Regional school comparison and school choice: how do they relate to student performance ? Evidence from PISA 2003

Maresa Sprietsma

No 2006002, Discussion Papers (ECON - Département des Sciences Economiques) from Université catholique de Louvain, Département des Sciences Economiques

Abstract: School choice and accountability have become popular educational policies in the US and the UK. In Europe, such policies are less often applied and therefore less subject to research. The present paper uses recent international data to study the impact of schools comparing their pupil’s results to a regional or national performance standard and that of regional school choice on student test scores. School performance comparisons and school choice by parents are assumed to complement each other in increasing both school and teacher effort. We estimate an education production function controlling for the hierarchical nature of the data. We also estimate our model using quantiles of student test scores to identify potentially different effects at different levels of student performance. We find that both a higher regional percentage of schools comparing their results and regional intensity of school choice significantly improve student test scores. This positive effect varies in size according to whether we consider low or high-performancing students.

Keywords: School choice; school performance standards; education production function; pupil performance; hierarchical models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41
Date: 2006-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-geo, nep-hrm, nep-sog and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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