School choice initiatives and charter schools have grown substantially in the past two and a half decades. Economists argue that this is a move toward more competition and should lead to improved school system performance. However, school choice and charter school enabling laws can be quite...

This paper applies several fundamentals of the economics of organizations and principal-agent theory to the governance of schools, the use of teacher incentive pay, the performance of schools, and school reform efforts. We analyze schools as we do firms. We then focus on using the results to...