An influential 2013 study found that attending an urban charter school in Massachusetts boosts standardized test scores, but attending a nonurban one reduces them—despite the fact that both sets of schools are popular enough with families to hold admissions lotteries. This finding is congruent with other lottery-based research on charters, as well as observational evidence showing gains on test scores for many urban charters but few differences in other settings (see here for a review). However, schools influence much more than just test scores.
In a new paper, the authors return to the same sample of Massachusetts charter schools and study their impact on college enrollment and graduation, following applicants to 15 urban and nine nonurban charter schools from the time of application to a charter school via an admission lottery, through school enrollment, and up to six years after their expected high school graduation. They make use of the charter school lotteries to generate causal estimates of charter school impacts by comparing students who won the admissions lottery to those who did not.