Working Paper No . 578 , 2002 School Vouchers in Practice : Competition Won ' t Hurt You ! (original) (raw)
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School vouchers in practice : Competition won ’ t hurt you ! 1
2002
An important issue in the debate on voucher systems and school choice is what effects competition from independent schools will have on public schools. Sweden has made a radical reform of its system for financing schools. Independent and public schools operate on close to equal terms under a voucher system covering all children. Sample selection models are estimated, using a data set of about 28000 individuals. In addition,panel data models are estimated on 288 Swedish municipalities. The findings support the hypothesis that school results in public schools improve due to competition.
School vouchers in practice: competition will not hurt you
Journal of Public Economics, 2005
Since the introduction of school vouchers in 1992, independent and public schools in Sweden operate on equal terms. We analyze the effects of competition on the public schools using data on the results of 28,000 ninth graders. Because the decision on which school to attend is a choice variable, sample selection models are used. To account for the potential endogeneity of the share of students attending independent schools, we use instrumental variable estimation. We also estimate panel data models on 288 Swedish municipalities. Our findings support the hypothesis that school results in public schools improve due to competition.
School Vouchers in Practice: Competition Won't Hurt You!
2002
An important issue in the debate on voucher systems and school choice is what effects competition from independent schools will have on public schools. Sweden has made a radical reform of its system for financing schools. Independent and public schools operate on close to equal terms under a voucher system covering all children. Sample selection models are estimated, using a
The Powers and Limits of a National School Voucher System: The Case of Sweden
School Choice Around the World, 2019
Twenty-five years ago, Sweden enacted the most ambitious school choice policy seen in the Western world, allowing families to select any school regardless of their residence and independent providers to open new Free Schools after satisfying some general regulatory requirements. This made Sweden, a paragon of social democracy, an unlikely opportunity to test Milton Friedman’s theory that open competition in education facilitated by state-funded vouchers would better serve the public than monopoly state provision. Has it worked? The premise of this chapter is that choice has produced observable benefits. It may also have contributed to a few unintended bad social consequences. However, it has not had the impact so far to justify some of the initial excitement. I explore possible explanations for this outcome and what we can learn when proposing future educational reforms.
The Impact of School Choice on Pupil Achievement, Segregation and Costs: Swedish Evidence * This paper evaluates school choice at the compulsory-school level by assessing a reform implemented in Sweden in 1992, which opened up for publicly funded but privately operated schools. In many local school markets, this reform led to a significant increase in the quantity of such schools as well as in the share of pupils attending them. We estimate the impact of this increase in private enrolment on the average achievement of all pupils using withinmunicipality variation over time, and controlling for differential pre-reform municipality trends. We find that an increase in the private-school share by 10 percentage points increases average pupil achievement by almost 1 percentile rank point. We show that this total effect can be interpreted as the sum of a private-school attendance effect and a competition effect. The former effect, which is identified using variation in school choice among siblings, is found to be only a small part of the total effect. This suggests that the main part of the achievement effect is due to more competition in the school sector, forcing schools to improve their quality. We use grade point average as outcome variable. A comparison with test data suggests that our results are not driven by differential grade-setting standards in private and public schools. We further find that more competition from private schools increases school costs. There is also some evidence of sorting of pupils along socioeconomic and ethnic lines.
Market approaches to education: Vouchers and school choice
Economics of Education Review, 1992
The debate over educational vouchers has heated up in recent years, but there has been little empirical evidence on the many issues. The purpose of this article is to set the background for that debate and introduce a number of original empirical works of recent vintage on issues of market choice. These include studies of choice and payment by results in England and Scotland as well as econometric simulation and case studies of public choice and public/private choice in the U.S.A. In addition, there are four essay reviews of recent books on public and market choice and a theoretical attempt to explain why public and private schools have similar curriculum and organization.
Competition Pressures and Academic Performance in a Generalized Vouchers Context
2012
The positive impact that competition has on performance in most industries, has been questioned in the "education industry." The idea that competition is limited, that parents don't choose schools for their children considering quality and that schools do not react to that choice is in the center of the debate on school vouchers. We analyze the prevailing methodology in the literature that relates competition and educational performance and the data used to estimate that impact, and we propose a novel methodology to do so. We estimate such impact. We propose the use of an idea that considers relevant substitutes for each school using various attributes which parents consider when choosing schools, and we estimate the effect of competition pressures on performance for Chile, were more than 90% of the students are covered by a voucher. We use a reveled preference mthodology estimating a logit model for school decisions, and form there, we compute relevant tradeoffs among...
School Vouchers: A Vehicle to Induce Greater Competition Among Public Schools
This article synthesizes various strands of the leading research studies to conclude that vouchers have the strongest impact on the lowest-and highest-performing public-school students and in the most competitive school districts. Based on case studies in Ohio and Florida, greater competitive measures will help improve educational outcomes for students on the margins. This article avoids a one-size-fits-all conclusion about the relationship between vouchers and educational outcomes, which will prove increasingly useful in a political climate that seems ripe for educational reform-especially as the current presidential administration pursues an agenda that looks to address school choice.