Program design, incentives, and response: evidence from educational interventions

Rajashri Chakrabarti

Economic Policy Review, 2010, vol. 16, issue Oct, 22 pages

Abstract: In an effort to reform K-12 education, policymakers have introduced school vouchers?scholarships that make students eligible to transfer from public to private schools?in some U.S. school districts. This article analyzes two such educational interventions in the United States: the Milwaukee and Florida voucher programs. Under the Milwaukee program, vouchers were imposed from the outset, so that all low-income public school students became eligible for vouchers to transfer to private schools. In contrast, schools in the Florida program were only threatened with vouchers, with students of a particular school becoming eligible for vouchers only if the school received two ?F? grades in a period of four years. Unlike the Milwaukee schools, Florida schools therefore had an incentive to avoid vouchers. Using school-level data from Florida and Wisconsin, this study shows that the performance effects of the threatened public schools under the Florida program have exceeded those of corresponding schools in Milwaukee. The lessons of the study are broadly applicable to New York City's educational reform efforts.

Keywords: Private schools; Reward (Psychology); Educational vouchers; Public schools; Education - Economic aspects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/10v16n2/1010chak.pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/10v16n2/1010chak.html (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednep:y:2010:i:oct:p:1-22:n:v.16no.2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Policy Review from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().