Choice in a World of New School Types

As the school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to have an understanding of what family and school factors are associated with enrollment decisions of households. In this paper, we use restricted-access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), which allows us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of individuals and to match the household to the actual school attended and other nearby schools. This matching is significant as the previous research has generally not been able to link individual households to their school enrollment decisions. Using these data, we examine the role that socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity play in school enrollment decisions. One of our more interesting results suggests that the newest public alternative (charter schools) attracts higher socioeconomic status families than do traditional public schools. Unlike traditional public schools, the attraction of the charter schools, however, appears to be race/ethnic neutral. Families neither choose the charter schools because of their racial/ethnic composition nor does household race/ethnicity influence the choice of charter schools. Other socioeconomic factors influencing charter school choice are more similar to factors explaining choice of private schools than to those of traditional public schools.