Working Papers

In this article, we review the empirical evidence on the impact of education vouchers on student achievement, and briefly discuss the evidence from other forms of school choice. The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero. Further, what little evidence exists regarding the potential for public schools to respond to increased competitive pressure generated by vouchers suggests that one should remain wary that large improvements would result from a more comprehensive voucher system. The evidence from other forms of school choice is also consistent with this conclusion. Many questions remain unanswered, however, including whether vouchers have longer-run impacts on outcomes such as graduation rates, college enrollment, or even future wages, and whether vouchers might nevertheless provide a costneutral alternative to our current system of public education provision at the elementary and secondary school level.

Prepared for publication in Annual Review of Economics , Vol. 1 (2009)

Targeted educational voucher schemes [TEVS] are often proposed for poor children in developing countries. This paper explores the design of an effective TEVS using three policy instruments: regulation, support services, and finance. The regulation design addresses the rules that must be adhered to by participating households, children, and schools. The support services design considers the complementary services for all participants and financial and political supporters. The finance design addresses the value of each voucher, total TEVS costs, and sources of finance. The paper concludes that the prospect of a TEVS depends on establishing cost-effectiveness.

While numerous recent authors have studied the effects of school accountability systems on student test performance and school "gaming" of accountability incentives, there has been little attention paid to substantive changes in instructional policies and practices resulting from school accountability. The lack of research is primarily due to the unavailability of appropriate data to carry out such an analysis. This paper brings to bear new evidence from a remarkable five-year survey conducted of a census of public schools in Florida, coupled with detailed administrative data on student performance. We show that schools facing accountability pressure changed their instructional practices in meaningful ways. In addition, we present medium-run evidence of the effects of school accountability on student test scores, and find that a significant portion of these test score gains can likely be attributed to the changes in school policies and practices that we uncover in our surveys.

Education is an essential pre-requisite and basic building block for social capital formation. Pakistan is the sixth most populous country with 160 million people, 33% mired in abject poverty, living below the poverty line. Pakistan is at serious risk of not attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Education For All (EFA) targets by 2015. Government alone will not be able to accomplish the gigantic task of attaining the goal of sustainable quality education and meet the targets of MDGs and EFA. Policy change is necessary to involve and facilitate Non-State Providers for extending access, equity and quality. There is greater sensitivity now to facilitate private sector intervention by financial, administrative and management empowerment and autonomous academic leadership through Public Private Partnership (PPP). The idea is to ensure trust-based synergy and synchronization culminating in a longeval win-win situation. The evidence has suggested that PPP is extremely successful. The central thematic area explored in the paper involves how robust PPP models are in terms of affordability and sustainability. The paper elucidates on evidence-based research findings with multi-dimensional contents and contours. The findings are based on actual data and practices in operational theatrics in the context of PPP models in the largest province of Punjab under the auspices of Punjab Education Foundation (PEF). By now, there is irrefutable and convincing supporting empirical evidence that PPP carries very secure potential not only for long-term viability but also for sustainable quality education at affordable cost to the less-privileged and disenfranchised sections of society. Efficient private sector leadership facilitated by public sector financing securely integrates and bleeds into an optimal level of service delivery, resulting in better learning outcomes, less drop-outs, ensured presence of teachers and no truancy.

Education vouchers might seem like a natural extension of the liberal welfare model of the United States and American society generally; but they might also seem like a contradiction for the social democratic welfare states in Scandinavia with their state and public sector dominated principles of welfare provision. Nevertheless, school vouchers have faced severe resistance in the United States—with no legislative success as a national education reform—but sporadic and limited state level developments can be observed. On the other hand, in the early 1990s the social democratic welfare state of Sweden adopted a universal public voucher scheme. The goal of the present paper is to explain this counter intuitive and counter theoretical empirical puzzle. It is argued that the different ways political institutions affect political decision-making in these two countries affects the varying policy output on school vouchers in the United States and Sweden.

Political theorists have long argued that the average citizen’s lack of information and lack of clear policy preferences provide the rationale for public policy to be guided by experts and elites. Others counter that it is precisely the practice of deference to elites that perpetuates and even exacerbates the problem of apathetic and uninformed citizens. According to them, requiring citizens to take responsibility for political decisions and procedures motivates them to obtain the information and training necessary to become effective citizens. Here we look at school choice programs as an environment to provide insight into this important debate. Theories of school choice suggest that parents need to and can make informed decisions that will tend to situate their students in appropriate and desirable schools. Choice parents should have more reasons to gather more information about their schools than parents without options. Alternatively, a lack of any increase in information levels amongst school choosers would suggest that despite the increased incentives to gather information, having choices per se is not sufficient to overcome the costs of information gathering. Analyzing data from the experimental evaluation of the Washington Scholarship Fund, a privately-funded K-12 scholarship organization, we find that presenting parents with educational choices does lead to higher levels of accurate school-based information on measures of important school characteristics. Specifically, parents in the school choice treatment group provided responses that more closely matched the school-reported data about school size and class size than did parents of control group members.

