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Improving education quality is an important concern in many countries around the world. Over the last few decades, many governments have introduced market mechanisms in education with the objectives of enhancing choice and encouraging competition. In theory, increased competition between educational establishments should result in the provision of better quality education services to attract students. These reforms have given rise to fierce debates in political and scientific circles.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared school voucher programs constitutional, the many unanswered questions concerning the potential effects of school choice will become especially pressing. Contributors to this volume draw on state-of-the-art economic methods to answer some of these questions, investigating the ways in which school choice affects a wide range of issues. Combining the results of empirical research with analyses of the basic economic forces underlying local education markets, The Economics of School Choice presents evidence concerning the impact of school choice on student achievement, school productivity, teachers, and special education. It also tackles difficult questions such as whether school choice affects where people decide to live and how choice can be integrated into a system of school financing that gives children from different backgrounds equal access to resources. Contributors discuss the latest findings on Florida's school choice program as well as voucher programs and charter schools in several other states. The resulting volume not only reveals the promise of school choice, but examines its pitfalls as well, showing how programs can be designed that exploit the idea's potential but avoid its worst effects. With school choice programs gradually becoming both more possible and more popular, this book stands out as an essential exploration of the effects such programs will have, and a necessary resource for anyone interested in the idea of school choice.
"Although numerous reforms for improving public education have been proposed in the United States, the effects of implemented programs remain controversial. Focusing on recent reform policies, my dissertation examines the impact of school choice, educational accountability, and teacher performance-pay programs on student achievement. Chapter One analyzes the effects of introducing charter schools, fast-growing school-choice programs, on students at neighboring traditional public schools. Unlike prior work, which estimates the effects at the school level, this study examines the impact at the grade level by exploiting the fact that charter schools expand their grade ranges over time. I define direct impact as the impact on traditional-school students in overlapping grades and indirect impact as the impact on those in non-overlapping grades. Using student-level panel data from North Carolina, this study shows that the entry of charter schools generates a positive and significant direct impact on student achievement. Moreover, I demonstrate that one-quarter of the positive direct impact is driven by student sorting while three-quarters result from competition. Chapter Two presents evidence from a regression-discontinuity analysis of North Carolina's accountability program, in which teachers are awarded an additional cash bonus for improving their students' achievement. Results show that teachers who failed to reach an expected benchmark for their students' achievement, resulting in no bonuses, performed significantly better in the subsequent year than those who reached this benchmark and thus received a bonus. Moreover, the results demonstrate that such impact disappeared once the state government repealed the pay scheme - another indication that teachers actively respond to monetary bonuses. Chapter Three examines the performance-pay program from a different viewpoint. To date, no studies in this literature have examined the potentially negative effects of repealing incentive bonuses. This chapter exploits North Carolina's policy changes, which first reduced and finally repealed its teacher incentive bonuses. This paper shows that, as a result, student achievement at the lowest-performing schools significantly decreased after the reduction and further decreased after the repeal of the bonus. These findings illustrate that once incentives are introduced it is not cost-free to reduce or remove them"--Pages v-vi.
The Wiley Handbook of School Choice presents a comprehensive collection of original essays addressing the wide range of alternatives to traditional public schools available in contemporary US society. A comprehensive collection of the latest research findings on school choices in the US, including charter schools, magnet schools, school vouchers, home schooling, private schools, and virtual schools Viewpoints of both advocates and opponents of each school choice provide balanced examinations and opinions Perspectives drawn from both established researchers and practicing professionals in the U.S. and abroad and from across the educational spectrum gives a holistic outlook Includes thorough coverage of the history of traditional education in the US, its current state, and predictions for the future of each alternative school choice
This volume of essays examines the empirical evidence on school choice in different countries across Europe, North America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It demonstrates the advantages which choice offers in different institutional contexts, whether it be Free Schools in the UK, voucher systems in Sweden or private-proprietor schools for low-income families in Liberia. Everywhere experience suggests that parents are ‘active choosers’: they make rational and considered decisions, drawing on available evidence and responding to incentives which vary from context to context. Government educators frequently downplay the importance of choice and try to constrain the options parents have. But they face increasing resistance: the evidence is that informed parents drive improvements in school quality. Where state education in some developing countries is particularly bad, private bottom-up provision is preferred even though it costs parents money which they can ill-afford. This book is both a collection of inspiring case studies and a call to action.
