Private School Enrollment and Public School Performance

Advocates of education privatization often take two general approaches to denigrating commonplace public school monopoly service provision assignments. One general argument is that public school administrators are self-interested rent-seekers, which is evidenced by the ever-enlarging bureaucracies they operate. This argument has been roundly criticized by Kevin Smith and Kenneth Meier (1994, 1995) in two methodologically rigorous analyses. The second general argument is grounded in the assumption that public school student performance will improve if public schools are forced to compete for enrollment with private school alternatives. The evidence regarding this claim of privatization advocates has been contested in a systematic study of North Carolina school districts, but requires further analysis to determine if these findings can be generalized to school districts writ large. Such a replication study is presented here, with findings reported that are in agreement with those of Newmark (1995).     

School Choice in Milwaukee

For decades educational reformers have identified school choice programs as a strategy for restructuring public school systems. Practically every state has considered or adopted a school assignment program that qualifies as a "choice" initiative, one in which students and parents have some choice in school selection. Increasingly, school districts are contemplating plans that include a choice of private, as well as public, schools. One of the most far-reaching of these school choice plans is the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Parental Choice Program, which, as legislated, allows parents to use vouchers to enroll their children in both sectarian and nonsectarian schools in the community. This paper explores the evolution of school choice in Milwaukee and examines the extent to which school choice is representative of other privatization efforts currently under way in the United States.     

School Choice and Educational Stratification

Recent growth in the number of school choice programs across the country has ignited debate on the stratifying effects of these programs. In the context of interdistrict open enrollment, this paper analyzes—both theoretically and empirically—how choice programs affect stratification levels through the mechanisms of (i) the relative characteristics of program participants and nonparticipants and (ii) the schooling choices of different groups of program participants. The theoretical analysis uses Monte Carlo simulation techniques to analyze a hypothetical world where interdistrict choice is available to students in three school districts that are allowed to vary in student composition, the type of students who take advantage of the interdistrict choice program, and schooling choices of students who open enroll. The results of these simulations provide an understanding of the conditions under which an interdistrict open enrollment program leads to increases, decreases, or no changes in stratification levels. The empirical analysis uses data from the universe of students attending Colorado public schools in 2009–10 to examine how the state's interdistrict choice program affects stratification levels. It also analyzes the factors responsible for any increases or decreases in stratification and finds both participation patterns and differences in schooling decisions across groups to play important roles. The paper concludes with a discussion of its implications for research and policy.     

Children's Space and Interests: Constructing an Agenda for Student Voice

Student voice is now a more prominent feature of the education policy agenda in England and Wales. The introduction of citizenship education and the demands on schools to become more socially inclusive have forced educationalists to look more critically at the most popular expression of student voice, the school council. Drawing on empirical data from four secondary schools, this paper explores the strategies adopted by students and staff in establishing the position of the school council both as a mechanism for the expression of students' interests and as a possible forum within a broader decision-making process in school. As such the paper provides an insight into new ways of governance that may resonate with young people's experiences in other settings, both temporal and spatial.     

租购同权”政策对学区房溢价的影响研究——基于空间特征价格模型的广州实证

在公共服务对住房市场的影响研究领域，学校质量的资本化效应一直是重要话题。本文借鉴边界固定效应思路，使用广州市2016和2019年136所重点小学周边学区房与相邻非学区房的配对面板数据，利用空间特征价格模型定量测度了不同质量等级教育资源的资本化效应，使用双重差分模型检验了“租购同权”政策对重点小学学区房房价和租金溢价的影响。研究结果表明：①广州市教育质量已部分资本化于住房价格和租金之中，且教育资源越优质，资本化程度越高。②“租购同权”政策的实施，并未带来学区房房价和租金溢价的显著变化。③“租购同权”政策对不同质量等级的重点小学学区房房价影响存在异质性，政策实施后省级重点小学的学区房溢价上升，区级重点小学的学区房溢价下降。④“租购同权”政策对于不同区域重点小学学区房房价和租金溢价的影响无显著差异。本文的研究结论可以为制定教育资源供给与配置的均衡化和公平性政策提供参考。     

School Vouchers and Student Attainment: Evidence from a State‐Mandated Study of Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program

In this article we examine educational attainment levels for students in Milwaukee's citywide voucher program and a comparable group of public school students. Using unique data collected as part of a state‐mandated evaluation of the program, we consider high school graduation and enrollment in postsecondary institutions for students initially exposed to voucher schools and those in public schools at the same time. We show that exposure to voucher schools was related to graduation and, in particular, to enrollment and persistence in a 4‐year college. These differences are apparent despite controls for student neighborhoods, demographics, early‐career test scores and—for a subsample of survey respondents—controls for parental education, income, religious behavior, and marital status. We conclude by stressing the implications for future scholarship and policy, including the importance of attainment outcomes in educational research.     

