A common, although misleading, refrain heard from education reform critics is that charter schools on average do no better on standardized tests than public schools. Less commonly discussed is the impact on other, non-test outcomes. A paper (working version) in the most recent Journal of Labor Economics by Kevin Booker and Brian Gill from Mathematica, Tim Sass from Florida State, and Ron Zimmer from Vanderbilt, looks at how attending a charter schools affects the probability of graduating high school and attending college for a sample of students from Chicago and Florida.
An important question in the literature is the extent to which selection bias is a problem. Do charter school students have different outcomes than public school students because the charters educate them somehow better or worse, or is it because people who decide to go to charter schools are systematically different than those who don’t? In order to control for this…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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