Abstract
The availability of public funding for private schools, in both primary and secondary education, has become a common feature in a number of OECD countries. The expansion of public subsidies for privately owned schools has consequences that go far beyond the involvement of private actors in the provision of education. These include deepening forms of regulatory governance in educational systems and the blurring of frontiers between public and private education. Public subsidies for privately owned schools have been adopted following diverse rationalities and in pursuit of different goals. In light of the diversity, this research examines the regulatory configurations of private subsidized education provision across OECD countries, from a policy instruments’ perspective. Based on a systematic review of the literature, the article identifies four models of regulation of private subsidized education, and analyses why and how these models have been problematized and have evolved accordingly. The paper pays particular attention to recent educational reforms adopted, in most cases, to tackle the equity challenges posed by publicly subsidized private provision. Finally, the paper elaborates on the implications that this form of provision has for public education and the achievement of equity goals, and reflects on the potential and limits of regulatory reforms when confronting these issues.
Highlights
IntroductionPublicly funded private schooling has become a central feature in numerous educational systems
Over the past decades, publicly funded private schooling has become a central feature in numerous educational systems
For each of the countries, we collected information relating to the historical origins of the public subsidies for private schools (PSPS) arrangements in place, with particular attention focused on the policy goals that education administrators and decision-makers were pursuing with the establishment of such arrangements
Summary
Publicly funded private schooling has become a central feature in numerous educational systems. The presence of private subsidized schools in educational systems impacts public education in numerous ways. In terms of educational governance, public subsidies for private schools render more evident the decoupling of the funding and provision roles, traditionally assumed by the state, which is something that contributes to the state managing publicly and privately owned schools as independent operators, through resource allocation and accountability instruments. Numerous studies show that the presence of private subsidized education impacts negatively on school segregation and social stratification between schools (Alegre and Ferrer, 2010; Dumay and Dupriez, 2014; Eurydice, 2020; OECD, 2012). Existing research challenges the idea that public funding might be a sufficient mechanism to equate public and private schools in terms of their social commitment, or to make private actors comply with equity goals or align with a more public ethos
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