ABSTRACT
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) offers a collection of high-quality data that can be used to address many issues of concern to the school-choice community. This chapter shows that the NCES has data about who chooses, what schools they choose from, and the characteristics of the students and teachers in those schools. It highlights specific NCES datasets that the education research community may find useful to study school choice, including the National Household Education Surveys Program, the Common Core of Data, the Private School Universe Survey, the Schools and Staffing Survey, and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998. NCES offers a wide collection of data that education researchers can apply to many of the school choice issues they care about. The chapter provides a glimpse into what some of these datasets are and how researchers can use them to investigate what they want to know.
