1Fulfilling Parents Wishes: Property Taxes, School Choice, and Referendum Success

Do charter schools improve the odds for school districts seeking increased funding at the polls? If school choice increases parental satisfaction, and those parents who choose schools are among the most attentive to school district policies, then increasing school choice should increase the like-lihood that they turn out to support a districts request for more funds. (These voters would be more likely to turn out, too, given that few people vote in school referenda elections.) This paper uses a logit analysis of school finance ballot measures for Wisconsin from 1998 to 2005. The anal-ysis suggests that the presence of charter schools in a district does improve a districts chances of gaining voter approval for finance issues. 3The ability of parents to choose the school where their children attendedwithout mov-ingproved to be one of the innovations of the 1990s. The number of students using some form of school choice continues to grow (National Center for Education Statistics 2006, 187). The debates over whether allowing school choice improves student achievement, creams the best students, im-proves school morale, or simply competes with private schools continue (see Gill et al. 2007; Ver-gari 2007), but the focus of these studies has been on students and student interactions. Students are indeed a crucial part of the equation, but researchers have paid little attention to the educationa