School Choice, Screening, and Stratification: Evidence on Enrollment and Composition

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

School choice policies have fundamentally reshaped American public education, yet their consequences for enrollment, student composition, and equity remain contested and unevenly understood. This panel brings together four studies examining how choice and sorting mechanisms, from Education Savings Accounts and private school vouchers to academic screening and alternative school placement, alter who attends which schools and with what consequences for educational stratification. The panel opens with Francis and Senese, who provide the first multi-state causal analysis of ESA adoption across five states with meaningfully different program designs. Using staggered difference-in-differences models and a continuous treatment dosage based on state ESA expenditures, they find that average public school enrollment effects are modest but concentrate among incoming kindergarten cohorts and vary substantially by district urbanicity and private school availability. A complementary study by Roy and Nguyen uses Arizona as a leading case study of universal voucher expansion, examining how broad eligibility changes affect not only public school enrollment but also per-pupil spending and local taxpayer support for public education. These questions have direct implications for the fiscal sustainability of public school systems. Both studies focus on students who leave, yet the school choice landscape includes a large and underexamined sector serving students who never had a straightforward choice to begin with. Pardo et al. examine alternative schools, a sector enrolling over 900,000 students annually at the intersection of choice and institutional assignment. Drawing on national school-level data from 1992 to 2024 and multilevel growth curve models, they document persistent overrepresentation of Black students across alternative school types, particularly in traditional alternative and juvenile justice schools. Significant state-level variation underscores the role of local policy context in shaping stratification. Chang provides causal evidence on academic screening in New York City middle schools by exploiting a 2023 reform that introduced standardized admissions criteria. The study finds that screening raises average prior achievement among admitted cohorts, reduces applications from Hispanic and low-income students, and produces math achievement gains concentrated among higher-performing students, while generating minimal effects on district-level segregation or aggregate outcomes. Across all of these studies, sorting mechanisms operate through program design, geography, and institutional processes. They illuminate a consistent tension: policies that generate localized benefits often concentrate costs among already-disadvantaged students and districts. As states continue to expand and redesign choice architectures, this panel offers timely empirical grounding for debates over access, equity, and the distribution of public educational resources.

Policy Area

• Education

Chair

• Yerin Yoon, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Discussants

• Douglas N Harris, Tulane University

• Mark Junxuan Chin, Vanderbilt University

Organizer

• Abigail Francis, Boston University

Individual Presentations

• The Effect of ESA Policies on Public School Enrollment and Composition - Presenting Author: Abigail Francis, Boston University

• Alternative Schools in the Era of School Choice: National Trends in Enrollment Over Three Decades - Presenting Author: Nicolas Pardo, University of Southern California

• Impact of Universal Private School Vouchers on Enrollment and Spending in Public Schools: Evidence from Arizona - Presenting Author: Joydeep Roy, New York City Independent Budget Office

• Back on Track? Academic Screening, Cohort Sorting, and Achievement in NYC Middle Schools - Presenting Author: Jerray Chang, Boston University