Private School Competition Research Articles

Beyond narrow definitions: Quantifying school privatisation across countries and over time

The OECD reported that the proportions of students enrolled in ‘private schools’ have remained stable since 2000. Drawing on the concepts of endogenous and exogenous privatisation, we question this statement, arguing that school privatisation can be disaggregated into four dimensions: private provision, restricted access, school competition and school autonomy. We operationalise these dimensions using indicators from the PISA school questionnaire. We explore changes cross-nationally between 2000 and 2018 in 35 educational systems, revealing increases in secondary school competition dynamics over time and some cases of substantial increases in autonomous school-level decision-making. We also provide an up-to-date landscape of school privatisation for 64 countries in 2018 and highlight the relevance of using a wide set of indicators to report the extent of privatisation, accounting for both endogenous and exogenous sides of the phenomenon. Finally, we discuss ways in which cross-national quantitative data collection on schools might be developed to produce a more appropriate quantification of privatisation.

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)

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.

Multiple choice: How public school leaders in New Orleans's saturated market view private school competitors

School choice policies, such as charter schools and vouchers, are in part designed to induce competition between schools. While several studies have examined the impact of private school competition on public schools, few studies have explored school leaders’ perceptions of private school competitors. This study examines the extent to which public school leaders in New Orleans, which already has a robust public school choice system, perceived competition with private schools, and the characteristics that predicted competition between the two types of schools. We find that while over half of principals reported competing with private schools for students, there was a wide range of the number and percentage of possible competitors reported. Furthermore, the results suggest that school voucher policies did not play a major role in influencing why schools competed with private schools. In addition, public school leaders who did lose students to private schools through the voucher program reported that they often recouped those losses, when parents returned to public schools unsatisfied or facing additional unexpected costs.

Private School Competition and Public School Performance in Arizona

Advocates of school choice policies claim that private school competition would make public schools more efficient. I evaluate the effect of private school competition on public schools’ test scores in Arizona. Private schooling is treated as endogenous. I use the Arizona K-12 tax credit to build the first instrument based on religious denominations likely to donate to private schools. Also, I use measures of the population of private school students and schools as new instruments for private schooling. Moreover, I build grade-specific measures of private school competition. I find a strong positive effect of private school competition on scores in grade 4, and no significant effect on scores in grade 7.

Does private school competition improve public school performance? The case of Nepal

Using data from the survey of the Ministry of Education, Nepal-2005 for school leaving certificate (SLC) exam, this paper attempts to estimate the impact of private school competition on public school performance for the case of Nepal. The study uses the number of private schools in the neighborhood as a measure of competition. The identification problem is that private school enrollment is likely to be correlated with public school performance. To address this, the study uses the existence of a motorable road within an hour's walking distance from the sample school as an instrument for number of private schools in the neighborhood. The OLS results show no significant relationship. In contrast, the IV method indicates a positive and significant impact of private school competition on public school performance, which holds true for the continuous and binary measure of private school competition.

The Effects of Competition from Private Schooling on French Public School Districts in the Province of Québec

ABSTRACT The Province of Québec subsidizes nearly 50% of private education, and at the same time heavily regulates private schools. To date, no studies have been done to determine the effect of the unique nature of competition from K–12 private schools on public school education of the sort found in Québec. The authors used multiple regression to determine the effects of private school competition on school district performance and efficiency. The authors found that private school competition has a positive, though nonsignificant, effect on school district performance. However, private school competition does have a significant, positive effect on the efficiency of public school districts. This gain in efficiency is explained by competition's influence on lowering expenditures across the board.

Community Schooling in Nepal: A Genealogy of Education Reform since 1990

Community participation in schooling is seen by policy makers and practitioners alike as essential for the achievement of efficient, accountable, and sustainable education. The shift in many developing countries to policies promoting decentralized provision is emerging increasingly in the form of programs in which parents and local groups play prominent roles in decisions about school finance, staffing, and overall educational “quality.” While scholars acknowledge the complex and contested nature of “community” and accept that participatory activities take many different forms (e.g., Bray 2001), there is also broad agreement that educational reform must engage stakeholders if it is to have any chance of overturning historic patterns of underinvestment, low relevance, and marginal usefulness. Whether participation is “genuine” (i.e., stakeholders play a significant role in decision making and governance) or “pseudo” (i.e., citizens are kept informed, often for the purposes of contributing resources), a guiding principle of the “post-Washington consensus” (Stiglitz 2002, 20) has been to encourage processes that deal concurrently with concerns for democracy, poverty alleviation, and sustainability. Recent developments in Nepal are no exception to the global trend of elevating the role of local communities in education. In 2003, as part of a renewed drive by the government to shift service delivery to the local level, the World Bank was invited to support project work to prepare the country for large-scale “transfer” of schools to local community stakeholders (World Bank 2003, 2). Known as the Community School Support Project (CSSP), the initiative aimed to elevate the role of parents on school management committees (SMCs) and empowered these organizations to appoint and supervise teachers locally. To encourage school transfer, a substantial initial incentive allowance/payment was provided. Unlike unaided or private community school models, however, the approach implemented in Nepal trans-

Community Schooling in Nepal: A Genealogy of Education Reform since 1990

Community Schooling in Nepal: A Genealogy of Education Reform since 1990

An alternative instrument for private school competition

Empirical studies estimating the effect of private school competition on student outcomes commonly use the share of Catholics in the local population as an instrument for private school competition. I show that this is not a valid instrument since it is endogenous to private school competition and suggest using instead the local share of Catholics in the population in 1890 and its squared term. These instruments are very strong and are also exogenous to both student achievements and private school competition. I further show that using the current Catholic share as an instrument results in seriously flawed estimates of the effect of private school competition on math test scores and on educational attainment, to the extent that significant positive effects of private school competition on these outcome measures do not hold when the historical Catholic share in 1890 is used as an alternative instrument. The historical Catholic share in 1890 can also be applied to estimate the treatment effect of Catholic schools.

