School choice boosts test scores

M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin Anderson, and Patrick J. Wolf have released "a meta-analysis of 19 'gold standard' experimental evaluations of the test-score effects of private school choice programs around the world," Wolf writes.

The sum of the reliable evidence indicates that, on average, private school choice increases the reading scores of choice users by about 0.27 standard deviations and their math scores by 0.15 standard deviations. These are highly statistically significant, educationally meaningful achievement gains of several months of additional learning from school choice. The achievement benefits of private school choice appear to be somewhat larger for programs in developing countries than for those in the U.S. Publicly-funded programs produce larger test-score gains than privately-funded ones.