Abstract: I estimate the impact of attending a first-choice middle or high school on adult crime, using data from public school choice lotteries in Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district (CMS). Seven years after random assignment, lottery winners had been arrested for fewer serious crimes and had spent fewer days incarcerated. The gain in school quality as measured by peer and teacher inputs was equivalent to moving from one of the lowest-ranked schools to one at the district average. The reduction in crime comes largely from years after enrollment in the preferred school is complete. The impacts are concentrated among high-risk youth, who commit about 50% less crime across several different outcome measures and scalings of crime by severity. I find suggestive evidence that school quality explains more of the impact in high school, whereas peer effects are more important in middle school. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.

Abstract: This paper uses a within- school i across-cohort design to present new evidence of the effects of high school classmate characteristics on a wide range of post-secondary outcomes. We find that increases in the percent of classmates with college-educated mothers decreases the likelihood of dropping out and increases the likelihood of attending college, despite showing no impact on a range of in-school achievement, attitudes, and behaviors. The percent of students from disadvantaged minority groups does not show any effects on postsecondary outcomes, but is associated with students reporting less caring student-teacher relationships and increased prevalence of some undesirable student behaviors during high school {JEL 121, J13,J15) the influence of school composition on individual outcomes is central to the evaluation of many education policies including efforts to desegregate schools, single sex schooling, expanded school choice, and policies to assimilate immigrant students. Much of the research on school composition, however, has focused on a narrow range of short-term outcomes, limiting our understanding of these effects. This study applies recently developed methods for identifying the causal effect of peers using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health

Abstract: The political popularity of charter schools is unmistakable. This article explores the relationship between charter schools and segregation across the country, in 40 states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen metropolitan areas with large enrollments of charter school students in 2007�08. The descriptive analysis of the charter school enrollment is aimed at understanding the characteristics of students enrolled in charter schools and the extent to which charter school students are segregated, including how charter school segregation compare to students in traditional public schools. This article examines these questions at different levels, aggregating school-level enrollment to explore patterns among metropolitan areas, states, and the nation using three national datasets. Our findings suggest that charters currently isolate students by race and class. This analysis of recent data finds that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation. In some regions, white students are overrepresented in charter schools while in other charter schools; minority students have little exposure to white students. Data about the extent to which charter schools serve low-income and English Language Learners is incomplete, but suggest that a substantial share of charter schools may not enroll such students. As charters represent an increasing share of our public schools, they influence the level of segregation experienced by all of our nation�s school-aged children. After two decades, the promise of charter schools to use choice to foster integration and equality in American education has yet to be realized.

Abstract: We present a survey of the emerging literature on the design of matching markets. We survey the articles on discrete resource allocation problems, their solutions, and their applications in three related domains. The first domain gives the theoretical background regarding the basic models, namely “house allocation and exchange” problems. First, we investigate the allocation and exchange problems separately, and then we combine them to present a real-life application: on-campus housing at universities. As the second application domain, we extend the basic allocation and exchange models to the “kidney exchange” problem and present new theory and applications regarding this problem. We present proposed and adopted mechanisms that take very specific institutional details into account. Then, we present the school admissions problem in three subcategories: the “college admissions” model where both schools and students are strategic agents, the “school placement” model where only students are strategic agents and they induce an endogenous priority structure of schools over students, and finally the “school choice” model for the US public school districts where the students are the only strategic agents and the school priorities over the students are exogenous. In the final chapter, we investigate the basic models of the axiomatic mechanism design literature that present mechanisms that are generalizations of the mechanisms designed for the specific market design problems discussed before. JEL Codes: C78, D78

Abstract: This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household allocation of education expenditure with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas. In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to enroll (incur any educational expenditure) and the decision of how much to spend on education, conditional on enrolling. Finally the paper also uses household fixed effects to examine whether any gender bias is a within-household phenomenon. The paper finds that the traditional Engel method often fails to pick up gender bias where it exists not only because of the aggregation of data at the household-level but also because of aggregation of the two decisions in which gender can have opposite signs. It is found that pro-male gender bias exists in the primary school age group for several states but that the incidence of gender bias increases with age – it is greater in the middle school age group (10-14 years) and greater still in the secondary school age group (15-19 years). However, gender discrimination in the secondary school age group 15-19 takes place mainly through the decision to enroll boys and not girls, and not through differential expenditure on girls and boys. The results also suggest that the extent of pro-male gender bias in educational expenditure is substantially greater in rural than in urban areas. Finally, our results suggest that an important mechanism through which households spend less on girls than boys is by sending sons to fee-charging private schools and daughters to the fee-free government-funded schools.

