The Roles of Policy Design and Context in School Choice Reforms: Essays on Educational Equity and Quality

Abstract

School choice has influenced several educational reforms in the US and across the world in the last decades. These reforms have often promoted school autonomy, parental choice, and competition between schools to improve quality and equity. Whether those reforms work in practice is well examined, but the roles of policy design such as the extent to which school choice is regulated and the level of school autonomy are not well understood. Also, the socioeconomic context is often neglected. Using institutional theory in three empirical studies, this dissertation addresses that research gap.

Study I examines the causal effect of controlled school autonomy—an increasingly common school choice design in the US—on student achievement and its heterogeneity by contextual factors. I use difference in differences and event study estimation to analyze ten years of student-level data in Indianapolis. Study II focuses on whether uncontrolled school choice in the form of private schools improves student achievement in the US. The study unpacks the underlying instructional conditions by incorporating structural equation modeling and propensity score matching. Study III examines school choice design and socioeconomic segregation internationally to exploit global variation in policy design and context. I use a multilevel model to examine the roles of common policy instruments that aim to regulate school choice such as tuition add-ons, academic selectivity, for-profit status, and availability of information within and between countries.

Findings indicate that whether in a controlled school autonomy or unregulated private school setting, the relationship between school choice and student achievement is insignificant. This is because school choice does not influence instructional quality. However, school choice worsens student achievement in highly disadvantaged settings. It is associated with socioeconomic segregation. Such association is stronger in high-income inequality environments. Removing tuition add-ons, and academic selectivity can mitigate the relationship between choice and socioeconomic segregation, but they may not eliminate socioeconomic segregation linked to school choice. These results suggest even carefully designed school choice designs may not make substantial changes in parental and organizational behavior once parents and schools are incentivized to maximize their utility through school choice, especially in disadvantaged and high-income inequality contexts.