Center Director,
Kenneth K. Wong
The Center on School Choice, Competition, and Achievement aims at conducting scientific, comprehensive, and timely investigation on the individual and systemic effects of school choice and competition. The Center will assume national intellectual leadership in coordinating efforts of multiple disciplines, methodologies, and substantive issues that are associated with the design, implementation, and effects of school choice. Its programs of research will engage nationally known scholars across major social science disciplines from nationally ranked top research universities. Led by Vanderbilt, the Center’s core partners include Harvard, Stanford, National Bureau of Economic Research, Brookings Institution, and Northwest Evaluation Association.
The Center on School Choice, Competition, and Achievement has received a federally funded grant from the Institute for Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education. The grant will fund the Center for $10 million over five years. The grant is a cooperative agreement between the Institute for Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education, and Vanderbilt University.
Policymakers, parents, and students need to know what effects they can expect to see from the choice options emerging in their school district. Will school choice raise student achievement? Satisfy parents and students? Improve instructional and curricular quality? Stratify / segregate students along racial or class lines? Meet the needs of special education and disabled students? Spur traditional school districts to change their behavior? Find itself limited by political and legal constraints? Create a more satisfactory professional environment for teachers? The current state of research on school choice provides hardly definitive answers to these questions. To address this problem, we propose a Center for the study of school choice, competition, and achievement.
Recognizing these challenges, we will take several steps from the inception to foster an integrated approach. First, the Center has assembled a multidisciplinary team to study school choice and to seek solutions to issues related to competition and student achievement. Among the key project investigators are economists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, curriculum experts, psychometricians, statisticians, public finance analysts, and legal scholars.
Second, the center has engaged the nation’s top universities and top research organizations that otherwise would not have participated in a collaborative endeavor in educational research. Among the center's core partners are two of the nation's top five graduate schools of education (Vanderbilt and Stanford), a renowned public policy school (Harvard's Kennedy School of Government), the nation’s undisputed top economic research organization (National Bureau of Economic Research's Economics of Education Program), a highly ranked law school (Vanderbilt), the nation’s oldest nonpartisan policy think tank (Brookings Institution), and a non-profit assessment organization that houses the nation's most extensive data base on student achievement growth (Northwest Evaluation Association). In addition, several investigators are affiliated with Stanford’s influential Hoover Institute and the public, independent, and charter school sectors.
Third, while the Center will naturally have projects that address specific issues on choice and competition, its main program of research consists of coordinated data collection that is jointly shared and analyzed by researchers from different disciplines and institutions. For example, the Center will coordinate a major randomized experimental study on students lotteried in and out of a national sample of charter schools. Approaching the data from their own disciplinary orientations, researchers will examine distinct aspects of the implementation and effects of charter schools, including mathematics and reading curricula, achievement, and resource allocation practices. In essence, we are creating a “center” of scientific inquiry with a focus on school choice issues.