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Neal, D., (2002)
‘‘How vouchers could change the market for education.’
Journal of Economic Perspectives 16: 4, pp. 25-44
- A summary of both empirical and theoretical literature relating to
voucher schemes.
- Neal emphasises that changes in the labour market for
teachers could be an important benefit of vouchers. The personnel systems
of many public
schools are bureaucratic & rigid, while charter & private schools
tend to deviate from these systems.
- Three studies have also found that
teachers with higher test scores and better college records leave their
jobs at higher rates.
- Neal notes that a market is more likely than
a mechanical accountability system to reward schools able to teach
children hard-to-quantify but
highly valued (by parents) skills such as intellectual curiosity,
critical thinking,
and self-confidence.
- On the question of sorting/cream-skimming, Neal
notes that there have not been enough large-scale voucher programs
to enable definitive
empirical
answers, so for now we must turn to the general equilibrium model
results of authors such as Nechyba, Epple and Romano.
- The key
point Neal draws from these papers is that it is not helpful to ask
how vouchers per se would affect the sorting of
students among
schools. Voucher plans that differ with respect to funding, targeting
or admissions
regulations may yield entirely different outcomes.
- From Nechyba’s
numerous simulations, one result is almost ubiquitous – wealthy
families in the best public school districts usually lose from
the introduction of vouchers. This may help explain why suburban residents
have voted against
vouchers in state ballot initiatives.
- Epple & Romano have shown
that it is possible (if vouchers cannot be ‘topped
up’ by parents and voucher levels vary with student ability)
to design voucher systems which do not
increase stratification by ability – though this may not be possible
to implement in practice.
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