Gender and Performance: Evidence from School Assignment by Randomized Lottery

School choice programs are intended to im-prove student achievement, by allowing for bet-ter matches between students and schools. It is not clear, however, that academic achievement will improve if parents make school choice de-cisions over both academic and nonacademic school attributes (Justine S. Hastings et al., 2005, 2006). Indeed, many randomized studies of impacts of school choice find little or no effect of school choice on academic outcomes. For example, initial evaluations of randomized voucher experiments in Milwaukee and New York City found modest academic impacts on eligible students (John F. Witte et al., 1995; Daniel P. Mayer et al., 2002).1 More recently