Public School Choice: An Economic Analysis
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چکیده
Public school choice programs, also known as open enrollment or intra-district choice programs, give households a free choice of public school and provide public schools with incentives to compete for students. Supporters of these programs argue that by injecting market forces into the public school system, they will improve the quality of the education that public schools provide. Critics counter that because households’ perceptions of school quality depend on the composition of the student body as well as the efforts of school personnel (i.e., households have peer preferences), this market logic may not go through. In this paper we advance this debate by developing and analyzing an economic model of public school choice. A distinctive feature of our model is that households have peer preferences. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, we show that public school choice programs have ambiguous effects on welfare. Second, with respect to school quality, we show that public school choice programs generate a type of equity-efficiency trade-off. In particular, in the settings in which these programs generate the largest increases in average quality, they also exacerbate the gap between the quality of advantaged and disadvantaged schools. Third, we show that outcomes under these programs could be improved by auxiliary policies that help disadvantaged students to exercise choice and provide schools with stronger incentives to enroll disadvantaged students. ∗For helpful comments and discussions, we thank Jean-Paul Carvalho, Jon Hamilton, Sergios Skaperdas, Steve Slutsky, David Sappington and various seminar participants. Barseghyan: Department of Economics, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853, [email protected]. Clark: Department of Economics, UC Irvine, Irvine CA 92617, [email protected]. Coate: Department of Economics, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853, [email protected].
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تاریخ انتشار 2014