Public School Search Policies and the "Politics of Sin"

In recent years, high school students have been subjected to greater levels of drug searching and surveillance on school grounds. The effect of such searching is potentially wide-ranging, because public schools "play an important role in socializing students according to the norms and mores of society" ( Vergari, 2000 ). Using the "morality politics" framework, this study reports and analyzes the presence of random, suspicionless drug searches in the Nebraska public schools. Whereas most studies of morality policy have focused on the state as the unit of analysis, we consider the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of principals in regards to drug policies in schools. Our findings, based on a survey of 181 high school principals, reflect several features of morality policy. There has been a significant rise in the number of random drug searches, despite the principals' observation that these measures neither lessen drug use nor catch perpetrators. The most important predictors of drug policy are pressure from local sources, perception of the problem within the community (but not the schools), and the racial composition of schools. Principals articulate limited concern for student rights, and students largely accept searches without resistance. In the discussion, we consider these findings in light of recent court rulings and introduce the potential ramifications of waging the drug war in our nation's classrooms and hallways.     

The Impact of Demographic Representation on Absences and Suspensions

Representative bureaucracy theory is central to public administration scholarship due to the likely relationship between the demographic composition of the public workforce and both the actual and perceived performance of public organizations. Primary school classrooms provide an ideal context in which to test the predictions of representative bureaucracy theory at the micro (student) level. Specifically, as parents have at least some agency over primary school students’ daily attendance, absences partially reflect parental assessments of their child's school, classroom, and teacher. Ensuring students attend school each day represents an effort at coproduction on the part of parents. The representativeness of the teacher workforce, and specifically that of the student's classroom teacher, is therefore likely to influence student absenteeism. Similarly, student suspensions reflect students’ relationships with their teacher, students’ comfort level in the classroom, and teachers’ discretion in the referral of misbehavior. These academically and socially important outcomes provide convenient, objective measures of behaviors that are likely influenced by street‐level representation. Using longitudinal student‐level administrative data from North Carolina, we use a two‐way (student and classroom) fixed effects strategy to identify the impact of student–teacher demographic mismatch on primary school students’ absences and suspensions. We find that representation among street‐level bureaucrats significantly decreases both absenteeism and suspensions and that these effects can be given a causal interpretation. This pushes literature forward by establishing the importance of demographic representation in shaping productive relationships between individual bureaucrats and clients.     

Coping With Competition: The impact of Charter Schooling on Public School Outreach in Arizona

Advocates of market-based education reform hypothesize that competition will cause traditional public schools to increase outreach efforts as they seek to market themselves. Advocates hope such efforts will result in more information on school activities and performance and thereby enhance accountability. We examine the effect of charter school competition on outreach efforts by a sample of 98 Arizona district schools, finding that charter competition is associated with a short-term increase in outreach. Organizational structure influenced school response, with more decentralized district schools responding more readily to charter competition. Competition modestly increased information regarding schooling in the short run, although long-term implications are less clear.     

General Social Capital,Education‐Related Social Capital,and Choosing Charter Schools

Proponents of charter schools credit them with many advantages over traditional schools. One claim is that school choice yields increased parental participation in voluntary school activities—which we shall call education‐related social capital. In this article we test for the independent effect of school choice on education‐related social capital, controlling for general social capital and other potentially confounding variables. Studies of school choice invariably show that choosing parents have a greater level of general social capital than non‐choosing parents. Consequently, any increase in education‐related social capital could be spurious—due to the fact that choice parents start with atypically high levels of general social capital. We find under controlled conditions that school choice has a small but statistically significant effect on education‐related social capital. However, its effect is considerably smaller than for general social capital, as well as for other traditional predictors such as parental education and the school‐related home resources that parents may provide.     

