Private School Choice Research Articles

Are Hybrid Schoolers Reluctant to Participate in Private School Choice Programs? Experimental Evidence from a National Sample of Hybrid School Leaders

ABSTRACT Private school choice programs are publicly-funded programs that provide families with funding to attend a private school of their choice. Since 2021, 15 states have enacted or expanded choice legislation, even making homeschoolers eligible to participate. However, homeschoolers are often reluctant to participate due to proposed regulations. We survey a national sample of hybrid school leaders, a sector that shares similarities with homeschoolers in modality, and randomly assign hypothetical regulations to them. We find that 65% are willing to encourage participation in the absence of regulations, but regulations reduce leaders’ willingness to encourage participation by about 31 points.

Will Private School Choice Save Catholic Schools in the U.S.? Interrogating the Catholic School Sector’s Relationship to the School Privatization Movement

A central part of the private school choice coalition in the U.S. has been the participation of Catholic school stakeholders. The purpose of this article is to examine how Catholic school advocacy became linked to private school choice advocacy by highlighting the institutional and organizational crises facing Catholic elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. that led to sector-wide policy responses favoring choice. However, through an analysis of emerging trends in private school choice policy implementation, this paper raises questions about the efficacy of continued advocacy for private school choice policy within the Catholic sector.

Does Private School Choice Threaten Democracy? Evidence from Private and Public Schools in New York City and Dallas/Fort Worth

A major concern in the ongoing debate over school choice is whether private schools help to increase their students’ levels of tolerance necessary for a functioning democracy in the United States. Over 40 years ago, scholars at the University of Minnesota created a survey which measured political knowledge, political tolerance, perceived threats from opposing groups, and support for democratic norms anchored in each respondent’s view of the political group they find most distasteful. In 1997, researchers at various universities used a similar survey instrument to derive responses from students in eighth-grade social studies classes who were enrolled in seven public and twenty-four private schools in New York City and Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. Those original data remained archived and unexamined for decades. We analyze those data using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and rigorous Nearest Neighbor Matching (NNM) methods based on propensity scores. We find that students who attended private schools demonstrate higher levels of political knowledge and stronger support for democratic norms when compared to observationally similar students who attended public schools.

Effects of Maturing Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes as the program matured and scaled up. We observe growing benefits (higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates) to students attending public schools with more preprogram private school options as the program matured. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well. Local and district-wide private school competition are both independently related to student outcomes. (JEL H75, I21, I22, I28)

Private Schools and Student Achievement

Abstract We investigate the effects of private schools on reading and numeracy scores using rich population data. Conditional on lagged test scores and narrowly defined neighborhood indicators, Catholic and non-Christian faith private schools on average raise test scores by 0.18 standard deviation or more relative to the average public school, while non-Catholic Christian private schools have negligible effects. The effects of secular private “prep” schools are similar to those of Catholic schools, but selection bias is a greater concern in this case. We use school-specific estimates of effectiveness to investigate private school choice decisions and the determinants of private school effectiveness.

Crude oil cycles and the choice of private vs public school: Evidence from Saudi Arabia

We show how in Saudi Arabia, a country that relies heavily on crude oil exports, negative shocks in crude oil prices significantly impact households’ decisions to invest in education. Our findings reveal that the downturn in the oil market, which began in the second half of 2014, led parents to refrain from sending their children to tuition-based private schools. In some cases, they even withdrew their children from such schools and enrolled them in free public schools, despite perceiving lower education quality in the public sector. The influence of the oil downturn on private school enrollments varied depending on the type of school. In national private schools, which follow the national curriculum, the growth rate of Saudi students decreased from 6 percent prior to the shock to -3.8 percent in the academic year of 2018. Conversely, in international private schools, which offer international curricula and tend to charge higher fees, the growth rate declined from 40 percent before the shock to 23.8 percent in the academic year of 2017. Furthermore, our study reveals that the recovery rate of national private schools, following the rebound in oil prices, exhibited significant variation across cities, genders, and educational levels. This heterogeneity highlights the diverse impact of the oil downturn shock.

Principled Politics, Regulatory Reluctance: Conditions Moderating Private School Choice Program Participation

ABSTRACT Private school leaders consider the potential benefits of private school choice program participation against costs associated with program regulations. Rational Choice Theory suggests leaders in states with conditions related to greater likelihood of program passage may be less willing to accept such regulations. To test this theory, we merge experimental data from a national study of private school choice program regulations with state-level data on political partisanship and union strength. We find limited evidence of heterogeneity by partisanship. We find leaders in states with weaker teachers’ unions are more reluctant to accept standardized testing requirements and copay prohibition.

