School Choice, Competition, and Aggregate School Quality

This paper develops and estimates an empirical framework that evaluates the impact of charter school choice on education quality in the aggregate. We estimate the model using student-level data from North Carolina. We find that North Carolina’s lifting of its statewide charter school cap raised the average public school's value-added by around 0.01 standard deviations (on the student test score distribution). We calculate the total human capital returns of the expansion at above $100,000 per charter school enrollee. We further show that competition drives the aggregate gains; test score impacts on students induced into charter schools by the policy are negative.