ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on meta-analysis, the most thorough yet conducted, on the effect that school choice has on educational attainment. It attempts to collect every experimental and quasi-experimental study of school choice in the US. The chapter examines a very specific question: whether the relative impacts of school choice on achievement are correlated with the relative impacts on attainment, for the population of empirical studies that examine both outcomes. One mechanism is private school vouchers, where students are awarded vouchers to cover tuition at any one of a number of private schools of their choosing. If test score gains are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for producing long-term gains in crucial student outcomes, then current approaches to accountability for school choice programs are questionable at best. The most obvious implication is that policymakers need to be much more humble in what they believe that test scores tell them about the performance of schools of choice.
