The opportunity structure of segregation: School choice and school segregation in Sweden

It is a matter of debate whether free school choice should lead to higher or lower levels of school segregation. We investigate how school choice opportunities affect school segregation utilizing geocoded Swedish population register data with information on 13 cohorts of ninth graders. We find that local school choice opportunities strongly affect the sorting of students across schools based on the parents’ country of birth and level of education. An increase in the number of local schools leads to higher levels of local segregation net of stable area characteristics, and time-varying controls for population structure and local residential segregation. In particular, the local presence of private voucher schools pushes school segregation upwards. The segregating impact of school choice opportunities is notably stronger in ‘native’ areas with high portions of highly educated parents, and in areas with low residential segregation. Our results point to the importance of embedding individual actors in relevant opportunity structures for understanding segregation processes.

The Case Against Markets in Education

This chapter makes the case against markets in education. It identifies four issues often raised by opponents of markets. In a pure market system, private organizations would run schools, children would be allocated to schools through parental choice, there would be no government funding, and there would be no education-specific regulation of schools. The chapter gives reasons for believing that such a system would fall far short of the goals we should have for an education system. Then the chapter reviews the research on actual choice systems in the US, and argues that the evidence suggests that, whereas some charter and voucher schools may serve some students well, the preponderance of evidence does not support the claim that markets have made significant improvements in educational provision.

Means-Tested School Vouchers and Educational Achievement: Evidence from Chile’s Universal Voucher System

Chile features a universal school choice system, in which a government voucher provides families an opportunity to send students to public or private schools of their choosing. Since its implementation in 1981, the amount of the voucher was flat without adjustments for family income, creating incentives for schools to enroll students from economically advantaged families. In 2008, a policy change adjusted voucher values by the poverty level of students and the proportion of poor students attending each school. We evaluate the effect of this policy on primary school students’ standardized test scores, using time-distributed fixed effects models. We find a positive and significant effect of the means-tested voucher policy on Math and Language achievement. The effect is much larger among private-voucher schools serving poor children, and it increased over the years after the policy change, suggesting that schools require some time to realize the benefits of the policy. Our findings show that moving from a flat to a means-tested voucher improves achievement and equality.

Structural Reforms and Equity in Chilean Schools

After over 30 years of a market model for the provision of educational services in Chile, the expansion of private providers financed through state vouchers, a decrease in public school enrollments, and a highly segregated educational system with unequal learning opportunities sparked in 2006 a social movement demanding changes to the model. In this article we discuss three structural reforms implemented between the years of 2008 and 2016 aiming to increase educational quality, reverse declining enrollments in public schools, the inequitable distribution of learning opportunities, and school segregation. The Preferential School Subsidy Law, passed in 2008, acknowledges that students who are growing up under conditions of social exclusion require extra support, thus in addition to the regular voucher a subsidy is provided to vulnerable students. The Law for School Inclusion, approved in May 2015, involves four main components: expansion of state subsidies, elimination of parental co-payment, elimination of for-profit voucher schools, and elimination of school practices to select students. The National System for Teachers’ Professional Development Law, approved in 2016, addresses improvements in teachers’ working conditions as well as more rigorous requirements for university-based initial teacher preparation programs. After presenting the antecedents and key provisions of each law, we analyze their potential impacts and the risk factors that may attenuate them. Three main areas of risks are addressed: externalities, institutional capacities at various levels of the system, and changes in the economic and political support needed for long-term sustainability.

Entry Barriers and Nonprofit Founding Rates: An Examination of the Milwaukee Voucher School Population

In this study we examine how formal barriers to entry correlate with levels and changes in the founding rate of new voucher schools in Milwaukee. Drawing from a unique dataset covering founding attempts and successful foundlings of voucher schools since the early 1990s we show how formal institutions regulating entrepreneurial efforts have an impact on both attempts and success rates. For example, our analysis indicates that the removal of the non-sectarian school requirement led to an increase in entrepreneurial attempts. Likewise, we find that erecting of institutional barriers in the form of a formal third party approval process, proved to have an impactful effect on the founding success rate of new voucher schools. Our research also illuminate how a majority of entrepreneurial attempts, about 70 percent in the case of the new voucher schools in Milwaukee, fail somewhere between the stage of entrepreneur intent and actual establishment of the organization.