Teachers' Attitudes and the Success of School Choice

The 1990s witnessed growing attention to the adoption of choice-based school reforms, particularly charter schooling and school vouchers. Although researchers have approached the school choice debate from theoretical, normative, and empirical directions, little attention has been paid to examining how teachers view school choice or what factors shape their attitudes. This oversight is significant because teachers can impact the success of school choice experiments in many ways, such as through their willingness to launch and staff schools of choice, adopt new practices developed in schools of choice, and support choice-based reform efforts in their unions and communities. Using a survey of Arizona and Nevada teachers, we find that White, experienced, unionized, Democratic educators and those working in a "positive" school environment are less supportive of school choice. Arizona teachers, who live in close approximation of a free market for education, are particularly hostile to choice, but teachers who have had personal contact with a charter school are more supportive. The results indicate that the success of school choice will likely be influenced by the characteristics of the teacher workforce and teachers' familiarity with competition.     

What Drives Charter School Diffusion at the Local Level: Educational Needs or Political and Institutional Forces?

While the number of charter schools has increased rapidly in the United States, few studies have examined whether charter schools are implemented in response to real and perceived educational needs or to political and institutional factors in the education policy arena. Unlike traditional policy adoption and diffusion studies that focus on the state level and use a dichotomous dependent variable—adoption or not—this article focuses on local school districts and uses the number of operating charter schools as the dependent variable. Accordingly, instead of applying event history analysis, this article conducts generalized event count regression to estimate models. Based on a data set that consists of Florida's 67 school districts across a six‐year time period, the results suggest that charter school diffusion is more heavily driven by political and institutional factors than by educational needs. The results also demonstrate a dynamic trend of charter school diffusion over time.     

Does Diversity Matter? Measuring the Impact of High School Diversity on Freshman GPA

At the heart of arguments for affirmative action in university admissions are various claims about ethnic diversity. One assertion is that a diverse student body improves the quality of the educational experience: all students learn more. Further, a diverse educational experience better prepares students for the pluralistic society in which they will live. Previous studies examining these issues have been based on informal and survey methods. To better assess the impact of diversity we utilize a data set that allows us to measure student performance at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) as a function of the diversity of a student's high school. Do students from diverse high schools do better in the ethnically diverse environment at UIC? After controlling for other factors that affect GPA, such as ACT, high school rank, and high school quality, we find significant diversity impacts. Depending on the diversity measure, a student from a very diverse high school has an expected first semester GPA that is a one‐fourth to one‐half point higher than a student from a nondiverse high school. The diversity impacts tend to be greater for students in the lower tail of the GPA distribution. There are also large gender differences with females helped most by diversity. Although the results represent outcomes at only one university, they nevertheless serve as a starting point for quantitatively assessing the impact of a diverse learning environment.     

Secondary schools in Napoleonic Italy (1802–14)

Napoleon conceptualized public education, especially at the secondary level, as a tool designed to unify and strengthen the state. In France, he set up forty-five secondary schools, lycées, characterized by uniformity, a hierarchical structure, centralization, state control, and a standardized curriculum. He exported the French education system to his satellite states to help in ‘frenchifying’ them. This article discusses the establishment of secondary schools, licei, in the Republic and Kingdom of Italy (1802–14), exploring educational legislation and its implementation and the Direzione generale di pubblica istruzione that ran public education. The government created a liceo in each of the twenty-four departments. This article studies academic disciplines, teachers, books, student numbers, and other aspects that concerned the functioning of the schools. It assesses the consequences of the educational reforms and argues that the Napoleonic authorities laid the foundations of a modern public secondary school system in Italy.     

Our Schools,Our Country: American Evangelicals,Public Schools,and the Supreme Court Decisions of 1962 and 1963

American evangelicals have long maintained a tense and paradoxical relationship to mainstream American culture. This article explores the effect of the 1962 and 1963 United States Supreme Court school decisions on that perennial tension. Unlike many conservatives, conservative evangelicals greeted the court's 1962 Engel decision to ban state‐written prayer in public schools with cautious approval; however, evangelicals saw the 1963 Schempp decision to ban Bible reading and the Lord's Prayer from those schools as an affront. The unique relationship between evangelical belief and America's public school system forced evangelicals to reconsider their special place in both schools and society as a whole. They concluded with surprising unanimity that those school decisions had done more than forced evangelical belief out of America's public schools; the decisions had pushed evangelicals themselves out of America's mainstream culture.     

