Welcome to Informed Choice

Dispatches from the EdChoice research team

In the words of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, “It's happening, Reg! Something's actually happening!”

Milton Friedman first made his argument for universal school choice seven decades ago.

Nearly three decades ago, EdChoice was created to advance his and his wife’s vision for the American education system.

For the vast majority of that time, school choice was an idea in theory with limited real-world examples.

That has all changed. States across the country have created substantial and wide-sweeping educational choice programs. More than a million students now use some form of public support to attend private school, and the enrollment curve has bent sharply upward. More states appear poised to create choice programs.

For researchers like us, the world has become a target-rich environment. There are some big, empirical questions related to school choice that will only become more salient as choice grows and expands.

Here is just a sample:

1. What is the supply-side response to greatly expanded or new programs? Are existing schools/providers growing? Are new schools/providers emerging? What do those new organizations and institutions look like?

2. Are parents aware of these programs? Are school leaders? What are their opinions about them? Are there ways that they should be improved to be more user friendly?

3. How does choice affect outcomes that we care about? Student achievement? Student attainment? Student experiences (related to everything from school safety to bullying to mental health)?

4. Do education savings account (ESA) programs, where parents have an incentive to be cost conscious, bend the cost curve of schooling down?

5. Are students being pulled or pushed into school choice? That is, are parents choosing new schools to leave bad situations or because they are being enticed by good ones?

6. What are the demographics of new program participants? How do they vary based on program design? How do they change as programs mature?

7. What does expanded choice mean for teachers? Do choice programs affect recruitment, retention, satisfaction, pay, and/or the demographic characteristics of teachers?

8. How much does all of this cost? Are there better or worse ways to structure programs to ensure stable funding at necessary levels? How do different funding levels in different programs affect participation? How do these programs affect state budgets?

We are launching Informed Choice, our new Substack newsletter, as a place to answer these questions. This does not mean that our team is going to stop publishing the long-form reports, briefs, working papers, journal articles, book chapters, and books that dive deep into the questions of educational choice.

Informed Choice will be a place that we can, to borrow a term from my old teaching days, extend and refine our longer form work, teasing out interesting tidbits, highlighting important findings, and publishing extra figures, graphs, and data that might not fit into traditional publications. It will also be a place for other things that catch our eye, like Q&A’s with interesting people, book reviews, study summaries, and more.

The plan for now is to publish twice weekly (on Tuesdays and Fridays), so we hope you’ll sign up to join us as we come to better understand this new and exciting world of school choice policy and practice. Oh, and don’t worry, this newsletter will always be free.

Mike McShane

Editor-in-Chief