Understanding Universal Vouchers and Urban Public Schools in Santiago de Chile: Educational Administrators’ Responses to Choice

<p>In this study we examine how school leaders in urban districts have responded to the Chilean universal school voucher system. We conducted interviews with public district school officials and principals in Santiago, Chile. We found that school leaders in the wealthy public schools have confronted the market policy by implementing similar cream-skimming measures as private-voucher schools. In comparison, the poorer public-municipal schools are not able to select their students. The respondents in our study elucidated that parent and student choice is limited because specific family and student characteristics (i.e. SES background, test scores), as well as the family/student residence within the city (in a relatively wealthy or poor section of the city) influence the spectrum of opportunities a student will have and the school he/she will enter. As a result, the voucher system introduces educational opportunities for students who have the capital (pecuniary and non-pecuniary) to enable a move from one public school to another within an area, from a public school to private-voucher school within an area, from one district to another, or from a public school within an area to a private school within another district.</p>

When Does Inter-School Competition Matter? Evidence from the Chilean “Voucher” System

I investigate the effects of voucher-school competition on educational outcomes. I test whether voucher-school competition (1) improves student outcomes and (2) has stronger effects when public schools face a hard-budget constraint. Since both voucher-school competition and the degree of hardness of the budget constraint for public schools are endogenous to public school quality, I exploit (i) the interaction of the number of Catholic priests in 1950 and the institution of the voucher system in Chile in 1981 as a potentially exogenous determinant of the supply of voucher schools and (ii) a particular feature of the electoral system that affects the identity of the mayors of different counties (who manage public schools) as a source of exogenous variation in the degree of hardness of the public schools’ budget constraints. Using this information, I find that (1) an increase of one standard deviation of the ratio of voucher-to-public schools increases test scores by just around 0.10 standard deviations; and (2) the effects are significantly bigger for public schools facing more binding minimum enrollment levels.

Gifted students’ readiness for college

Gifted students’ performance on a Chilean university admission test, Prueba de Selección Universitaria (PSU), was investigated in this study. Sixty-six students participating in an enrichment-based university program for gifted youth were selected. The sample included both male and female gifted adolescents who studied in public and voucher (charter) high schools. The purpose was to investigate which combination of factors was the best predictor of students’ scores and the differences between male and female students’ performance. Only intelligence, as measured by the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices test, correlated with the scores on the PSU. Males from voucher schools outperformed females on the PSU. Providing academic support and adequate preparation has been discussed as an important element for college readiness, successful transition to college, and to diminish the existing performance gap between students from different types of schools in Chile.

Privatization Reform and Inequality of Educational Opportunity: The Case of Chile

Chile has experienced considerable educational expansion over the past few decades, as well as a privatization reform in 1981 that introduced full parental choice through a voucher system, in the context of a market-oriented transformation of the country. Using a cohort analysis of the 2001 Chilean Mobility Survey, this article examines trends in educational stratification in Chile over the past 50 years, with a focus on the changes that followed the privatization reform. The analysis shows that, in line with international findings, there is “persistent inequality” of educational opportunity across cohorts in Chile. Persistent inequality is not total, however. There is a small but significant increase in inequality in the transition to secondary education, which is cotemporaneous with the market-oriented transformation. Furthermore, when school sector-a form of “qualitative inequality” expressed in the distinction among public, private-voucher, and private-paid schools-is considered, the analysis suggests an increase in the advantages that are associated with private-voucher schools after the privatization reform, as well as in the benefits of attending private-paid schools during and after the reform. The article concludes by discussing the relationship among economic context, privatization reform, and educational inequality.