Examining charter school policy and public school district resource allocation using multiple quasi-experimental designs
This project incorporates three different examinations of the relationship between charter schools and public school districts and district-run public schools. Charter schools, publically funded and privately run, are thought to improve performance in district-run public schools through a variety of forces. This project focuses on the competitive pressure, or the threat of competitive pressure, generated by charter schools and charter school policies and how those pressures do, and do not, impact district-run public schools. The first paper, a literature review of how charter schools induce competition in district-run public schools, examines quantitative and qualitative analyses of how charter schools may or may not compel public school districts to respond. The second paper uses longitudinal district-level data to examine the relationship between Ohio charter school policy and changes in public school district instructional resource allocation. The third paper is an examination of how, in the quantitative literature, competition is measured in examinations of the second-level effects of charter schools, and a critique of existing approaches to that measurement. The findings from this project highlight the various potential influences that may induce or mitigate a response from a public school district. One such influence is charter school policy itself, and this study demonstrates that some Ohio charter school policies may be associated with increased level of instructional resource allocation. These findings are problematized by inconsistent findings in other, similar charter school policies and methodological concerns; further, other studies of charter school competition are problematized by inconsistent definitions and metrics of competition.
charter schools, resource allocation, quasi-experimental design, second-level effects, competition, charter school policy
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign