The Effect of Charter School Openings on Traditional Public Schools in Massachusetts and North Carolina

Abstract

The rapid expansion of charter schools has fueled concerns about their impact on traditional public schools. I estimate the effect of charter openings on traditional public schools in Massachusetts and North Carolina by comparing schools near actual charter sites to those near proposed sites that were never occupied. I find charter openings reduced public school enrollment by around 5 percent and reduced White enrollment in North Carolina. I find no impact on student achievement, and my 95 percent confidence intervals rule out effects larger than ± 0.05 standard deviations. I find no effects on attendance or suspensions. (JEL H75, I21, I28, J15)

The Boundaries of Competition: Examining Charter Schools’ Impact on Traditional Schools

“…Similarly, Buckley and Schneider (2007) found that charter school parents in the District of Columbia were similar in socioeconomic status and education to traditional school parents. On the other hand, Slungaard Mumma (2019) finds that charter school openings in North Carolina reduced the enrollment among nearby traditional schools by 5%. Barseghyan et al (2019) develop a theoretical model and find that when peer preferences are strong, school competition can reduce the quality of the public school system in several ways.…”

Competitive Effects of Charter Schools

“…Because charter schools are generally anticipated to serve a minority of any given school population, the competition channel represents the mechanism posited to affect more students, and so whether charter competition affects public school students positive or negatively is a first-order question. Despite these theoretical predictions, the competitive effects of charters has remained a relatively under-studied topic, and results are not consistent across papers (e.g., Hoxby, 2003;Sass, 2006;Booker et al, 2008;Zimmer & Buddin, 2009;Bettinger, 2005;Imberman, 2011;Winters, 2012;Davis, 2013;Jinnai, 2014;Cordes, 2018;Ridley and Terrier, 2018;Mann & Bruno, 2022;Gilraine et al, 2021;Slungaard Mumma, 2022). These inconsistencies likely spring from multiple sources, including different empirical strategies subject to different limitations, as well as differences in the institutional settings used across the variety of case-4 studies.…”

“…Several of the studies have been limited to single districts or a small set of districts (e.g., Winters, 2012;Cordes, 2018), while studies that have used statewide data or larger number of districts generally look at the very early years of charter policies and over relatively short periods of time (e.g., Bettinger, 2005;Bifluco and Ladd, 2006;Sass, 2006;Booker et al, 2008;Zimmer & Buddin, 2009 but see Jinnai, 2014or Slungaard Mumma, 2022. Other studies that take a national perspective are limited to district-level data (Han & Keefe, 2020) or to state-level measures of charter competition (Davis, 2013).…”