Author ORCID Identifier:

https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2135-1058

Date of Graduation

8-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Education Policy (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Education Reform

Advisor/Mentor

McGee, Josh

Committee Member

Patrick Wolf

Second Committee Member

Sarah McKenzie

Keywords

Charter Schools; Fiscal Impact; Funding Equity; School Choice; School Finance

Abstract

A growing movement in the United States in recent years, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has brought a wave of school choice policies, which allow students to opt into an educational arrangement outside of their zoned traditional public schools (TPS) using public funds. Critics frequently express concern that these policies place an undue financial burden on both taxpayers and school districts. States adopting such policies may take on the additional financial responsibility of educating students who would otherwise privately finance their education, posing an additional cost to the state. When students do leave TPS to participate in private school choice programs or charter schools, this attrition decreases funding to their zoned school districts, which have some fixed costs (costs which do not decrease proportionally with decreases in enrollment). However, as supporters point out, school choice also has the potential to save taxpayers money by lowering the costs to the state of educating these students. School vouchers and similar programs may cost less to the state than educating program participants in TPS would cost. In the case of charter schools, proponents assert, charter schools receive less funding to do the same job as a TPS. Additionally, school choice supporters argue that students leaving TPS also represent reduced costs to public school districts. Some researchers have posed these questions and have investigated them with data. However, there are significant limitations to precisely studying the fiscal impacts and implications of school choice. Because the funding mechanisms and functions of TPS and charter schools differ, simply comparing funding per pupil between the two sectors does not provide an apples-to-apples comparison. In the case of private school choice programs, understanding the fiscal impacts to the state and school districts requires a proxy for the counterfactual—the schooling decisions families would make in the hypothetical world in which the program does not exist. In this dissertation, I summarize best practices for attempting to overcome these limitations and apply these best practices to national charter school data and private school choice data from Arkansas, bringing evidence to bear on questions of the fiscal impacts and implications of school choice. In Chapter One, I define school choice, describe the landscape of school choice in the United States, and explain the history of school finance and administration in the United States. In Chapter Two, I describe the literature comparing TPS and charter school funding and summarize best practices from this literature. In Chapter Three, I apply these best practices to the School District Finance Survey (F-33) from the National Center for Education Statistics and provide results for 17 major U.S. cities. In Chapter Four, I use data from the Arkansas Department of Education to study the fiscal impacts of the Arkansas Education Freedom Accounts Program on the state and public school districts. Finally, in Chapter Five, I summarize the findings of all three studies and provide overall implications for policy and research in my conclusion.

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