What Research Now Needs to Tell Policy Makers about School Choice

The purpose of this paper is to present a case for a new generation of research on the question of school choice. This case is based on two premises. First, it is likely that taxpayers, who have school aged children and taxpayers who don't, differ with respect to their preferences concerning education. Since al taxpayers must decide on whether and how much school choice should be allowed, it is important to see how these preferences intersect with respect to both educational and extracurricular outputs of the educational process. Second, any policy decision focuses on maximizing a set of goals given a series of constraints. Therefore, it is necessary to examine all aspects of the school choice question simultaneously in order to make incisive policy recommendations. This paper presents a simple economic model which shows the importance of these premises in the policy decision and suggests that the next generation of researchers should consider these premises as important parts of their investigation.