School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [29]
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic introduced voucher programs after the fall of communism, which spurred the creation of private schools in areas of pent-up demand and poor-quality government-run schools. In the 1990s the Czech Republic expanded educational choice by funding private schools with a “two-part tariff,” that is, 50 percent of the total support for a state school is automatically given to a private school, and state officials determine an additional amount such that total funding does not exceed 90 percent of what is received by a state school. Given this small disparity between public funding levels for private and public schools, private schools introduced additional fees for supplemental education services, which may limit access to low-income students with greater educational needs.
According to Belfield and Levin: “Even as the number of private schools grew from zero to over 440 within a decade, the absorption of students into these schools was correspondingly high: most private schools are smaller than public schools.”45 Since the new school choice policies increased options in low-income areas, which tend to have the worst-performing schools, low-income families have the widest range of choice and benefit from increased privatization in the Czech Republic.
Chile
In 1982 Chile introduced a universal voucher program that decentralized education governance to local municipalities.46 Enrollment-driven subsidies were given to public and private schools that elected to participate. All students could choose to enroll at either type of school. Under this policy, private school enrollments increased as both religious and independent for-profit private schools proliferated.
Some early test score comparisons showed that students attending for-profit voucher schools performed similarly to students in public schools, while Catholic school students performed slightly better. Students in elite private schools that did not participate in the voucher program scored the highest in test score comparisons.47 The students, however, may have been different from one another in ways not considered by these early studies, which makes their results questionable.
Claudio Sapelli found in later research that, after controlling for budget differences and for socioeconomic characteristics of students and their peers, students in private subsidized (that is, voucher) schools outperformed those in public schools.48 Sapelli, moreover, pointed out that public schools that saw an exodus of students to the private sector are not closed; rather, they receive extra funding from municipal governments to ensure that teachers’ salaries can still be paid. This extra funding was not offered to private schools. Hence, he explains: “[P]ublic schools do not have to choose between supplying an education that attracts enough students to allow the school to pay its wage bill and laying off staff. The choice those schools actually face is whether public school teachers are to be paid to teach large or small classes.”49 Subsidized public schools also received extra funding to educate poorer students, which put private schools at a competitive disadvantage in their efforts to serve such students.
As Andrew Coulson has pointed out, test score analyses by Francisco Gallego show that both public and private voucher schools have been closing the gap with elite nonvoucher private schools.50 Market forces, in other words, may be the tide that indeed lifts all boats—and this result was achieved even though unsubsidized Chilean private schools could set their own admissions policies, just as such schools can in the United States.
Colombia
Beginning in 1991, more than 125,000 students in Colombia received vouchers covering about half the cost of private schooling. The Programa de Ampliacion de Cobertura