Regional policy trajectories in the Spanish education system: Different uses of relative autonomy

Federal and highly decentralized political systems open different spaces to interpret, adapt, and enact international policy trends and ideas within the same territory. Spain, a country with a highly decentralized educational system and contentious territorial politics, is a very suitable case to analyze these dynamics. Spain and its different regions have not been immune to the influence of global policy ideas that gear around promoting private provision, school choice, and New Public Management (NPM) in education. However, the consolidation of the decentralization project, together with the fact that many regional governments have aimed to construct, for a variety of reasons, singular political profiles, have resulted in markedly different policy trajectories. To show this, this article pays particular attention to recent changes in the educational governance arrangements of two important Spanish regions, Madrid and Catalonia, as they have gone through differentiated processes of educational reform. Albeit the two regional education systems share important features (such as a historical and wide-scale public-private partnership for school provision), they have engaged with, combined, and mobilized exogenous and endogenous privatization policy ideas in remarkably different ways. The article delves into the political drivers behind this policy differentiation process by paying special attention to the relations of coordination, conflict, and competition that prevail within an incomplete federal system, such as the Spanish one.

The Effects of Regulations on Private School Choice Program Participation: Experimental Evidence from the United States

Private school leaders weigh costs and benefits when deciding whether to participate in school voucher programs. Regulatory costs associated with accepting voucher funding could reduce private school leaders’ willingness to participate. We test this hypothesis through the first random assignment analysis of the effects of various regulations on the expressed willingness of private school leaders to participate in hypothetical voucher programs that draws upon national data. We randomly assign different regulations to U.S. private school leaders and ask them whether they would participate in a hypothetical school voucher program during the following school year. Relative to no regulations, we find that open-enrollment mandates reduce the likelihood that private school leaders report being certain to participate in a hypothetical choice program by about 14 percentage points, or 67%. The requirement that private schools accept the voucher funding amount as payment-in-full reduces the likelihood that private school leaders report being certain to participate by 16 percentage points, or 77%. Some regulations are more likely to deter private schools with higher reported tuitions, higher enrollment trends, more specialization, and more climate problems.

Education Freedom and Student Achievement: Is More School Choice Associated with Higher State-Level Performance on the NAEP?

ABSTRACT School choice is spreading across the U.S. at the same time that scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) are stagnant. We examine the association between education freedom and 8th grade student NAEP score levels and gains in states in 2019. We construct the 2019 Education Freedom Index as a composite measure of the accessibility of private school choice, public charter schools, homeschooling, and public school choice in each state. Using statistical regression, we find that more education freedom is significantly associated with increased NAEP scores and gains, supporting the claim that choice and competition improves system-wide achievement.

The Fiscal and Welfare Effects of Policy Responses to the Covid-19 School Closures

Based on data on school visits from Safegraph and on school closures from Burbio, we document that during the Covid-19 crisis secondary schools were closed for in-person learning for longer periods than elementary schools, private schools experienced shorter closures than public schools, and schools in poorer US counties experienced shorter school closures. To quantify the long-run consequences of these school closures, we extend the structural life cycle model of private and public schooling investments by Fuchs-Schündeln et al. (Econ J 132:1647–1683, 2022) to include private school choice and feed into the model the school closure measures from our empirical analysis. Future earnings and welfare losses are largest for children that started public secondary schools at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. Comparing children from the top to children from the bottom quartile of the income distribution, welfare losses are 0.5 percentage points larger for the poorer children if school closures were unrelated to income. Accounting for the longer school closures in richer counties reduces this gap by about 1/4. A policy intervention that extends schools by 6 weeks generates significant welfare gains for children and raises future tax revenues sufficient to pay for the cost of this schooling expansion.

Estimating the Impact on Educational Demand of Divesting in a Private School Voucher Policy: A Study of an Italian Region

ABSTRACT Voucher policies represent a market mechanism to support school choice, with the expected effect of stimulating competition among schools and, in turn, positively benefiting the educational outcomes. As the only Italian region adopting this policy to free private/public school choice, Lombardy is the subject of this study. In particular, we aim at understanding whether the voucher policy still affects private school enrollments, considering its de-financing in 2016. Findings show that this reduction did not impact private enrollments. Reasons could be probably found in the well-rooted motivations behind private school choice and in the low amount of the voucher, which does not cover the full private school enrollment.

The Effect of Private School Choice Regulations on School Participation: Experimental Evidence from the Christian School Sector

ABSTRACT Private school choice programs’ success depends partly on the supply of private schools. Many parents prioritize a religious education for their children. Therefore, it is important to consider how religious private schools may respond to various program regulations. We conducted an experimental study surveying a national sample of 354 leaders of Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) member schools, the second largest private school organization of any kind in the United States. We find evidence that while over four-fifths of Christian school leaders are inclined to participate with no changes to school operations, open enrollment mandates reduce participation rates by 62 percentage points and employment regulations reduce participation rates by 79 percentage points.

