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How Transportation Shapes School Choice: Evidence from Baltimore City Public Schools

July 06, 2025 | By Julia Burdick-Will, Marc Stein

Baltimore’s system of school choice requires students and families to select their high schools rather than be assigned one based on where they live. While this system provides flexibility, challenges related to distance and commuting remain, especially for those students who rely on public transportation to get to school. This study uses major changes to the bus system over time to examine the effect of commuting difficulty on school choice.

This study was was published in Social Science Research in May of 2025.

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How Should the Government Regulate Charter Schools? State Policy Patterns and Causal Effects

November 01, 2023 | By Douglas N. Harris, Roy McKenzie

This brief describes how charter regulation varies across states, it shows how the regulations are related to charter school outcomes, and provides evidence of their policy effects.

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Choice in a Time of COVID: Immediate Enrollment Decisions in New York City and Detroit

July 26, 2023 | By Sarah Cordes, Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Jeremy Singer, Samantha Trajkovski

New research offers some of the first evidence of COVID-19’s impact on student mobility.

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A Year That Forced Change: Examining How Schools and School Systems Adapted to the Challenges of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Calls for Racial Justice in 2020

July 18, 2023 | By Huriya Jabbar, Taylor Enoch-Stevens, Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, Julie A. Marsh, Eupha Jeanne Daramola, Jacob Alonso, Jeremy Singer, Chanteliese Watson, Laura Mulfinger, Kait Ogden, Dwuana Bradley, Annie Hemphill, Sheneka Williams, Kate Kennedy

These two reports explore how educational institutions and their systems responded to two sudden disruptions, the COVID-19 pandemic and increased awareness of racial inequity. We compared responses from traditional, charter, voucher-receiving private schools and rural and urban districts.

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Online Reviews Are Leading Indicators of Changes in K-12 School Attributes

May 28, 2023 | By Linsen Li, Aron Culotta, Douglas N. Harris, Nicholas Mattei

In this paper, we investigate to what extent the language used in online reviews of a school is predictive of changes in the attributes of that school, such as its socio-economic makeup and student test scores.

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Virtual Charter Students Have Worse Labor Market Outcomes as Young Adults

May 24, 2023 | By Paul Y. Yoo, Thurston Domina, Andrew McEachin, Leah Clark, Hannah Hertenstein, Andrew Penner

Virtual charter schools are increasingly popular, yet there is no research on the long-term outcomes of virtual charter students. We link statewide education records from Oregon with earnings information from IRS records housed at the U.S. Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults.

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How Charter Authorizers Shape Equity: A Cross-State Analysis of Charter Applications

January 10, 2023 | By Katrina Bulkley, Amanda Lu, Kate Meza Fernandez, Alica Gerry

This study examines the role of authorizers in advancing equity-focused charter schools.

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School Choice and Competition for Teachers: Evidence from Michigan

December 20, 2022 | By Kaitlin P. Anderson

This study from Kaitlin P. Anderson examines how competition from school choice relates to the distribution of teacher characteristics across school contexts in Michigan.

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How Do Charter Schools Affect the Supply of Teachers from University-Based Education Programs?

October 27, 2022 | By Douglas N. Harris, Mary Penn

This study examines how charter schools affect the number of traditionally prepared teachers who receive a bachelor’s degree in education.

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The Roles of Residential Mobility and Distance in Participation in Public School Choice

October 18, 2022 | By Danielle Sanderson Edwards, Joshua M. Cowen

This study examines the relationship between residential decisions, commute time to school, and exit from inter-district and charter school choice in Michigan.

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How Does School Bus Transportation Affect Student Attendance and Achievement?

July 19, 2022 | By Danielle Sanderson Edwards

This study analyzes how bus eligibility impacts student attendance and achievement in Michigan where almost half of the largest districts limit bus transportation to students who live more than 1.5 miles from school.

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