School Choice: Evidence and Recommendations, a collection of 10 policy briefs on specific topics under the umbrella of choice, brings together some of the top scholars in the field and presents a comprehensive overview of the best current knowledge of these important policies. Together, the briefs offer reason to believe that choice policies can further some educational goals, but they also offer many reasons for caution.

Since 1996, the Center for Education Reform has released an annual report card, grading each state’s charter school legislation and labeling as the “strongest” those laws placing the fewest and slightest restrictions on charter schools. While the Center for Education Reform rankings have undoubtedly been the most influential, at least four other systems have been developed. In this article, we analyze the different ranking systems, including a new approach we have developed in order to illustrate the arbitrariness of any given ranking system and to highlight some key charter school issues. We then investigate the general, popular phenomenon of rankings in the field of education, exploring the benefits, drawbacks, and appeal of such rankings.

This policy brief analyzes factors related to the implementation of effective parental involvement with English Language Learners (ELLs). It analyzes characteristics of the ELL student and parent population; barriers to ELL family engagement with schools; and characteristics of traditional and non-traditional parental involvement models. Diversity in ELL parents and their communities speaks to the need for both traditional and non-traditional models for ELL parental involvement. With a dual-model approach, variation in language proficiency is acknowledged, communication is facilitated and maintained, and communities are recognized and integrated within the school culture.

This policy brief examines empirical research on the demographic characteristics of students and families who actively engage in school choice as well as the research on the motivations, preferences and behavior of families who actively choose schools. Although there have been many surveys asking parents about their preferences for schools or about what they would choose if they had a choice, such studies are not the focus of this brief. Rather, the research reviewed here is only that which focuses on those who have actively chosen a school. The choice options examined here include home schooling, private schools, vouchers, and public school choice programs such as controlled choice districts, charter schools, and magnet schools.

This policy brief examines the recent wave of commission reports that have attacked the American high school and called for its "reinvention." Two conceptions of rigor are dominant: test-based rigor, requiring higher scores on conventional tests; and course-based rigor, requiring more demanding courses. However, these conventional academic conceptions neglect several other conceptions of rigor: as depth rather than breadth; as more sophisticated levels of understanding including "higher-order skills"; and as the ability to apply learning in unfamiliar settings. With very few exceptions, both graduation requirements and exit exams replicate the conventional academic curriculum of the late nineteenth century, and they have little to say about how their imposition will enhance student performance generally. Overall, the push to enhance rigor and standards behind the high school diploma is seriously flawed. Moreover, any gains come at the expense of other goals for high school reform, including equity, curricular relevance, and student interest. A more promising approach to reshaping the high school involves pathways, structured around a coherent theme, either broadly occupational or non-occupational.

This annual report, in its ninth edition, found that, despite repeated requests, several large, publicly funded Education Management Organizations (EMOs) failed to provide information about their schools or finances when queried by researchers. The data collected in the report suggest that the number of charter schools overall has increased and the number of EMO-run charter schools has stabilized or declined slightly. The number of students enrolled in charter schools has shown a slight decrease. The report is the most comprehensive resource on the for-profit education management industry.

Issued by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, "A School Privatization Primer for Michigan School Officials, Media and Residents" examines the "contracting out" of public school support services — specifically food, transportation, and custodial services. The report describes the prevalence of contracting out and sets forth the practical steps in hiring a contractor and the benefits in allowing districts to focus on their core mission of instruction. This information may help districts already committed to contracting out. However, the report presupposes that the practice is beneficial. It relies primarily on testimony from district officials rather than direct data or research. And it does not consider the significant transactions costs associated with contracting out or the risks in ceding control to an outside vendor. Overall, the report is prone to overstatement and misleading contentions, resulting in a report that greatly over-simplifies how education systems operate and the purported benefits of contracting out education-related services.

This study examines the relationship between high-stakes school accountability and its effects upon student test scores and school policies. The authors seek to understand the extent to which accountability sanctions and incentives for the poorest-performing schools in Florida explain subsequent changes in school practices and policies as well as achievement — measured by state assessment data, Stanford-10 assessment data and surveys of public school principals. Based on statistical analysis of the lowest-performing schools, the authors report that accountability incentives and sanctions are related to school practice and policy as well as to student achievement. The report uses comprehensive data sources and applies appropriate methodologies to address the research question. Its analyses demonstrate a mediating relationship for school policies between accountability and achievement gains, a finding consistent with both the literature on the subject and common sense. However, the report overstates and makes causal claims about the relationship between accountability sanctions and improvements in school achievement. In this way, the report’s title and some causal statements in the body of the report are unfortunate in that they overstate the report’s sound findings and suggest that vouchers and other accountability measures are shown to be the cause of achievement gains in some of Florida’s lowest-performing schools.

Five sister reports published by the Friedman Foundation over the past two years have ignored the relevant research literature in asserting that private-school voucher programs can reduce the social costs of dropping out while increasing graduation rates. The reports are state-specific, targeting five different states. But each report follows a parallel structure, arguing that the state in question overestimates its graduation rate, that the costs of drop-ping out are dramatic and that a private-school voucher program can increase graduation and address the dropout problem by generating competition. Yet the reports largely ignore the existing research literature on the personal and social benefits of educational attain-ment, the effects of school competition, and the factors associated with either completing or dropping out of high school. Further, each report does not provide sufficient information about how the author estimated the statistical claims made for each state, and the author fails to compare the alleged benefits of private-school vouchers with plausible alternatives, such as increasing public-school choice programs or improving graduation through other programs. State policymakers interested in increasing graduation would be better served by seeking out the available, well-researched scholarship on the topic.

Public versus private school achievement gaps in general and the effects of school choice on academic outcomes in particular remain controversial issues. I review two recent reports of empirical studies on this topic: one from the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation (MFF) and the other from the Center on Education Policy (CEP). MFF presents its empirical analysis in the context of the larger policy question about the effect of school choice, whereas CEP simply attempts to answer a research question, with policy implications, about a possible public-private school achievement gap. Both studies contribute new evidence to the existing literature through secondary analyses of national high school student datasets — the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS) and the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) databases. The two reports in tandem provide contrasting views and results regarding private school effects. MFF argues that private schooling is more successful at improving student test scores; CEP argues that public and private schools have relatively equal success. This review provides an independent cross-examination of the two data sources and shows that the public-private high school gaps in math achievement gain scores were almost null (in the NELS) or too small to be practically significant (in the ELS). Therefore, the seemingly divergent findings and conclusions at the first glance may have been largely due to their different interpretations rather than real differences in the results. Both studies could have given more useful guidelines for policy and practice if they had examined reasons for observed gaps (or the lack thereof) between public and private schools.

The Buckeye Institute report, Shortchanging Disadvantaged Students: An Analysis of Intra-district Spending Patterns in Ohio, argues that high-poverty Ohio school districts can no longer place blame on the State of Ohio for failing to provide financial resources equitably. Rather, the authors argue that inequitable resource allocation across schools within high-poverty districts is the primary cause of remaining poverty-related disparities in student outcomes in Ohio. However, analyses presented by the authors fail to validate that the State of Ohio has allocated financial resources across districts with any greater degree of equity than high-poverty districts have allocated resources across schools. The authors show that many of the 72 high-poverty districts they identify in the state do not systematically allocate more funding to higher-poverty schools. This finding is undermined by numerous well-understood, overlooked factors, however, including cost differences and poverty-reporting differences by school grade level and very basic issues of sample size. Finally, while the authors contend that poverty related achievement gaps are a function of within district resource allocation disparities, the authors provide no validation that the achievement gap they measure exists within rather than between districts.