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).