What Can We Learn from Charter School Lotteries?

Julia Chabrier, Sarah Cohodes and Philip Oreopoulos

No 22390, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We take a closer look at what we can learn about charter schools by pooling data from lottery-based impact estimates of the effect of charter school attendance at 113 schools. On average, each year enrolled at one of these schools increases math scores by 0.08 standard deviations and English/language arts scores by 0.04 standard deviations. There is wide variation in impact estimates. To glean what drives this variation, we link these effects to school practices, inputs, and characteristics of fallback schools. In line with the earlier literature, we find that schools that adopt an intensive “No Excuses” attitude towards students are correlated with large gains in academic performance, with traditional inputs like class size playing no role in explaining charter school effects. However, we highlight that “No Excuses” schools are also located among the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. After accounting for performance levels at fallback schools, the relationship between the remaining variation in school performance and the entire “No Excuses” package of practices weakens. “No Excuses” schools are effective at raising performance in neighborhoods with very poor performing schools, but the available data have less to say on whether the “No Excuses” approach could help in nonurban settings or whether other practices would similarly raise achievement in areas with low-performing schools. We find that intensive tutoring is the only “No Excuses” characteristic that remains significant (even for nonurban schools) once the performance levels of fallback schools are taken into account.

JEL-codes: I20 I24 I28 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
Note: CH ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Published as Julia Chabrier & Sarah Cohodes & Philip Oreopoulos, 2016. "What Can We Learn from Charter School Lotteries?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 30(3), pages 57-84.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22390.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What Can We Learn from Charter School Lotteries? (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22390

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22390

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().