofar as that is the case, the report merely repeats well-worn ideological positions and neither advances what we know about the challenge of regulating private schools nor offers useful information for policy decisions.

As an increasing number of states adopt or expand choice programs in the form of charter schools, vouchers, tuition tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts, questions grow about their efficacy. This review analyzes a recent report from Kentucky’s Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions claiming that NAEP score trends for Florida and Kentucky from the 1990s to 2019 exhibit sufficient evidence that choice programs catalyze significant educational improvement. This review rejects that determination for two reasons. First, the report overlooks the intensity of Florida’s focus on preparing students for annual state exams in reading and math since the implementation of its A+ Accountability Plan in 1999, which appears to have had a substantial impact on the state’s NAEP scores. Second, in focusing on Florida, the report fails to acknowledge that the majority of the top 10 states with choice programs (as measured by percentage of students enrolled in charter schools) fell short of Kentucky in posting gains on NAEP over this time period.