Impact of Democracy Prep Public Schools

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Review of “Can Charter Schools Boost Civic Participation? The Impact of Democracy Prep Public Schools on Voting Behavior” submitted to the American Political Science Review—APSR-19-494
In this paper the authors use data from Democracy Prep lotteries to provide experimental evidence on the effects of being offered an opportunity to attend Democracy Prep (the ITT parameter) on voting behavior, as well as the effects of attending Democracy Prep (the TOT parameter). The results show that receiving an offer to attend Democracy Prep increases both voter registration and voting in the 2016 election by about 6 percentage points, although only the effect on voting is statistically significant at conventional levels. Because lottery winners are about 25 percentage points more likely to attend Democracy Prep than lottery losers, the corresponding TOT estimates are approximately 25 percentage points, although the confidence intervals around these estimates are quite wide. The authors cite the sizable confidence intervals as motivation for conducting a Bayesian analysis, where they incorporate information from a number of other studies on the relationship between education and voting outcomes, concluding that enrolling Democracy Prep positively impacted registration and voting with a probability of 0.98—the means of erior distributions for registration and voting were 0.156 and 0.125, respectively.
The paper is clearly written and the analyses are well-conceived and well-executed, providing credible evidence that charter schools designed to increase the political participation of youth can indeed do so. Even though the analysis is conducted using information from a single charter management organization, I view this as a quite important contribution to the literature—it serves as “proof of concept” that schools can achieve a mission of increasing political engagement of young adults in the United States. I do have some comments and suggestions for the paper, however.
Broad Comments
The gender imbalance presented in Table 1 is potentially concerning. The difference between lottery winners and losers is substantively large. However, it is not clear to me whether that difference is unconditional or whether it is conditional on lottery fixed effects. Given the design of the analysis in the paper, baseline imbalances are only concerning if they remain after conditioning on lottery fixed effects. When presenting the analysis of baseline equivalence in Table 1, I suggest the authors present regression-adjusted differences. Additionally, due to these imbalances, I think it is important to present the results from a model containing no baseline covariates, if only as a point of comparison.
I appreciate the rationale for the Bayesian analysis, but I’m ultimately not convinced it adds much to the paper. Most of my skepticism stems from the fact that, as the authors themselves argue, no prior work has estimated the effect of attending a charter school with the explicit mission of increasing the political participation of its students. Most of the studies the authors draw upon to inform their Bayesian priors estimate a very different parameter. They include studies that estimate the civic effects of taking civics courses, entering college, graduating from high school, completing an additional year of education, and Catholic schooling. The study that is perhaps most closely related is Carlson, Chingos, and Campbell’s work estimating the effect of a private school voucher offer on political participation outcomes. But even that is still very different from the effect of attending a charter school explicitly designed to, in part, increase the political participation of its students. Given the substantive differences across these studies, I would be very hesitant to use them as a basis for generating a prior for the registration and voting effects of attending a civically-oriented charter school. At the end of the day, we either find the design—and the resulting estimates—credible or we don’t. I do find the design credible and I take the results for what they are, estimates of the effect of attending a charter school with a stated civic mission on voting and registration. Because I view the studies used to generate the Bayesian prior largely irrelevant to what the authors set out to do, the Bayesian analysis does nothing to change my interpretation of the results. I don’t find erior means to be a more credible estimate of the TOT parameter than the results presented in Table B4. And I don’t think the Bayesian analysis does anything to generalize the results to charter schools more broadly (a recent working paper using North Carolina data finds charter schools to increase participation, although the estimates are much smaller than even erior means of the Bayesian analysis—see the recent Annenberg Working Paper by McEachin et al.). Consequently, I suggest reorganizing the paper to place more emphasis and to reduce the prominence of the Bayesian analysis.
There are certain aspects and assertions in the paper that seem to reflect a somewhat limited familiarity with the broader civic education literature in political science. For example, on page 1 the authors assert that researchers have rarely examined the effectiveness of public schools in developing engaged citizens. I disagree with this statement. There is a fairly large literature on civic education stretching back to the 1960s and 1970s that examines the relationships between civic outcomes and different aspects of education. Now, many of these studies aren’t designed in a manner that support causal conclusions, but that’s different than saying that the topic hasn’t been addressed. On a similar note, the statement on page 2 that this is the first paper to rigorously measure the causal impact of charter schools on civic participation belies the fact that there is a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Politics (Cook et al., which has been a working paper for a while) showing that greater charter enrollment shares reduce turnout in school board elections. I encourage the authors to work to better reflect the body of prior work on the topic.
It would be helpful to have a bit more context on the characteristics of students at the time the outcomes are measured. What is the distribution of age? Where did they live? Information like this would be helpful for purposes of interpretation.
Minor comments
Page 3- I’m not sure I’d characterize the analysis as providing evidence on long-term voting and registration effects. These outcomes are measured about as early as possible.
A bit more detail about the contributions of the different lotteries to the analytic sample would be useful. Obviously, sibling priorities didn’t contribute any students to the analytic sample, but what were the relative contributions of geographic preferences and no preferences?
Page 17-18- The following sentence “A Bayesian analysis indicates a 98 percent probability that Democracy Prep increased both registration (by 16 percentage points) and voting in the 2016 election (by 12 percentage points).” is a bit sloppy. I think the authors mean that the means of erior distribution are 16 and 12 percentage points, respectively, and that 98 percent of erior distribution was above zero. Regardless, this sentence should be rewritten and clarified.

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