/pdf/what-do-parents-want-from-schools-evidence-from-the-internet-15ix3gsoa5.pdf

What Do Parents Want from Schools? Evidence from the Internet. Occasional Paper.

Proponents of school choice present market-based competition as a means of leveling disparities between race, class and performance in public school systems. Opponents see school choice as threatening to exacerbate this problem because competition for students will pressure individual schools into targeting students with the highest performance and the least encumbered with personal and social disadvantages. We suggest that some charter schools, by background and affiliation, are likely to be more market-oriented in their behavior than others, and test the proposition that market-oriented charter schools engage in cream-skimming while others disproportionately serve highly disadvantaged students. Comparing student composition in market-oriented charter schools, nonmarket-oriented charter schools, and traditional public schools in Washington, DC, we find little evidence that market-oriented charters are focusing on an elite clientele, but they are less likely than the other two types of schools to serve so...

Creaming Versus Cropping: Charter School Enrollment Practices in Response to Market Incentives:

The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts: Final Report. NCEE 2010-4029.

Competition sparked by school choice is expected to generate greater educational opportunities, particularly for disadvantaged students. The premise is that competitive incentives will change the organizational behavior of schools (and districts, dioceses, etc.) in ways that will lead to more equitable access for students across varied and often segregated urban landscapes. Drawing from theories of institutional environments and nonprofit firms, this analysis investigates patterns of access across three highly competitive local education markets to determine how school choices are arranged as options expand. The findings indicate that competitive incentives can have similar impacts on different types of organizations, but both policy variations and contextual factors such as demographic distributions may also play critical roles in shaping the market structures in which schools operate. Notably, all three cases showed patterns of exclusionary strategies that schools embraced to enhance market position.

School Choice and Competitive Incentives: Mapping the Distribution of Educational Opportunities across Local Education Markets

▪ Abstract This review examines the policies and practices that address the evolving conditions of risk, security, and disaster management in U.S. society. Although each condition presents particular challenges to public agencies and the communities they serve, all represent varying states of uncertainty and require different approaches for informed action. This analysis reframes the issue of managing risk by focusing on the distinction between policies and practices developed in reference to natural and technological hazards and those developed to enhance security from hostile acts. The author concludes that building networks of organizations committed to a process of continual inquiry, informed action, and adaptive learning is a more flexible, robust strategy than the standard practice of establishing greater control over possible threats through administrative structures. Supported by methods of network analysis, computational simulation, information infrastructure, and long-term policy goals, networke...

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.polisci.8.081404.075608

Risk, security, and disaster management

In this article we re-examine the dualist theory of public and private sector providers of public services. While this theory holds that private sector providers exhibit a behavior substantively different from those of the public sector, i.e., they respond to external pressures with market-oriented behavior instead of political behavior, we argue that these actors actually can and often do respond in a political manner. Furthermore, we argue that a political response is as likely to be exhibited by for-profit providers, who should be the most free-market oriented, as nonprofit organizations. We provide evidence for our proposition drawn from our study of the behavior of charter schools, market-based providers of public education, and charter school advocates in the District of Columbia and find that when faced with numerous challenges, charters responded by lobbying government for assistance instead of competing in the market place. We conclude that the line of demarcation between the behavior of public and private sector providers is actually quite blurred and when faced with similar problems in the delivery of public services, both forms of providers will respond in a similar manner.

Privatization, Politics, and Urban Services: The Political Behavior of Charter Schools

Public education is the largest area of state and local government spending in the United States, accounting for almost one-fifth of direct state and local government expenditures in 1996 (Statistical Abstract of the United States 1999, table 504). Given the enormous resources involved and--more importantly--the critical private and societal benefits that education produces, the distribution of educational opportunities across communities has generated considerable interest among policy makers, the public, and the courts. This article takes advantage of national data sets to examine the equality of education funding across school districts in 49 states for fiscal years 1992 and 1995. (1) It presents rankings of each state's funding equality and explores factors that may be related to the level of equality within states and to changes across years. The focus of this article is the equality of revenues that are available to school districts within states, one of a number of broad goals of education financing systems. In recent years, policy initiatives and court cases in many states have focused on other goals, such as eliminating the relationship between local property wealth and education spending or achieving an adequate level of funding for all students. Still, ensuring equality of resources across school districts (often referred to as "horizontal equity") remains a fundamental benchmark in evaluating state education funding systems, and it continues to be an important concern of the public and the broad education community. Comparing the national averages of a number of intrastate equity measures, our results show that the equality of the distribution of education revenues improved slightly between 1992 and 1995. Relative equity rankings for most states changed little between 1992 and 1995, however. Our analysis of univariate equity measures suggests that states with fewer school districts relative to students tended to have a more equal distribution of education dollars than did states with more districts, although states with a greater number of districts had somewhat larger improvements across the two years. We also found a weak but significant relationship between intrastate equity and median revenues for education, with lower-revenue states tending to have a more equal distribution of resources. Finally, states with higher proportions of revenues provided by state governments generally showed a more equitable distribution of resources than did states that were more dependent on local revenues. The Role of Equity in School Finance Concerns over the equality of educational opportunity date back well over 40 years. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (347 U.S. 483 [1954]) overturned the long-standing system of separate educational institutions for whites and African Americans, ruling that "separate but equal" schools are inherently unequal. The country's awakening to the perils of unequal access to employment and education helped bring about the enactment of three important pieces of federal legislation related to education: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The latter act created new federal funding (Title 1) for "at-risk" pupils, while the Civil Rights and Economic Opportunity acts more broadly addressed poverty and discrimination in society. The Civil Rights Act, in particular, is important for proponents of educational equity because it required a study of the factors leading to unequal educational opportunity. A team of researchers led by James Coleman conducted the study, which produced a long line of quantitative research examining the factors, including dollars and the resources they buy, that might affect student achievement (see Coleman et al. 1966; Hanushek 1972, 1981, 1989; Murnane 1975; Hedges, Laine, and Greenwald 1994). While the debate about whether (and how) money matters to educational achievement continues among researchers (Hanushek 1989; Hedges, Laine and Greenwald 1994), courts in virtually every state have addressed the constitutionality of funding disparities across districts within states. …

The Equality of Public School District Funding in the United States: A National Status Report

Making a Choice, Making a Difference? An Evaluation of Charter Schools in the District of Columbia.

/pdf/growing-pains-an-evaluation-of-charter-schools-in-the-1ef0vejpy0.pdf

Michele Moser

Papers

Creaming Versus Cropping: Charter School Enrollment Practices in Response to Market Incentives:

Privatization, Politics, and Urban Services: The Political Behavior of Charter Schools

The Equality of Public School District Funding in the United States: A National Status Report

Making a Choice, Making a Difference? An Evaluation of Charter Schools in the District of Columbia.

Growing Pains: An Evaluation of Charter Schools in the District of Columbia, 1999-2000.