were initially focused on patterns of time spent in work and family life, and using these surveys to assess one dimension of economic outputs. A particular focus was the changing time allocations for women at work and at home. Time use surveys captured all activities in a day and offered a window into the emerging problem of reconciling family responsibilities and seeking a career. The United States Department of Agriculture also financed a supplement on food-related matters. The American Time Use Survey departs from the basic Szalai architecture, by only collecting a single activity category per event. But it is collected continuously, with annual releases of data, and is the largest source of time diary data collected anywhere. Having a continuous collection opens the way for workforce analysestoday showing that “charter schools took approximately 190,000 students from private schools between 2000 and 2008,” a development that Cato scholar Adam Schaeffer said is “wreaking havoc on private education” while only marginally improving public schools. Overall, Buddin found that 8 percent of charter-elementary students and 11 percent of middle and high school students came from private schools. The numbers were worse for private schools in the nation’s major urban areas, where 32 percent of the elementary-charter enrollment was drawn from the private sector.

It is true that charter schools have drained students from urban Catholic schools in particular (though my colleague Kathleen Porter-Magee has shown how enrollments declined at Catholic schools long before the first charters appeared). And Schaeffer and Buddin are right to point out the economic