Welcome
There is love in the air on this Valentine's Day. Of course, I am talking about love for school choice! What other kind of love is there?

Bulletin Board

• The John Locke Foundation and the Campbell Federalist Society will host national security policy experts Doug Bandow and Afsheen John Radsan for a discussion titled "The Targeted Killing of Anwar al-Awlaki: Policy and Law in an Asymmetric Age." The event will be held on Wednesday, February 22, at 12:00 noon at Campbell University Law School in Raleigh. To register for this event, please send us an email or call 919-828-3876.
  
  
• Join the Civitas Institute on March 2 and 3 at the Marriot Hotel, Crabtree Valley in Raleigh for Conservative Leadership Conference 2012: Battleground North Carolina. This highly anticipated conference will train, prepare, and motivate the citizens of North Carolina with experts from some of the nation's most respected conservative organizations. Confirmed speakers include Charles Krauthammer of Fox News, Jason Lewis of the Jason Lewis Show, and Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute. To register visit https://www.battlegroundnc.org/register or call 919-834-2099.
  
  
• Attend the Civitas Institute's Free Market Academy on Saturday, March 10, from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Fairfield Inn & Suites in Elizabeth City, NC. This workshop is inspired by Henry Hazlitt's classic book -- described by F.A. Hayek as "a brilliant performance" -- and explores several overlooked economic truths missing from today's economic debates. Essential for newcomers to economics and also serves as a great refresher for those already familiar with the subject. This discussion will better equip you to win debates on the economy and be a more persuasive advocate for economic liberty. Cost is $5.00. Register online at http://www.nccivitas.org/events or call 919-834-2099.
  
  
• The John Locke Foundation is sponsoring a Citizen's Constitutional Workshop on Saturday, March 17, from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at Joslyn Hall, Carteret Community College, in Morehead City, NC. Historian Dr. Troy Kickler and political science expert Dr. Michael Sanera will discuss "What would the Federalists and Anti-federalists say about the current political and economic crises?" The cost is $5.00 per participant, lunch not included. Pre-registration is strongly suggested. For more information or to sign up for the event, visit the Events section of the John Locke Foundation website.
  
  
• The North Carolina History Project would like educators and homeschool parents to submit lesson plans suitable for middle and high school courses in North Carolina history. Please provide links to NC History Project encyclopedia articles and other primary and secondary source material, if possible. Go to the NC History Project website for further information.
  
  
• Love JLF's research newsletter archive.

CommenTerry

In the Spring 2012 issue of Education Next, Harvard education professor David Deming published an insightful study of the relationship between school choice and crime. Deming analyzed two groups of low-income African-American students from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) -- one group had won a random lottery for admission to a better school under a districtwide open-enrollment school-choice plan and one had not. The use of a lottery replicates a randomized (or experimental) research design, the "gold standard" in social science research.

Deming concluded that students who gained admission to a better school were half as likely to commit a crime and were 18 percent more likely to stay in school through tenth grade. He wrote,

I find consistent evidence that attending a better school reduces crime among those age 16 and older, across various schools, and for both middle and high school students. The effect is largest for African American males and youth who are at highest risk for criminal involvement. In general, high-risk male youth commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning the school-choice lottery. They are also more likely to remain enrolled in school, and they show modest improvements on measures of behavior such as absences and suspensions. Yet there is no detectable impact on test scores for any youth in the sample.

Most importantly, students exhibited a lasting change in behavior. Deming discovered that the impact of winning the school-choice lottery persisted for up to seven years after their initial transfer.

Deming considered four possible explanations for this -- incapacitation, contagion, skill attainment, and peer effects, but none of them explained the phenomenon to his satisfaction. He found little evidence that incapacitation (occupying youth with long bus rides during high-crime hours) and contagion (removing kids from high-crime neighborhoods) played a significant role in discouraging criminal activity among choice recipients.

Deming's analysis revealed evidence that lottery winners obtained superior skills and knowledge in their higher-quality destination school, possibly enabling them to find employment or take advantage of other opportunities that made criminal activity less appealing. Finally, exposure to crime-prone peers had a small effect on middle school students in the choice group, but overall Deming found little evidence that peers encouraged or discouraged criminal activity.

We may not yet understand how school choice improves kids' behavior (and schooling generally), but there is ample evidence that it does. For example, the benefits of school choice are not limited to crime reduction and attendance increases. In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study titled, "School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment," Deming, along with co-authors Justine Hastings, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger, used the same sample of CMS students to assess the relationship between school choice and college enrollment.

As David Bass of Carolina Journal reported last year, Deming and his colleagues concluded that "lottery winners from low quality neighborhood school zones are 8.7 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school, 6.6 percentage points more likely to attend a four year college, and 5.7 percentage points more likely to earn a four-year college degree." In other words, the open-enrollment school-choice plan placed CMS students fortunate enough to benefit from the program on a trajectory for success.

Deming's research was not the first to identify positive outcomes from school choice in Charlotte. In an August 2000 evaluation of the Children's Scholarship Fund, Dr. Jay Greene found that low-income, predominantly African-American, scholarship recipients had combined reading and math scores 6 percentile points higher (or 0.25 of a standard deviation) than the control group after only one year of schooling (See Jay Greene, "The Effect of School Choice: An Evaluation of the Charlotte Children's Scholarship Fund Program," Manhattan Institute Civic Report no. 12, August 2000). Joshua Cowen's "School Choice as a Latent Variable: Estimating 'Complier Average Causal Effect' of Vouchers in Charlotte" from the November 2007 issue of Policy Studies Journal found comparable gains for voucher recipients.

One wonders when the politics will catch up to the research. For the sake of low-income children condemned to failing schools, let's hope that it is sooner rather than later.

Random Thought

Once upon a time, vampires were cool.

Facts and Stats

According to David Deming's study of school choice and crime,

• In general, high-risk students commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning a school choice lottery.
  
  
• Among male high school students at high risk of criminal activity, winning admission to a first-choice school reduced felony arrests from 77 to 43 per 100 students over the study period (2002-2009).
  
  
• The attendant social cost of crimes committed decreased by more than 35 percent.
  
  
• Among high-risk middle school students, admittance by lottery to a preferred school reduced the average social cost of crimes committed by 63 percent (due chiefly to a reduction in violent crime), and reduced the total expected sentence of crimes committed by 31 months (64 percent).

Mailbag

I would like to invite all readers to submit announcements, as well as their personal insights, anecdotes, concerns, and observations about the state of education in North Carolina. I will publish selected submissions in future editions of the newsletter. Anonymity will be honored. For additional information or to send a submission, email Terry at tstoops@johnlocke.org.

Education Acronym of the Week

CMS -- Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools

Quote of the Week

"The open enrollment policy thus sent a strong signal of parental demand to CMS that may have resulted in the shutting down or restructuring of low-performing schools. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 included a provision that allowed parents to transfer students from 'persistently dangerous' public schools, but many states have set the legal threshold so high that very few schools qualify. The results here suggest that, to the extent that low-quality schools are also persistently dangerous, allowing students to leave them might benefit individual students as well as society as a whole."
-- David J. Deming, "Does School Choice Reduce Crime? Evidence from North Carolina," Education Next, Spring 2012, Vol. 12, No. 2.

Click here for the Education Update archive.