School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [39]
5. Geopolitical Area Choice Effects
The three preceding chapters focused on the effects of charter schools, education vouchers, and private schools on students who attend schools of choice as well as those who remain in traditional public schools. In all three cases, positive effects on both categories of students were cited.
Market effects may also be assessed by measuring the relative degree of school choice and competition within geopolitical areas such as parts of cities, cities, counties, states, and nations and comparing the educational outcomes across areas with varying degrees of choice. In principle, market pressures are higher when public and private school choice programs combine to expose themselves and traditional public schools to real competition, when school districts are small enough to cause interdistrict competition for students and taxpayers, when public school organizations are small and decentralized, and when public schools rely on local rather than state funding sources (thereby forcing them to compete with other districts to attract and retain residents).
Since choice and competition vary considerably from place to place, research on their effects is often more robust than studies of charter or voucher schools, which tend to be few in number and new or only a few years old. However, choice concentration research usually relies on statistical (regression) analysis to control for confounding factors, and so it does not achieve the “gold standard” of random-assignment studies. Large-scale studies in the United States and elsewhere nevertheless provide creditable evidence of “market effects,” particularly when combined with the generally accepted conclusion that market competition among providers benefits consumers.
Literature Reviews
Two comprehensive reviews of the literature on choice concentration effects have been conducted. The first, reported in 2001 by political scientists Paul Teske and Mark Schneider,1 included about 25 large-scale, rigorous, quantitative studies and about 75 qualitative case studies of schools in the United States. The authors examined a variety of outcomes. They explained:
A combination of evidence is important in a domain in which economists, political scientists, sociologists, educational scholars, and others often read work only in their own disciplines. Moreover, while other researchers have reviewed various pieces of the choice literature, most are focused on only one aspect or type of choice. Here a broader analysis is sought.2
Teske and Schneider found a research consensus that “parents are more satisfied with choice, that they report using academic preferences to make choices, and that they tend to be more involved with their child’s education as a consequence of choice.”3 Referring to public and private choice programs generally, they conclude,
While not all of these studies conclude that choice enhances [academic] performance, it is significant to note that the best ones do, and that [we] did not find any study that documents significantly lower performance in choice schools.4
Also reported in 2001, the second literature review, by economists Clive Belfield and Henry Levin,5 examined more than 40 studies of school competition. The studies reported analyses of the effects of the percentages of students enrolled in private schools and decentralized public school systems (where competition is engendered by a greater number of smaller school districts within a county or state). They concluded:
A sizable majority of these studies report beneficial effects of competition across all outcomes, with many reporting statistically significant coefficients. Those outcomes included test scores, graduation rates, teacher salaries, housing prices, and adult wages.6
The many U.S. studies