Efficiency in Swedish Public Education: Competition and Voter Monitoring

Sweden reformed public education in 1991–1993. A system with private school competition was introduced and the production of public education was decentralized from central to local government. One of the aims with this reform was to increase efficiency in the production of education. In this paper, efficiency in Swedish public education is estimated with data envelopment analysis and the efficiency scores are explained by variables reflecting competition and local politics in a second‐stage Tobit regression. In 1999–2000 Swedish municipalities could decrease school resources by 8–12% without decreasing outcomes. We find the political majority in the city council to affect efficiency, but we do not find efficiency to be related to private school competition.

The Unintended Effects of Private School Competition

We examine whether competition from private schools improves public school performance and expenditure. It is difficult methodologically to isolate the effect of competition, but we use new measures of competition in both the public and the private school sector and a data set comprising detailed background information on more than 35,000 public school students in the Danish voucher system. This design provides a relatively firm support for the conclusion that competition does not improve achievement of public school students but that it increases public expenditure per student. Finally, we argue that there may be several good reasons for this.

The Effect of Private School Competition on Public School Performance in Georgia

This article presents estimates of the effect of private school competition on public school performance. Using data on school districts in Georgia, the authors estimate models relating tenth- and third-grade test scores for either reading or mathematics to the level of private school competition. Test scores are not measurably or significantly higher in areas with greater private school competition, a result robust through multiple estimations using three measures of private school competition and a variety of control variables. The authors address the possible endogeneity between test scores and private school competition using instrumental variables estimators, with percentage of the population that is Catholic, county population in 1980, lagged competition, and various other measures as alternative instruments.

Public and Private School Competition: The Spatial Education Production Function

School vouchers may increase the competition public school districts face. Greater competition may spur public schools to improve student outcomes, which reliably predict labor market productivity and earnings. Previous school competition studies do not use spatial statistics; they fail to incorporate spillovers and the effect of omitted variables into their education production functions. Significant spatial effects are found in all regressions, and spatial statistics improves adjusted R-squared. There seems to be no consistent association between private school attendance rates and public school achievement, or between the number of public school districts in a county and public school performance. Competitive effects, which seem plausible in non-spatial regressions, dissipate when spatial statistics is used. When school inputs appeared statistically significant in non-spatial regressions, the spatial regressions generally made the significance disappear. Poverty appeared to depress reading and writing passage rates, but this effect disappeared in the spatial models.

The effect of public and private competition on high school outputs in New York State

An extensive data set on upstate New York school district is used to test whether competition from private schools and competition within the public school sector positively affect public school output and again whether different types of expenditures affect output differently. It finds generally significant positive effects of private competition for some measures of school output, but little if any on measures such as the percent of students receiving high quality statewide Regents diplomas. It also finds that private school competition could reduce spending in the non-instructional categories, while competition from other public schools might encourage it.

The role of aggregation in estimating the effects of private school competition on student achievement

This paper investigates possible reasons for the disparity in results in the private school competition literature. In particular, the focus is on the data set, the grade range, and level of aggregation of the competition variable, and on the choice of OLS or IV estimation strategies. The results show that the size and significance of the competition variable depends on each of these attributes, although the grade range of the competition variable has a slightly smaller impact than the others. Private school competition does not have a consistently positive, significant effect on student achievement.

Private school competition and public school teacher salaries

Teacher unions have fiercely fought public policy measures (e.g., vouchers, tuition tax credits) that might increase the proportion of students attending private schools. Yet increased competition in the educational service market should also lead to greater labor market competition, reducing any quasi-monopsony tendencies depressing teacher salaries. Using detailed data on over 600 Ohio school districts, we find that increased private school competition leads to higher salaries for public school teachers. It may be that union leaders disregard the interests of their members in trying to maximizing union size and power. An alternative interpretation is that unions sacrifice shortrun income gains for their members in order to maintain longterm economic rents associated with substantial political power.

Does Private School Competition H-arm Public Schools? Revisiting Smith and Meier's

Smith and Meier (1995a) empirically assess the market hypothesis advanced by Chubb and Moe (1988, 1990), which holds that compettion improves schools. Using Florida school district data, Smith and Meier find that higher private school market share lowers public school test scores; they conclude that competition harms public schools. Hoever, they do not take into account the impact of family income on copetition in traditionally organized education markets: the lower the income, the less likely parents can exit the public schools, which implies less competition. Using their database but segmenting it into low and high income groups, we reanalyze the relationship between test scores and private school market share. We find that private school market share lowers test scores primarily in low income districts, where comptition is least due to low family income. We conclude that Smith and Meier's rejection of the market hypothesis is premature.

Does Private School Competition Harm Public Schools? Revisiting Smith and Meier's The Case against School Choice

Does Private School Competition Harm Public Schools? Revisiting Smith and Meier's The Case against School Choice