"Compelling arguments, supported by both anecdotal and empirical evidence to convince readers that school choice does nothing to improve the quality of education. ... Solidly researched and written, Smith's and Meier's effort should sway those still undecided on the issue". -- Publishers Weekly
This dissertation comprises three essays on the Economics of Education. Its ultimate focus is to understand how different agents in the education market respond to releasing information about teacher and school performance and how public interventions influence human capital accumulation. The first essay "The Effect of Releasing Teacher Performance Information to Schools: Teachers' Response and Student Achievement" examines the effects of releasing teacher value-added (VA) information on student performance in two settings; in the first, VA data was released to all potential employers within the district, while in the second, only the current employer received the data. I find that student achievement increased only in the district where the VA scores were provided to all potential employers. These effects were driven solely by improved performance among ex-ante less-effective teachers; the null effects in the other setting, however, were driven by moderate declines in performance among ex-ante highly-effective teachers and small improvements among less-effective teachers. These results highlight the importance of understanding how the design features of VA disclosure translate into the productivity of teachers. The second essay "The Role of Credible Threats and School Competition within School Accountability Systems: Evidence from Focus Schools in Michigan" studies the impact of receiving accountability labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of Focus (schools with the largest achievement gaps) labels and find that schools receiving the Focus label improved the performance of low-achieving students relative to their barely non-Focus counterparts, and they did so without hurting high-achieving students. The positive achievement effects for Focus schools were entirely driven by Title 1 Focus schools that faced financial sanctions associated with being labeled the following year. There is no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine heterogeneous effects by looking at the number of alternative nearby schooling options. I find that when schools are exposed to a competitive choice environment, receiving the Focus label increased math test scores across the scoring distribution, while schools located in an uncompetitive choice environment improved the test scores of low achievers only. This evidence may suggest the importance of incorporating credible sanctions and school choice options into the school accountability system to maximize the effectiveness of the system on student achievement. Finally, the third essay "The Effects of School Accountability Systems Under NCLB Waiver: Evidence from Priority Schools in Michigan" investigates the impact of receiving Priority labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of the Priority (schools with the lowest performance) label and find no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine whether assigning the Priority label induced the changes in the composition of students. I define several key measures of student composition and find no evidence that the Priority designation influenced the student composition of schools.
Updated to reflect the latest developments and increasing scope of school-based options, the second edition of the Handbook of Research on School Choice makes readily available the most rigorous and policy-relevant research on K–12 school choice. This comprehensive research handbook begins with scholarly overviews that explore historical, political, economic, legal, methodological, and international perspectives on school choice. In the following sections, experts examine the research and current state of common forms of school choice: charter schools, school vouchers, and magnet schools. The concluding section brings together perspectives on other key topics such as accountability, tax credit scholarships, parent decision-making, and marginalized students. With empirical perspectives on all aspects of this evolving sphere of education, this is a critical resource for researchers, faculty, and students interested in education policy, the politics of education, and educational leadership.
This dissertation consists of three essays covering topics in the economics of education. Two common threads connect these essays: first, a focus on the inputs and practices driving variation in effectiveness across educational programs; and second, an interest in the relationships between students' preferences, characteristics, and returns to human capital investment. In the first chapter, I develop and estimate a structural model of school choice that links students' decisions to apply to and attend charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts to their potential achievement test scores in charter schools and public schools. This chapter is motivated by a growing literature that uses randomized entrance lotteries to show that urban charter schools, including those in Boston, substantially increase test scores and close racial achievement gaps among their applicants. A key policy question is whether charter expansion is likely to produce similar effects on a larger scale. To address this question, I use the structural model to predict the effects of charter expansion for the citywide achievement distribution in Boston. Estimates of the model suggest that charter applicants are negatively selected on achievement gains: low-income students and students with low prior achievement gain the most from charter attendance, but are unlikely to apply to charter schools. This form of selection implies that lottery-based estimates understate gains for broader groups of students, and that charter schools will produce substantial gains for marginal applicants drawn in by expansion. Simulations suggest that realistic expansions are likely to reduce the gap in math scores between Boston and the rest of Massachusetts by up to 8 percent, and reduce racial achievement gaps by roughly 5 percent. Nevertheless, the estimates also imply that perceived application costs are high and that most students prefer traditional public schools to charter schools, so large expansions may leave many charter seats empty. These results suggest that in the absence of significant behavioral or institutional changes, the potential gains from charter expansion may be limited as much by demand as by supply. The second chapter, written jointly with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak, seeks to explain differences in effectiveness across charter schools. Using a large sample of lotteried applicants to charter schools throughout Massachusetts, we show that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We then explore student-level and school-level explanations for this difference. In an econometric framework that isolates sources of charter effect heterogeneity, we show that urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond that of urban public school students, while non-urban charters reduce achievement from a higher baseline. Student demographics explain some of these gains since urban charters are most effective for non-whites and low-baseline achievers. At the same time, non-urban charter schools are uniformly ineffective. Our estimates also reveal important school-level heterogeneity within the urban charter sample. A non-lottery analysis suggests that urban charters with binding, well-documented admissions lotteries generate larger score gains than under-subscribed urban charter schools with poor lottery records. Using a detailed survey of school practices and characteristics, we link charter impacts to inputs such as instructional time, classroom techniques and school philosophy. The relative effectiveness of urban lottery-sample charters is accounted for by these schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to urban education, a package of policies that includes strict discipline, increased instructional time, selective teacher-hiring, and a focus on traditional skills. In the third chapter, I use data from the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS), a nationwide randomized trial of the Head Start program, to study the relationship between site-level treatment effects and educational inputs within Head Start. Studies of small-scale, intensive early-childhood programs, including the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project, show that such programs can have transformative effects on human capital and economic outcomes. Evidence for larger-scale programs like Head Start is more mixed. I use the HSIS data to ask whether Head Start centers using practices more similar to successful model programs produce larger short-run effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. My results show that while there is significant variation in effectiveness across Head Start centers, centers that are more similar to the Perry Preschool Project on observed dimensions are not more effective. Specifically, Head Start centers using the High/Scope curriculum, the centerpiece of the Perry experiment, do not produce larger gains relative to other centers. Other inputs often cited as essential to the success of the Perry Project, including teacher education, teacher certification, teacher/student ratios, instructional time, and frequency of home visiting, are also unrelated to effectiveness in Head Start. These results suggest that replicating the success of small-scale programs may be difficult, as the effectiveness of such programs may be due to idiosyncratic, unmeasured inputs. JEL Classification: 121, C51, J24