Paying for School Choice: Availability Differences among Local Education Markets

Abstract

On the grounds of the school zone discontinuity by parents’ educational level, housing price, and household income, empowering parents to choose children’s schools with their own hands has the potential to improve overall access to education by weakening geographical advantages, or disadvantages, and opening up invisible boundaries between communities. Though recent school choice proposals seem aligned with issues of access to education, little research has paid attention to potential access to and actual utilization of the federal government-initiated choice program in competitive markets. This paper explores whether or not the markets for the public school choice provision under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 are ready to serve students at chronically underperforming schools, by representing the geographic distribution of choice availability in a segregated metropolitan area. This study finds that the public school choice provision under the NCLB builds unequal choice settings between school districts.