Does School Choice Increase School Quality?

George Holmes, Jeffrey DeSimone and Nicholas Rupp ()

No 9683, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Federal No Child Left Behind' legislation, which enables students of low-performing schools to exercise public school choice, exemplies a widespread belief that competing for students will spur public schools to higher achievement. We investigate how the introduction of school choice in North Carolina, via a dramatic increase in the number of charter schools across the state, affects the performance of traditional public schools on statewide tests. We find test score gains from competition that are robust to a variety of specifications. The introduction of charter school competition causes an approximate one percent increase in the score, which constitutes about one quarter of the average yearly growth.

JEL-codes: H4 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Published as Advances in Applied Microeconomics Volume 14. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2006.

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