School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [40]
Competition in 39 Countries
Ludger Woessmann, a research associate at the Kiel Institute of World Economics in Kiel, Germany, combined data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Bank on public spending per student in secondary education, from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on institutional features such as the distribution of decisionmaking powers in public school systems and enrollment in private schools, and student-level academic achievement data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (the largest international student achievement survey ever conducted) to create a representative sample of about 250,000 students from a population of more than 30 million students in 39 economically advanced and emerging economies.7
Woessmann found that competition from private schools and the degree of centralization of authority in public school systems varied dramatically among countries, providing considerable natural variation for measuring the effects of competition on achievement. His analysis showed that, for all the countries, increased per student spending “does not generally raise educational performance,” and, in particular, there is “no systematic relationship between resources and performance across time within most countries in the OECD [30 economically advanced countries of the 39 included in the study].”8
Higher levels of private school governance, however, were associated with higher academic performance:
Students in countries with larger shares of their enrollment in privately managed schools scored significantly higher in both math and science. If the share of enrollment in privately managed schools was 10 percentage points higher, students scored 6 points better in math, 5 in science. The effect was even larger when only those private institutions that were financially independent were considered.9
As was pointed out in Chapter 4, several OECD countries have attained considerable recent success with publicly financed voucher or scholarship programs that enable students to attend privately managed schools. (In these cases, public funds go not directly to schools as in the case of charter schools but to families that can use the voucher at schools they choose.)
Competition in the 50 States
Jay Greene10 developed an Education Freedom Index (EFI) to measure the amount of school choice present in all 50 states. As revised in 2002, the index is an equally weighted average of five measures of educational options:
• the availability of charter school options,
• the availability of government-assisted private school options (e.g., vouchers),
• the ease with which one can homeschool one’s child,
• the ease with which one can choose a different public school district by relocating, and
• the ease with which one can send a child to a different public school district without changing residence.
According to the EFI, the greatest amount of school choice can be found in Arizona, which has the largest number of charter schools in the nation, imposes few regulations on homeschoolers, has a tax credit program for private school tuition, and encourages interdistrict public school choice. With only one school board for the entire state, few charter schools, and heavily regulated homeschooling, Hawaii has the least amount of educational freedom.
Using statistical (regression) analysis, Greene isolated the choice effect from the significant and potentially confounding effects of median household income and the percentage of ethnic minorities in each state, and two insignificant variables (average class size and per student expenditures). He found that the EFI scale was significantly