Abstract: The aim of the present paper is to examine the observed differences in Students’ test performance across public and private‐voucher schools in Spain. For this purpose, we explicitly consider that education is a multi‐input multi‐output production process subject to inefficient behaviors, which can be identified at student level using a parametric stochastic distance function approach. The empirical application of this model, based on Spanish data from the Programme for International Student Assessment implemented by the Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development in 2003, allows us to identify different aspects of the underlying educational technology. Among other things, the results provide insights into how student background, peer group, school characteristics and personal circumstances interact with educational outputs. Moreover, our findings suggest that, once educational inputs and potential bias due to school choice endogeneity are taken into account, no further unexplained difference re...

Abstract: In this timely interdisciplinary volume, William Watkins has brought together leading scholars and activists to address some of the most urgent issues facing public education. What is underneath and behind the language of choice, efficiency, and improvement in current neoliberal discourse? How will urban and poor populations be affected? Will privatization lead to increased stratification in our schools? How can public education not only be saved but re-imagined? In accessible language, renowned contributors explore and critique corporate school reform to both inform and serve as an organizing tool for teachers, parents, students, and citizens committed to genuine public education.

Abstract: We analyze the relationship between charter high school attendance and educational attainment in Florida and in Chicago. Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, we estimate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7–15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8–10 percentage points more likely to attend college. We find even larger effects when we treat high school choice as endogenous.

Abstract: In this article the authors analyze the effect of private voucher education on student academic performance using new data on Chilean students and a novel identification strategy. Most schools in C...

Abstract: There is widespread concern about differences in the quality of state-run and private schooling. The concerns are especially severe in the numerous developing countries where much of the population has left state-provided schooling for private schooling, including many private schools not recognized by the government. The fees charged by the private schools serving the poor are quite low and they seem to yield better results, but many analysts dispute and insist that private sector quality is unacceptable, and that the only route to universal access to quality schooling is increased investment in state-run provision. Because those claims and counterclaims have seen little scientifically rigorous evidence to support them, this article analyzes data from schools serving the very poor in randomly selected schools in Lagos, Nigeria; Delhi, India; and Hyderabad, India to compare the performance of unrecognized private schools, state-recognized private schools, and zero-tuition, state-run schools. The authors' ...

Abstract: Do school choice programs increase opportunities for educational mobility or reinforce initial disparities in schooling? I address this question in the context of the public education system in Ghana, which uses standardized tests and a nation-wide application process to allocate 150,000 elementary school students to 650 secondary schools. As has been found in other settings, students from lower-performing elementary schools in Ghana apply to less selective secondary schools than students with the same test scores from higher-performing elementary schools. My analysis suggests that dierences in application behavior are largely due to imperfect information about admission chances and dierences in decision-making skills, rather than dierences in preferences or the costs and accessibility of schools. Additionally, I show that the impact of uncertainty declines following a series of reforms in the application process that expanded the number of choices students could list, and encouraged students to select a more \diversied"

Abstract: Elementary and secondary education policy making in the U.S. states is heavily influenced by the political bargaining of various actors, with teacher unions one of the most important actors. Yet previous studies that assess the impact of teacher unions on education reform use problematic measures of their direct political influence, instead opting for broader measures of membership or collective bargaining power. By contrast, the authors measure teacher union political activity by calculating the percentage of campaign contributions to candidates for state office that come from teacher unions. Using this measure, the authors find that increased teacher union political activity greatly reduces the chances that states enact reform-oriented education policies such as school choice and performance pay for teachers, while previous measures of teacher union strength bear little relationship to a state’s adoption of these reform policies. These findings highlight the importance of paying careful attention to how...

Abstract: "School Choice and School Improvement "brings together a collection of exemplary, policy-relevant papers that examine how communities, districts, and states use choice as a strategy for improving schools and student learning. The book includes sophisticated and insightful research on private schools and vouchers; charter schools and traditional public schools; and intradistrict transfer programs, adding depth and perspective to the ongoing debates about school choice options. The authors provide rigorous research and empirical data to answer central policy questions. What is the impact of school choice on student outcomes? In systems that provide school choice, do parents choose to move their children from low-achieving schools to higher-achieving schools? Does school choice result in increased competition among schools? What is the relationship between school choice and racial or ethnic segregation in the schools? The chapters in this volume collectively exemplify the directions in which research on school choice is developing and push the field toward a more systematic and nuanced understanding of the impact of school choice."

Abstract: The white middle-class parents who chose to send their children to urban comprehensives largely rejected engaging in the usual competitiveness for educational success. Nevertheless the parents in our study still found themselves wittingly or otherwise captured by that same discourse. Their children are high achievers and are regarded as a valuable resource for their comprehensive schools generating high volume capital. However, in spite of this, the parents do not leave such success to chance. Drawing on an ESRC-funded research project (Educational Choices and the White Urban Middle-Classes RES-148-25-0023) we analyse how middle-class parental involvement is part of the age old process of social reproduction and the transmission of parents’ middle-class privilege to their children, almost regardless of their intentions. Not only are the parents interventionist in their children’s schooling, they draw on and dispose their own privileged capitals to prepare and position their children for educational success.

