N RECENT YEARS, public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports, many of them critical of current school policy.' These policy documents have added to persistent and long-standing concerns about the cost, effectiveness, and fairness of the current school structure, and have made schooling once again a serious public issue. As in the past, however, any renewed interest in education is likely to be short-lived, doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in. This frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools. Although the educational process has been extensively researched, clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive.2 There exists, however, a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy: Schools differ dramatically in "quality,"

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2725865.pdf

The Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in Public Schools.

Why the "Haves" Come out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change

A theoretical and computational model with tax-financed, tuition-free public schools and competitive, tuition-financed private schools is developed. Students differ by ability and income. Achievement depends on own ability and on peers' abilities. Equilibrium has a strict hierarchy of school qualities and two-dimensional student sorting with stratification by ability and income. In private schools, high-ability, low-income students receive tuition discounts, while low-ability, high-income students pay tuition premia. Tuition vouchers increase the relative size of the private sector and the extent of student sorting, and benefit high-ability students relative to low-ability students.

Competition between Private and Public Schools, Vouchers, and Peer-Group Effects

In this article, Jennifer Jellison Holme explores how parents who can afford to buy homes in areas known “for the schools” approach school choice in an effort to illuminate how the “unofficial” choice market works. Using qualitative methods, Holme finds that the beliefs that inform the choices of such parents are mediated by status ideologies that emphasize race and class. She concludes that school choice policies alone will not level the playing field for lower-status parents, as choice advocates often suggest. Suzanne Holland and I were scheduled to meet on a warm summer morning at a Starbucks coffee shop located in a shopping center near her suburban home. 1 I arrived early, and waited at a patio table shaded by a large green umbrella before Suzanne, a tall blond White woman in her early forties, pulled up in her sport utility vehicle. I introduced myself, and after we got our coffees we sat down to talk about why Suzanne had moved to the community of Rancho Vista, and what role schools had played in that decision. Before she and her husband moved to Rancho Vista, Suzanne informed me, they had lived for many years in a large home in a predominately White, upper-middle-class neighborhood. This neighborhood, however, was located within a large urban school district that had, according to Suzanne’s friends and acquaintances, low-quality public schools. In fact, these schools were considered of such poor quality that almost everyone Suzanne knew either sent their children to private schools or simply moved out of the area to one considered to be in a better school district. As the eldest of their three chil

Buying Homes, Buying Schools: School Choice and the Social Construction of School Quality.

Historically, most attention in public programs has been given to the resources devoted to the activity, and resources have been used to index both commitment and quality. Education differs from other areas of public expenditure because direct measures of outcomes are available, making it is possible to consider results and, by implication, to consider the efficiency of provision. Early interpretations of the evidence, emanating from popular interpretations of the Coleman Report that 'schools do not make a difference,' are incorrect, but the basic evidence behind the statement suggests serious performance problems of government supply, because purchased inputs to schools are not closely related to outcomes. This paper reviews that evidence along with providing an evaluation of the various controversial aspects including issues of causality, consumer behavior, and estimation approaches. Two detailed policy areas are discussed in terms of the evidence on performance: public versus private provision and the financing of schools.

/pdf/publicly-provided-education-289sk0ldfd.pdf

John E. Coons

Papers

Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control

Private wealth and public education

Private Wealth and Public Education.

Education by choice : the case for family control : with an appendix: introducing family choice in education through state constitutional change

Education by choice