Do Charter Schools Affect Property Values? (original) (raw)
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Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, 2004
Using an individual panel data set to control for student fixed effects, we estimate the impact of charter schools on students in charter schools and in nearby traditional public schools. We find that students make considerably smaller achievement gains in charter schools than they would have in public schools. The large negative estimates of the effects of attending a charter schools are neither substantially biased, nor substantially offset, by positive impacts of charter schools on traditional public schools. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that about 30 percent of the negative effect of charter schools is attributable to high rates of student turnover.
While "school choice" has attracted much attention from policymakers and researchers, virtually all of the research has focused on understanding how changing school choice affects student academic performance. There is, in contrast, little work examining how weakening the link between residential location and school options affects property values - despite the well accepted theoretical (and empirical) link between schools and housing. In this paper, we begin to close this gap by examining how the introduction of new "choice" schools affects house prices and, particularly, the link between school quality and neighborhood house prices. Our study utilizes rich data on New York City public elementary schools geo-coded and matched to data on property sales for a fifteen-year period beginning in 1988. To identify the impact of a choice school on the capitalization of school quality into housing values we rely on a triple difference methodology. First we incorporate a boundary discontinuity approach, similar to Black (1999) to compare the capitalization of school quality into housing prices of buildings that are close to one another but in different elementary school attendance zones. We rely on smaller and smaller distances from the boundary to test the stability of our results. Second, we compare housing units that are within 3,000 feet of a choice school to housing units outside of these rings. Third, we take advantage of choice school openings to look at the capitalization rates before and after the choice school opens. We find that the proximity of alternative school choices does weaken the link between zoned schools and property values. The opening of a choice school reduces the capitalization of test scores from zoned schools into housing values by approximately one third.
How Do Charter Schools Affect System-Level Test Scores and Graduation Rates? A National Analysis
2022
We study the combined effects of charter schools, and their various mechanisms, on a national level and across multiple outcomes. Using difference-indifferences and fixed effects methods, we find that charter entry (above 10 percent market share) increases high school graduation rate in geographic districts by about 2-4 percentage points and increases test scores by 0.06-0.16 standard deviations. Charter effects peak with 5-15 percent charter market share. Also, total effects are comprised not only of participant and competitive effects, but also the charter-induced closure of low-performing traditional public schools. The analysis addresses potential endogeneity of charter school location and timing.
The Impacts of Charter Schools on Student Achievement: Evidence from North Carolina
Education Finance and Policy, 2006
Using an individual panel data set to control for student fixed effects, we estimate the impact of charter schools on students in charter schools and in nearby traditional public schools. We find that students make considerably smaller achievement gains in charter schools than they would have in public schools. The large negative estimates of the effects of attending a charter schools are neither substantially biased, nor substantially offset, by positive impacts of charter schools on traditional public schools. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that about 30 percent of the negative effect of charter schools is attributable to high rates of student turnover.
Knowledge and Space
The authors of this chapter describe an institutional arrangement for education in the United States: the provision of education through “charter schools,” an experiment in liberalization and decentralization begun in the early 1990s. They address whether charter schools raise student achievement on average compared to students in traditional public schools. They report that the authors of small-scale randomized studies report quite positive effects, but that as the sample of schools increases, the reported effects decline in size and significance, from which they conclude that while charter schools do not generally harm student achievement, they do not have significantly positive effects for the average student. They do, however, more positively affect poor and minority students and students in some urban centers. This underlines the importance of examining school effects across different geographies and social groups and the key role external validity plays in drawing policy impli...
Charter schools are a popular and growing area of school choice in the United States, but current research about their effects on student achievement is mixed. In this paper, we analyze student achievement growth in an urban district called "Crossroads." Over the 2002-2003 through the 2005-2006 school years, we compare the achievement levels and growth of charter school students with students enrolled in traditional public schools. We analyze data from the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), which provides fall and spring assessments in reading and mathematics as well as student and school characteristics. Using propensity score matching to compare charter public school students to otherwise similar traditional public school students and cross-classified random effects models to estimate achievement growth, we find that charter students experience an initial drop in achievement when they make a move to a charter school. Charter public students experience higher growth rates than traditional public school students to make up for the initial loss, but this compensatory effect may take a couple of school years.
Journal of Urban Economics, 2008
Texas has been an important player in the emergence of the charter school industry. We test for a competitive effect of charters by looking for changes in student achievement in traditional public schools following charter market penetration. We use an eight-year panel of data on individual student test scores for public schools students in Texas in order to evaluate the achievement impact of charter schools. We control for student background in two ways. We estimate a model which includes campus fixed effects to control for campus demographic and peer group characteristics, and student fixed effects to control directly for student and student family background characteristics. We find a positive and significant effect of charter school penetration on traditional public school student outcomes.
Journal of Urban Affairs
The link between neighborhood quality and school quality is long-standing and well established. Over the last two decades there have been several federally sponsored initiatives aimed at revitalizing the urban core; initiatives that emerged around the same time as charter schools. Despite the changing urban context that has occurred alongside charter school emergence, little research has addressed the link between urban revitalization efforts and charter school emergence. Using three cities that have experienced massive urban core revitalization and metropolitan growth since the early 1990s (Atlanta, Chicago, and Philadelphia), we examine whether demographic changes resulting from urban revitalization and gentrification are associated with the opening of a charter school. Our findings illustrate a somewhat mixed account. We find some evidence to support this link in Chicago and Philadelphia, whereas we find little support for it in Atlanta.
Peabody Journal of Education, 2020
To date, there is a paucity of research that examines differences between charter schools that operate in suburban and urban contexts. This paper examines whether students in suburban charter schools perform better or worse than their counterparts in traditional public schools or students in urban charter schools. Boasting the largest and most diverse charter school population in the United States, California offers a fertile urban-suburban context for the study of geographically differentiated charter school impacts and thus serves as the focus of our study. The student achievement data (2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years) for this study come from the California Department of Education. Using propensity score matching and virtual control records (VCR), we find that suburban charter schools do not improve academic achievement relative to the matched comparison group of traditional public schools. Suburban charter schools (namely, charters in high-income areas) appear to leave their students' achievement unchanged or diminished. This study adds to the existing literature by examining the effects of charter schools on the neighborhoods in which they operate. Methodologically, another important contribution of this study is that it supplements traditional selection criteria for suburban charters (NCES classification) with census-based neighborhood factors. Finally, this study provides evidence of the broader implications of school choice policies in a suburban setting.