Abstract: Purpose – This study aims to investigate the direction and strength of the relationships between school reputation, parent satisfaction and parent loyalty.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports the findings of a survey of 325 parents from three primary schools across Norway. Building on previous work examining corporate reputations, a new measure of school reputation, as viewed by parents, was developed. Structural equation models were used to validate the new reputation measure and to test the proposed relationships. Relationships linking school reputation to parent satisfaction and loyalty were tested.Findings – Support for a four‐dimensional scale for assessment of parent‐based school reputation was found, using the following dimensions: parent orientation, learning quality, safe environment and good teachers. Parents' satisfaction significantly affected all reputation dimensions. Views of schools as having a parent orientation and good teachers affected parents' loyalty.Research limitations/i...

Abstract: School choice is intended to leverage competition between schools to produce better educational opportunities for disadvantaged students. Yet we know very little about how competition impacts entire populations of schools of different types in distributing educational options across segregated social landscapes. We draw on theories from the literatures on institutional environment, organizational behavior, and positioning strategies to investigate how different types of schools (public, private, and charters) respond to market competition within Metropolitan Detroit's highly competitive and segregated environment. Mapping illustrates patterns of school types that have opened, relocated, and closed relative to socioeconomic and demographic neighborhood contexts. Our analysis explores the location incentive of high vacancy rate as proxy for affordable spaces suitable for new schools. Findings suggest that competitive incentives have

Abstract: This article focuses on the role of the state in the context of an increasing market orientation in Swedish education policy. It asks if and how a market orientation and privatisation can be reconciled with attempts to re-establish central output control. The controlling function of the state is emphasised in the form of efforts to inspect both public and private schools. Drawing on the literature on governance, dealing with the “hollowing-out” and “filling-in” of the state, two scenarios are distinguished asserting that a market orientation in the case of education policy could either reduce or intensify the need for state-led control. It is concluded that the characteristics of Swedish education policy conform to the “filling-in” line of argument, namely that central state control is strengthened at a point in time when a market orientation and greater choice and privatisation are gaining ground.

Abstract: School choice has been one of the most important and widely-debated education policies in the past two decades, with game theory playing a major role in the adoption of school choice mechanisms. Similarly, college admissions in China have gone through many local experimentations, with a rich variety of mechanisms used in various provinces.

Abstract: This article describes and critically analyzes how educational sociologists in the Netherlands have studied the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational inequality between 1980 and 2008. Five major research traditions are identified: (1) political arithmetic; (2) racism and ethnic discrimination; (3) school characteristics; (4) school choice; and (5) family background. The development of particular research traditions is explained by pointing to more general developments in terms of social policy and intellectual climate in the Netherlands. This study builds on a similar, recently published literature review that focuses on the UK context by critically comparing the development and findings from these different bodies of research literature. The conclusions suggest that the Netherlands, like England, developed strong research traditions in this area of research since the 1980s and that both countries can learn from each other and advance future research in this area by developing more comprehen...

Abstract: This article is taken, with publisher permission, from the Rethinking Childhood Series book: Cannella, G. S. & Diaz Soto, L. (Eds.) (2010). Childhoods; A Handbook. NY: Peter Lang. This paper examines the impact of neoliberalism on early childhood education, care, and policy both as a global phenomenon and in the form of disaster capitalism in post-Katrina New Orleans. Neoliberalism is discussed in general terms and then analyzed through a critical, feminist, poststructural, and postcolonial lens in order to reveal the way in which early childhood policy and practices in the United States (such as with NCLB, school choice initiatives, and the charter school movement) have been used as mechanisms to control and privatize services like public education for young children, creating vast inequities and denying access to a free and appropriate education for many. The reader is referred to the complete book for additional critical, feminist, post-structural, reconceptualist analyses on social justice issues within early childhood studies.

Abstract: This paper formally examines two competing methods of conducting a lottery to assign students to schools, motivated by the design of the centralized high school student assignment system in New York City. The main result of the paper is that single and multiple lottery mechanisms are equivalent for the problem of allocating students to schools in which students have strict preferences and the schools are indifferent. In proving this result, a new approach is introduced that simplifies and unifies all the known equivalence results in the house allocation literature. Along the way, two new mechanisms—Partitioned Random Priority and Partitioned Random Endowment—are introduced for the house allocation problem. These mechanisms generalize widely studied mechanisms for the house allocation problem and may be appropriate for the many-to-one setting such as the school choice problem.

