Jack Buckley

Duration Dependence, Functional Form, and Corrected Standard Errors: Improving EHA Models of State Policy Diffusion

Discrete event history analysis (EHA) is the analytic tool of choice for many scholars of policy diffusion across American states. Unfortunately, the policy diffusion literature largely ignores several important specification issues for EHA models: duration dependence, choice of functional form, and the computation of standard errors corrected for temporal and spatial dependence. We use data from Berry and Berrys (1990) seminal study of state lottery diffusion to demonstrate ways to deal properly with these issues.

Are Charter School Students Harder to Educate? Evidence From Washington, D.C.

One point of debate in the recent controversy in the media and among policy analysts over the academic achievement of charter school students is whether the charter students are in some way harder to educate than their counterparts enrolled in traditional public schools. This article examines this question using data from the 2002–2003 school year in Washington, D.C. It begins by examining a simple binomial model of the proportion of students in key demographic and programmatic categories linked to educability. It then turns to the estimation of a more theoretically appropriate mixture model that assumes two latent categories of charter schools. It concludes with an analysis that moves beyond simple demographic/programmatic factors to consider measures of educability using individual-level survey data from charter and traditional public school students. Overall, there is mixed evidence of differences in the educability of students in the two sectors.

Making the Grade: Comparing DC Charter Schools to Other DC Public Schools

Across the United States, charter schools have become one of the most frequently used means of increasing choice among educational alternatives. In this article we use data from a recent telephone survey of Washington D.C. parents to evaluate the success of the District’s large and growing charter school program. We find that parents with children in charter schools rate their teachers, principals, facilities and schools higher than their traditional public counterparts. This finding is robust even when controlling for self-selection into charter schools. Based on these empirical results, we argue that the greater satisfaction with charter schools reflected in these differences in grades is not simply the result of the act of choosing.