Examining the Impact of Charter Schools on Performance in Traditional Public Schools

Charter schools have grown in popularity, as both citizens and government officials search for ways to improve public education in America. Much of the research on charter schools focuses on academic performance comparisons between charter schools and traditional public schools. Far less attention has been devoted to whether the presence of charter schools creates marketlike environments that bring about systemic improvements in public education. This study examines the extent to which charter schools stimulate performance gains in traditional public schools. The results show that charter schools contribute to modest overall performance improvements for students enrolled in traditional public schools. Charter schools help bring about stronger performance gains for low-income students enrolled in traditional public schools. The presence of charter schools also affects how financial and programmatic resources are allocated in traditional public schools.     

Building Bridges Through Performance and Decision‐making: Schools,Research and Public Engagement

Abstract: This paper uses the impact agenda in the UK to realign debate about the relationship between schools, universities and (human) geography. It positions this debate in systemic tendencies within UK higher education. It argues that, whilst impact can be seen as a further instance of neoliberalism, emphasising the gap between accountability and accounting allows an identification with communicative and reflexive knowledge and, more broadly, critical praxis. The paper draws on a year‐long research‐based collaboration with school teachers and their students involving performance work and the development of decision‐making curriculum materials. It argues that working in these ways with schools can provide the basis for public engagement partnerships between schools and universities and a means to constitute diverse research publics. In these ways, it is argued, a wider sense of impact can be reappropriated, to reclaim the critical subject and to constitute academic value     

Determinants of Residential Location Choice: How Important Are Local Public Goods in Attracting Homeowners to Central City Locations?*

Abstract. A hybrid conditional logit choice model is estimated using data on the characteristics and destination of homeowners who engaged in intrametropolitan moves among 17 school districts within the Columbus, Ohio area in 1995. The model is used to test the relative influence of local fiscal and public goods versus household‐level characteristics in determining household location choices across central city and suburban school districts. Results provide evidence of both a “natural evolution” of households to the suburbs, due to job location, residential filtering, and household income and lifecycle effects, and “flight from blight,” due to lower school quality, higher crime levels, and lower average income levels in the city. In comparing the magnitudes of these variables, we find that school quality exerts the strongest influence: a 1‐percent increase in the school quality of the city district increases the probability of choosing a city residence by 3.7 percent. In contrast, the effects of household income and other individual characteristics are relatively modest. The findings provide support for a “flight from blight” suburbanization process that is dominated by differences in neighborhood quality between the city and suburbs. An implication is that investments that promote central city development and reduce suburbanization are justified on efficiency grounds if negative externalities are generated by increased concentration of poverty, crime, and low school quality.     

Children's daily travel to school in Johannesburg-Soweto,South Africa: geography and school choice in the Birth to Twenty cohort study

This paper has two aims: to explore approaches to the measurement of children's daily travel to school in a context of limited geospatial data availability and to provide data regarding school choice and distance travelled to school in Soweto-Johannesburg, South Africa. The paper makes use of data from the Birth to Twenty cohort study (n?=?1428) to explore three different approaches to estimating school choice and travel to school. First, straight-line distance between home and school is calculated. Second, census geography is used to determine whether a child's home and school fall in the same area. Third, distance data are used to determine whether a child attends the nearest school. Each of these approaches highlights a different aspect of mobility, and all provide valuable data. Overall, primary-school-aged children in Soweto-Johannesburg are shown to be travelling substantial distances to school on a daily basis. Over a third travel more than 3 km one way to school, 60% attend schools outside of the suburb in which they live, and only 18% attend their nearest school. These data provide evidence for high levels of school choice in Johannesburg-Soweto, and that families and children are making substantial investments in pursuit of high-quality educational opportunities. Additionally, these data suggest that two patterns of school choice are evident: one pattern involving travel of substantial distances and requiring a higher level of financial investment and a second pattern involving choice between more local schools, requiring less travel and a more limited financial investment.     

Local Markets and the Polarization of Public-Sector Schools in England and Wales

Notwithstanding the recent change of government, UK educational policy continues to stress school performance tables, parental choice and competition – reflecting an acceptance by New Labour of Tory notions concerning the role that market mechanisms play in improving school performance. In view of the 1997 Education White Paper's insistence that the new government's goal was to 'overcome the spiral of disadvantage … passed from one generation to the next', this implies that the DfEE remains unimpressed by long-standing arguments concerning the socially-divisive consequences of market forces in education.
This paper seeks to add empirical weight to this debate. Arguing that recent analyses of aggregate levels of social stratification have masked polarization occurring at the local level, our analysis places schools in the context of the local markets within which they operate. This yields clear evidence that educational markets tend to exacerbate existing differences between schools in terms of both their performance and social status.