Abstract: Private schools free households from a strict link between residential location decisions and the tax-school quality bundles they consume. In order to study the impact of private schools on educational outcomes, we develop a general equilibrium model that simultaneously incorporates locational choice built on access and locational choice built on tax-school quality attributes of jurisdictions. We conclude that private school choice enhances the welfare of all households—both those attending private schools and those attending public schools—while also working to reduce the amount of housing and school segregation in equilibrium. Investigation of alternative school policies indicates that greater choice, including using targeted school vouchers, can improve welfare and achievement. Finally, we demonstrate how the fiscal burden arising from some households paying less taxes than they consume in public services varies significantly with the structure of school choice options.

Abstract: Although a relatively new idea in the U.S., weighted student funding (WSF) for individual schools has a long history in the Netherlands. This country of about 16.5 million people has been using a version of WSF for all its primary schools (serving children from age 4 to 12) for 25 years. In this article we describe and evaluate the Dutch system and explore what insights there might be for the U.S., taking into account the very different cultural and normative contexts of the two countries. We find that, compared to those with few weighted students, Dutch schools with high proportions of weighted students have almost 60 percent more teachers per pupil as well as more support staff per teacher. Even these large resource advantages, however, are not sufficient by themselves to eliminate all quality shortfalls in the high-weight schools, where quality is measured by school policies and practices. We conclude that weighted student funding for schools within districts in the U.S. is not likely to deliver the same highly progressive funding patterns as in the Netherlands because of the complex, multilayered U.S. education system and the absence of a political consensus in favor of generous weights. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Abstract: In England, contextual value added (CVA) school performance tables are published annually by the government. These tables present statisticalmodel-based estimates of the educational effectiveness of schools, together with 95 per cent confidence intervals to communicate their statistical uncertainty. However, this information, particularly the notion of statistical uncertainty, is hard for users to understand. There is a real need to make school performance tables clearer. The media attempt to do this for the public by ranking schools in so-called ‗school league tables‘; however, they invariably discard the 95 per cent confidence intervals and, in doing so, encourage the public to over-interpret differences in schools‘ ranks. In this paper, we explore a simulation method to produce simple graphical summaries of schools‘ ranks that clearly communicate their associated uncertainty.

Abstract: School choice policies, which allow parents to select among a range of options to satisfy compulsory schooling for their children, have arisen from five periods of political and legal struggle. This Feature considers the shape of school choice that emerged in the 1920s education fight over Americanization of immigrants; the freedom-of-choice plans used to avoid court-ordered school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s; magnet schools used to promote school desegregation in the 1970s until they were halted by the Supreme Court; constitutional campaigns for vouchers to pay for religious schooling; and current experiments with charter schools and other alternatives, including special-identity schools. The idea of school choice appeals to individual freedom, market competition, religious freedom, multiculturalism, and ideological neutrality. School choice programs draw new talent into schooling and offer new avenues for social integration but only if that goal becomes an explicit public commitment, shaping available choices. Otherwise, school choice can enable new forms of social separation and obscure the absence of equal opportunities for all students. author. Dean and Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor, Harvard Law School. I thank Dick Fallon, Gish Jen, Toby Merrill, Frank Michelman, Joe Singer, Mira Singer, Jude Volek, and Rick Weissbourd for their invaluable comments. I am grateful to Dean Robert Post and the Yale Law School community for giving me the chance to present an earlier version of this Feature as the Robert Cover Lecture on Law and Religion at Yale Law School on March 22, 2010, and also to the Gann Academy faculty and students for their comments. This Feature is inspired by Robert Cover’s search for an organizing framework to ensure liberal values of freedom, tolerance, and equality—including considerable, but not unbounded, space for illiberal subcommunities. It also builds upon my recent book, MARTHA MINOW, IN BROWN’S WAKE: LEGACIES OF AMERICA’S EDUCATIONAL LANDMARK (2010). confronting the seduction of choice 815 feature contents

Abstract: This paper examines the key aspects of the practices of school-based management in Indonesia, and its effect on education quality. Using a conceptual framework of an accountability system of public service delivery, the paper explores the relations among Indonesian parents, school committees, schools, and government education supervisory bodies from three tenets: participation and voice; autonomy; and accountability. Using the data from a nationally representative survey of about 400 public primary schools in Indonesia, the paper finds that the level of parental participation and voice in school management is extremely low in Indonesia. While the role of school committees is still limited to community relations, school facilities, and other administrative areas of school management, school principals, together with teachers, are much more empowered to assert professional control of the schools. The accountability system has remained weak in Indonesia's school system, which is reflected by inadequate information flow to parents, as well as seemingly low parental awareness of the need to hold schools accountable. The accountability arrangement of the Indonesian school system currently puts more emphasis on top-down supervision and monitoring by government supervisory bodies. The findings show that although the scope of school-based management in Indonesia is limited, it has begun to help schools make the right decisions on allocation of resources and hiring additional (non-civil servant) teachers, and to create an enabling environment of learning, including increasing teacher attendance rates. These aspects are found to have significantly positive effects on student learning outcomes.