School Choice: Tradeoffs and Evidence-Based Policy Making

Call for Proposals

Submission Deadline: Friday, January 24, 2025

Notification of Acceptance: Friday, February 14, 2025

Organizers: Paul E. Peterson and Michael T. Hartney

Nearly all states today have some form or public-school choice and roughly 1 in 10 children attend a charter school. Almost half the states have some form of private school choice. Across the country choice programs have expanded in number, size and design since the  pandemic.

The rapid adoption of choice programs has created both the need and the opportunity for rigorous research. This research is needed now more than ever so that policymakers can understand what is and isn’t working along with the tradeoffs that can arise from different policy designs.

To address this need, the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government invites paper proposals for a spring research conference on school choice. The goal of this conference is to create a space for dispassionate and evidence-based scholarly exchange on a fraught topic that can too often generate more heat than light. To that end, we aim to bring a diverse group of scholars together to discuss multiple types of choice policies from widely differing perspectives. Topics/areas of interest include but are not limited to papers that tackle questions related to:

• Universal vs. targeted school choice programs
• Vouchers, tax credits, or education savings accounts
• Charter school demand, supply, effectiveness
• Charter and private choice program impacts on district policies, practices, enrollments, finances, performance
• Impacts of charter and other choice programs on private schools
• Politics of school choice (changes in public opinion, advocacy coalitions, political strategies)
• The market for new school creation (obstacles, regulatory issues, quality control)
• What forms/metrics of accountability/assessment should exist
• Effects of choice on student performance, school quality, equity/inequity
• How choice programs may impact private school tuitions and costs and the supply/incentive to create new schools

What to submit?

Proposals should include discussion of the significance of the topic, data availability, analytical techniques, and policy implications. Evidence that the paper will be available to share with conference participants by late April should be included.

Panel proposals will be considered, but each paper in the panel will be considered on its own merits.

Details

One-night accommodation and economy travel costs will be provided for one participant per paper, though other authors are welcome to attend. Meals provided during conference, including dinner on Thursday evening.