Canceling the admission priority of private schools enlarges housing price gap in public school districts: Evidence from Shanghai's new admission policy

AbstractIn 2018, Shanghai implemented an admission policy that canceled the admission priority of private schools to promote education equity. Since this policy is a unique measure for adjusting private and public school competition and discouraging private school choice priority, little is known about the policy effects. In this research, to examine the impact of the new admission policy on the capitalization of public education quality, we apply boundary fixed effect and Difference in Differences (DID) analysis to housing transaction records before and after the policy. The admission policy on average led to an additional 2% housing price premium for every standard deviation increase in public school quality. However, this average increase in premium was mainly driven by elite (top 5%) school districts, where an additional 8.6% housing price premium was generated by the policy. Housing prices in nonelite school districts, on the other hand, demonstrated no significant changes. These results indicate that the policy enlarges the housing price gap among school districts with different education quality. Thus, rather than promoting education equity, this policy may overall worsen the housing affordability in good public‐school districts and make access to quality education more exclusive.

Private school choice among Muslim parents: the public–private school decision in Delhi, India

This article examines Muslim parents’ private school choice, their understanding of public–private schooling and how they navigate the choice between fee-free public schools and fee-charging private schools. This article draws on qualitative data from open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 38 parents from Muslim-majority areas in Delhi, India. The findings show that parents choose private schools for several reasons, such as their proximity, discipline, emphasis on Islamic teachings and values, safety and caring teachers. The analysis suggests that structural and social factors influence and construct parents’ choice of a particular school. The neighbourhood where they reside, their minority status, their socio-economic and demographic profile, and the type of schools that are available to them influence their decision making.

Who supports MO private school choice? Evidence from likely voters in Missouri

In the first half of 2021, 33 states considered new private school choice legislation. Despite this legislative interest, public opinion on private school choice remains varied. In this paper, we examine voter support for private school choice in Missouri, a politically conservative state that lacked a private school choice program until 2021. We conduct a survey experiment to gauge support for the expansion of private school choice to religious schools, assess preferences for universal or targeted student access, and explore opinions regarding the regulation of participating private schools. We find voters are significantly less likely to support voucher expansion when primed to consider that vouchers could be used at religiously affiliated schools. Political ideology, racial identity, college exposure, and family income are significant predictors of voucher support. Regulation support varies widely, with the strongest support for adherence to state testing requirements and the lowest support for waiving admissions requirements for voucher students. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for Missouri’s recently passed private school choice program, particularly by considering ways in which political compromise may be reached to implement the program in a manner conscious of heterogeneous voter preferences.

Policy Feedback and the Polarization of Interest Groups

AbstractWe use the case of education interest groups to examine how and when policy changes lead interest groups to polarize in their support for political parties. Using over 145,000 campaign contributions from all 50 states from 2000 to 2017, we test whether the passage of private school choice, charter laws, and labor retrenchment policies led to the polarization of education interest groups over time. In 2000, teachers unions were the dominant group and mostly aligned with Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans lacked support from any education groups. This pattern was consistent across states. Over time, coalitions in some states became polarized, meaning unions grew even more aligned with Democrats and reform groups with Republicans, while other states did not experience such polarization. We show that private school choice programs, but not labor retrenchment or charter laws, contributed to this changing partisan alignment. Our findings demonstrate that policy feedback can shape both the electoral mobilization and party alignments of interest groups.

Okullarda Yabancı Dil Ağırlıklı Sınıflar Aracılığıyla Kültürel Sermaye Artırımı ve Eğitimsel Eşitsizlik Üzerine Nitel Bir Araştırma

There are many studies suggesting that the choice of private school is a cultural capital investment of upper- and middle-class families in order to differentiate their children from the lower classes and to increase their social status. In this study, we reveal that families use foreign language-based classes created within secondary schools in the new period in order to meet these needs. The study is based on the data of the field research conducted by using the qualitative research method and semi-structured interview technique with 25 parents of students whose children are studying in foreign language-based classes of secondary schools and a total of 25 teachers from different branches working in schools with foreign language-based classes. In the study, it was revealed that middle-class families enroll their children in foreign language-based classes in order to improve their children's social status. This practice leads to the emergence of different stigmas within the school, especially between parents and teachers. Foreign language-based classroom practice causes educational inequalities between students who study in these classes and those who do not. At this point, measures can be taken to prevent economic conditions from being a significant factor in the preference of foreign language-based classroom practice. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to provide schools with material richness, especially in foreign language learning.

Effects of Scaling Up Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and a student fixed effect design, we explore how the massive scale-up of a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes. Expansion of the program produced modestly larger benefits for students attending public schools that had a larger initial degree of private school options, measured prior to the introduction of the voucher program. These benefits include higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Effects of Scaling Up Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and a student fixed effect design, we explore how the massive scale-up of a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes. Expansion of the program produced modestly larger benefits for students attending public schools that had a larger initial degree of private school options, measured prior to the introduction of the voucher program. These benefits include higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well.