A Life Lesson In Civics

Amid this activity, some see another potential challenge to that old theory of civics osmosis: public charter schools. Since their debut in the 1990s, charters have represented a new type of public school: they are publicly authorized, publicly funded, publicly regulated, and open to all, but operate autonomously, outside the direct control of elected officials. Taken together, however, the two results suggest that receiving an offer to enroll in Democracy Prep substantially boosts students’ later involvement in the electoral process. [...]winning the admissions lottery cannot have affected voter registration and turnout among students who chose not to enroll. Because students in the treatment group—that is, those offered admission—were only 25 percentage points more likely to enroll than those in the control group, this adjustment amounts to increasing the raw difference between participation rates across the two groups by a factor of four. Anticipating this as a potential concern, we decided in advance of conducting our analysis to estimate the likelihood that Democracy Prep does, in fact, have positive effects on students’ registration and voting and to adjust the size of those estimated effects by combining them with results from prior research.