Does School Competition Improve the Quality of Education?
(2012) NEKN05 20122Department of Economics
- Abstract
- This paper evaluates the Swedish school reform that was implemented in 1992, at upper secondary school level. The reform implies that independent schools are welcome to compete on the school market and are publicly funded. This reform has led to an increase in the share of students attending independent schools. Several estimations are performed in this paper on what impact this increase of competition has had on students average GPA in public schools. Students from social science and science programs are included. The tests are done with multiple linear regression models and instrumental variable regressions on data collected from 2010. This study covers 93 schools in social science and 76 schools in science programs from 46 different... (More)
- This paper evaluates the Swedish school reform that was implemented in 1992, at upper secondary school level. The reform implies that independent schools are welcome to compete on the school market and are publicly funded. This reform has led to an increase in the share of students attending independent schools. Several estimations are performed in this paper on what impact this increase of competition has had on students average GPA in public schools. Students from social science and science programs are included. The tests are done with multiple linear regression models and instrumental variable regressions on data collected from 2010. This study covers 93 schools in social science and 76 schools in science programs from 46 different municipalities spread over the country. Previous research has shown a variety of findings. In this paper, no significant results have shown that independent schools would raise the average GPA in public schools; municipalities with no independent schools perform as well as municipalities with a high share of competition. Control variables are used to check for school characteristics. Mainly, it is the number of female students and share of parents with higher education that have the greatest impact. To conclude, this study shows that grades will not be affected if a public school is exposed to competition or not. At the same time, there is no evidence proving that the quality worsens because of competition; that comes from concerns about segregation, where the good students end up in better independent schools and leave low performing students behind. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/3168201
- author
- Landelius, Kaj LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- NEKN05 20122
- year
- 2012
- type
- H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
- subject
- keywords
- school-choice reform, school competition, public education, educational achievement
- language
- English
- id
- 3168201
- date added to LUP
- 2012-11-27 14:10:23
- date last changed
- 2012-11-27 14:10:23
@misc{3168201,
abstract = {{This paper evaluates the Swedish school reform that was implemented in 1992, at upper secondary school level. The reform implies that independent schools are welcome to compete on the school market and are publicly funded. This reform has led to an increase in the share of students attending independent schools. Several estimations are performed in this paper on what impact this increase of competition has had on students average GPA in public schools. Students from social science and science programs are included. The tests are done with multiple linear regression models and instrumental variable regressions on data collected from 2010. This study covers 93 schools in social science and 76 schools in science programs from 46 different municipalities spread over the country. Previous research has shown a variety of findings. In this paper, no significant results have shown that independent schools would raise the average GPA in public schools; municipalities with no independent schools perform as well as municipalities with a high share of competition. Control variables are used to check for school characteristics. Mainly, it is the number of female students and share of parents with higher education that have the greatest impact. To conclude, this study shows that grades will not be affected if a public school is exposed to competition or not. At the same time, there is no evidence proving that the quality worsens because of competition; that comes from concerns about segregation, where the good students end up in better independent schools and leave low performing students behind.}},
author = {{Landelius, Kaj}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Does School Competition Improve the Quality of Education?}},
year = {{2012}},
}