“Does education choice improve the quality of education in traditional public schools?”
Yes. Numerous studies indicate that the presence of large school choice programs improves traditional public schools. This is one of most consistent findings in all of school choice research.
(2022) Jabbar et al. The Competitive Effects of School Choice on Student Achievement: A Systematic Review.
““Our results suggest that competition from private school choice (through voucher policies) can have significant positive impacts on overall student achievement, often greater than that from charter school competition.” “In general, competition resulting from school-choice policies does have a small positive effect on student achievement. The lack of an overall negative impact on student outcomes might ease critics’ concerns that competition will hurt those students “left behind” due to school-choice policies… Our results suggest that research to date, overall, does not support this hypothesis, although specific studies have found negative effects of competition in some contexts.””
SUPPORTING STORY: ASHLEY GUERRA
Education has always been a priority in our family. I was raised to value opportunities and work diligently to pursue areas that would allow me to contribute successfully to our community. As I grew up and became a mother, education has remained an integral component of my life and a central focus in our family…
(2023) The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’s Zones of Choice
“We find large positive effects of ZOC on student achievement and four-year college enrollment. Event study estimates reveal that by the sixth year of the program, ZOC students’ English and language arts (ELA) exam performance improved by 0.16σ relative to comparable non-ZOC students. ZOC also raised four-year college enrollment by roughly 5 percentage points, a 25% increase from the baseline ZOC student mean, an effect mostly explained by increases in enrollment at California State University (CSU) campuses. Both effects lead to vast reductions in between-neighborhood inequality in educational outcomes.”
