Choices, Choices: Determining Significant Predictors of Choosing a School and Choosing Charters in Denver's Universal School Enrollment Program

Abstract

Through charter school laws, more than 40 states now enable parents to send their child to a school other than their neighborhood school. Given the option, what kinds of schools do parents prefer -- charter or traditional public schools? Are there differences in preferences based on family and student performance characteristics? To answer these questions, a body of literature has examined enrollment patterns, but for various reasons of policy and practice, enrollment patterns are not necessarily accurate representations of parental preferences. This study takes advantage of a rare centralized enrollment system in Denver, Colorado, that enabled the authors to track the actual stated choices/preferences of parents. Results indicate the most consistent predictor of affirmatively choosing a school and choosing a charter school is race/ethnicity. In particular, black families are almost always more likely than White families to choose and to choose charters. The same is also usually true for Hispanic families. Beyond race/ethnicity, few other variables demonstrate consistent patterns of relationships or significance across dependent measures or grades. ELL students, those with IEPs, and students who quality for free or reduced lunch sometimes choose or choose charters at significantly greater or lesser rates, but not consistently so. Finally, actual prior academic performance and prior enrollment in a charter school appear to play only a trivial role in predicting whether parents choose or choose charters.