This paper exploits the preference-based random assignment of students to middle schools resulting from the educational reform in Beijing’s Eastern City District in 1998. The data set consists of the census data and administrative data on 7,000 students who entered middle school in 1999 and graduated from middle school in June 2002, and the survey and administrative data on school characteristics including school facilities and teacher characteristics. We estimate the effect of entering one’s first-choice school by comparing the lottery winners (i.e. students who were randomly selected into their first-choice school) and lottery losers (i.e. students who were randomly selected out of their first-choice school) within the same lottery of first-choice school. Results show that entering one’s first-choice school does not have significant beneficial effects on the student test scores in the High School Entrance Exam (HSEE) 2002. However, the beneficial effects of entering one’s first-choice school are larger for students who applied to the top-tier schools (i.e. taking a high-stake lottery) than those who chose other schools as their first choice (i.e. taking a low-stake lottery). This indicates that entering one’s first-choice school does bring more beneficial effects on academic performance for students who were more academically ambitious than those who were not.

This article discusses the limited use of education vouchers in an era of unprecedented growth in school choice. It is divided into two parts: first, a description of the policy, political, and legal barriers that may limit the expansion of large-scale voucher programs is presented. Discussion then shifts to the efforts of voucher advocates to build support among historically marginalized populations frustrated with the performance of public schools and open to limited forms of private school choice. The authors consider the consequences of these strategies and suggest that the very voucher programs that appeal to disadvantaged families may prove most offensive to middleclass and suburban voters who vigorously object to policies that undermine local authority and redistribute local resources. Specifically, vouchers have the potential to erase municipal boundaries, dissolve neighborhood ties, lower housing prices, and upset student enrollments.

<This paper was published in Education Policy , Vol. 21, No. 1, 40-72 (2007)>

This article considers two issues regarding pre-school education. First, it provides a brief set of arguments for government funding of universal, pre-school education. Second, it explores the applicability of a voucher plan using a regulated market approach for the funding of universal, pre-school education. Four criteria are used to assess the approach: freedom of choice, equity, productive efficiency, and social cohesion. The analytic framework is then applied to the Georgia Pre-K program, a statewide and universal approach based upon market competition that enlists government, non-profit, and for-profit educational providers. We conclude that, according to the four criteria set out, the highly regulated Georgia pre-school approach appears to produce superior results than one built upon exclusive production of pre-school services by government entities.

Choice and competition in education have found growing support from both policy makers and academics in the recent past. Yet, evidence on the actual benefits of market-oriented reforms is at best mixed. Moreover, while the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear, in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts. In this paper, we study whether pupils in Primary schools in England with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited; and whether Primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation. In simple least squares regression models, we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement, but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance. Yet, this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting. In fact, an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited. Only when we restrict our attention to Faith autonomous schools, which have more freedom in managing their admission practices and governance, do we find evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement.

This study considers factors explaining why Florida has been the most aggressive state in the country in adopting vouchers and what this implies for the future of vouchers in other states. We find that vouchers represent one step in Florida ’s long progression of aggressive educational accountability policies. These policy directions, in turn, arise from Florida ’s moderate social conservatism, openness to various sorts of privatization, large and growing Hispanic population, and out-of-state “transplanted” voters who have weak ties to the state’s public education system. Even with this fertile political soil, the voucher programs were adopted only after hard-fought political battles and their future is less than secure. They probably would not have been adopted without the efforts of a single individual, Governor Jeb Bush, whose tenure is almost over. Moreover, the Florida voucher programs rest on a shaky legal foundation due to two highly restrictive features of the state’s constitution, the so-called Blaine Amendment and provisions for “public” and “uniform” schools. This leaves the Florida voucher programs on uncertain political and legal ground. Other states face many of the same legal restrictions—and even stronger political impediments. We argue therefore that while the adoption of vouchers in Florida does signal a continued national trend toward school choice, it does not suggest that the trend will continue in the form of vouchers or, more specifically, in forms that allow the use of public funds in religious and other private schoo

Voucher advocates argue that the introduction of educational vouchers can make improved educational opportunity available to the most disadvantaged children.  Critics contend that vouchers increase the risk of exacerbating inequities based on race and socioeconomic status. They fear that in order to remain competitive and save costs, private schools will have incentives to skim off the highest performing students who are usually least demanding in terms of resources.  Most evidence suggests that unrestricted choice in Chile has exacerbated stratification. Researchers have found that private voucher schools “cream skim” off the high income students while relegating disadvantaged students to public schools.  What has been overlooked, however, is stratification levels within public and private school sectors and variation within private school for-profit and nonprofit (religious and secular) sectors.  In this paper we examine public and private school enrollment practices in response to vouchers.  We find that public schools are more likely to serve disadvantaged student populations than private voucher schools. We also find that the typical public school is more internally diverse with regard to parental income and education than the typical private voucher school.   While differential behavior is also found across private school ownership types, the differences do not always comport with theory