Parental Valuation of Charter Schools and Student Performance

Students enrolled in charter schools increased by 81 percent from 2002 to 2007, and the number of charter schools increased by 52 percent.1 Nevertheless, many studies indicate students in charter schools do not score as highly on standard tests as students in tradi-tional public schools. Do parents choose academically inferior schools for their children because other factors are more important? The significance of that question stems from the requirement of scholastically motivated parental choice for competition-induced improvement in public schools. Milton Friedman (1962) and others have argued that parental choice would stimulate public schools to be more academically effective, because dissatisfied parents would move their children from inferior to superior schools, including pub-lic charter schools. This article provides evidence that the value parents place on charter schools, measured by the number of students on an admis-sions wait list, depends primarily on their academic effectiveness, measured by test scores. An analysis of New Jersey charter schools indicates that a 10 percent increase in test scores results in a 60 to 100 percent increase in the number of students on the waiting list. Also, schools that stress academic excellence in their mission state-ments have waiting lists 75 percent larger than identical school