Does School Choice Increase School Quality?

Federal No Child Left Behind' legislation, which enables students of low-performing schools to exercise public school choice, exemplies a widespread belief that competing for students will spur public schools to higher achievement. We investigate how the introduction of school choice in North Carolina, via a dramatic increase in the number of charter schools across the state, affects the performance of traditional public schools on statewide tests. We find test score gains from competition that are robust to a variety of specifications. The introduction of charter school competition causes an approximate one percent increase in the score, which constitutes about one quarter of the average yearly growth.

School Choice and Quality

The 1993 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a representative survey of the Italian population covering 24,000 individuals, reports detailed information on children's attendance of public and private schools and parents' assessments of the quality of public schools in the city of residence. The survey also provides detailed information on the household's demographic structure, income and parents' education. The empirical analysis indicates that the quality of schools is one of the driving factors in the choice between private and public schools. The results are robust with respect to the particular quality indicator used and the presence of fixed provincial effects

Teacher Quality and Student Inequality (Revised 2014)

This paper examines the extent to which the allocation of teachers within and across public high schools is contributing to inequality in student test score performance. Using ten years of administrative data from North Carolina public high schools, I estimate a flexible education production function in which student achievement reflects student inputs, teacher quality, school quality, and a school-specific scaling factor that allows the impact of teaching quality to vary across schools. The existence of nearly 3,000 teacher transfers, combined with a testable exogenous mobility assumption, allows separate identification of each teacher’s quality from both school quality and school sensitivity to teacher quality. I find that teaching quality is surprisingly equitably distributed both within and across high schools. Schools predominantly serving underprivileged students employ teachers who are only slightly below average, and most students receive a mix of their school’s good and bad teachers. Overall, I find that the allocation of teacher and school inputs at the high school level contributes only 4% to the achievement gap between the top and bottom deciles of an index of student background. Finally, I find that schools that disproportionately serve disadvantaged students tend to be more sensitive to teacher quality

Valuing School Quality via a School Choice Reform

Among policymakers, educators and economists there remains a strong, sometimes heated, debate on the extent to which good schools matter. This is seen, for instance, in the strong trend towards establishing accountability systems in education in many countries across the world. In this paper, in line with some recent studies, we value school quality using house prices. We, however, adopt a rather different approach to other work, using a policy experiment regarding pupils' choice to attend high schools to identify the relationship between house prices and school performance. We exploit a change in school choice policy that took place in Oslo county in 1997, where the school authorities opened up the possibility for every pupil to apply to any of the high schools in the county without having to live in the school's catchment area (the rule that applied before 1997). Our estimates show evidence that parents substantially value better performing schools since the sensitivity of housing valuations to school performance falls significantly by over 50% following the school choice reform.house prices, school performance, school reform

Providing organic food for millions of Italian pupils. How do we make it?

Italy has successfully improved the quality of school meals over the last decade. Actors from policy and public administration put emphasis especially on the quality of the used products; they should whenever possible come from controlled and certified production. In this paper the focus is on organic products. This paper analyses three crucial aspects of the procurement of high quality school food: a) strengths and weaknesses of organic supply chains in the perspective of producers and caterers; b) call for tenders being used as a key instrument by municipalities, being in charge of school food procurement, in order to influence the quality of school food; and c) best practice cases of municipal school food systems which combine supply chains on the one hand and municipalities and their activities on the other hand. The preliminary results suggest that an integrated approach is needed for high quality school meals. Various stakeholders should be brought together, to discuss their demands and increase the understandin

Charter School Quality and Parental Decision Making With School Choice

Charter schools have become a very popular instrument for reforming public schools, because they expand choices, facilitate local innovation, and provide incentives for the regular public schools while remaining under public control. Despite their conceptual appeal, evaluating their performance has been hindered by the selective nature of their student populations. This paper investigates the quality of charter schools in Texas in terms of mathematics and reading achievement and finds that, after an initial start-up period, average school quality in the charter sector is not significantly different from that in regular public schools. Perhaps most important, the parental decision to exit a charter school is much more sensitive to education quality than the decision to exit a regular public school, consistent with the notion that the introduction of charter schools substantially reduces the transactions costs of switching schools. Low income charter school families are, however, less sensitive to school quality than higher income families.

Alabama Faith Council Statement on Voluntary Pre-K For All Four-Year-Olds

There is ample evidence that high-quality early learning programs are critical for children to be successful in school an din life. Research shows that 85% of brain development takes place prior to a child turning five (5) years old. However, many children do not have access to the high-quality early learning experiences that their more affluent peers have; forcing these children to begin school far behind their peers. Because the achievement gap starts before children enter school and only grows wider during formal school training, we must make high-quality pre-K available for all four-year-olds whose parents want it to provide all Alabama children an equal opportunity to succeed in school and life. Such programs give children entering school a more "level playing field". Making high quality voluntary pre-K available to all four-year-olds is a justice issue

Labor Market Effects of School Quality: Theory and Evidence

This paper presents an overview and interpretation of the literature relating school quality to students' subsequent labor market success. We begin with a simple theoretical model that describes the determination of schooling and earnings with varying school quality. A key insight of the model is that changes in school quality may affect the characteristics of individuals who choose each level of schooling, imparting a potential selection bias to comparisons of earnings conditional on education. We then summarize the literature that relates school resources to students' earnings and educational attainment. A variety of evidence suggests that students who were educated in schools with more resources tend to earn more and have higher schooling. We also discuss two important issues in the literature: the tradeoffs involved in using school-level versus more aggregated (district or state-level) quality measures; and the evidence on school quality effects for African Americans educated in the segregated school systems of the South.

Hubungan Antara Quality of School Life Dengan Motivasi Belajar Pada Siswa Kelas XI SMA Islam Sultan Agung 1 Semarang

Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui hubungan antara quality of school life dengan motivasi belajar pada siswa kelas XI SMA Islam Sultan Agung 1 Semarang. Populasi penelitian ini adalah siswa kelas XI SMA Islam Sultan Agung 1 Semarang yang berjumlah 226 siswa dengan jumlah subjek penelitian sebanyak 70 siswa. Teknik pengambilan sampel yang digunakan adalah cluster random sampling. Pengambilan data menggunakan skala quality of school life (45 aitem valid α = 0,916) dan skala motivasi belajar (29 aitem valid α = 0,884).Data yang diperoleh berdasarkan hasil analisis regresi linear sederhana menunjukan hasil koefisien korelasi antara quality of school life dengan motivasi belajar sebesar 0,773 dengan p = 0,000 (p < 0,05). Hasil tersebut menunjukan bahwa hipotesis penelitian, yaitu terdapat hubungan positif antara quality of school life dengan motivasi belajar pada siswa kelas XI SMA Islam Sultan Agung 1 Semarang dapat diterima. Nilai koefisiensi korelasi positif menunjukan bahwa arah hubungan kedua variabel adalah positif, artinya semakin positif quality of school life siswa maka akan semakin tinggi motivasi belajar, dan sebaliknya semakin negatif quality of school life yang dimiliki siswa maka akan semakin rendah pula motivasi belajar. Quality of school life memberikan sumbangan efektif sebesar 59,8% terhadap motivasi belajar dan sisanya sebesar 40,2% ditentukan oleh faktor-faktor lain