School Choice and Student Achievement. Evidence from Poland

Herbst, Mikolaj and Herczynski, Jan (2005): School Choice and Student Achievement. Evidence from Poland.

Abstract

The impact of school choice on education quality is one of the most hotly contested issues in education economics. We contribute to the debate by investigating the effect of concentration of local education markets and the number of schools in the city on the average achievements of 9th grade students in Polish middle schools. We find the evidence that the increased availability of choice leads to higher performance, although this relationship holds only until a certain threshold is reached. As the number of schools in the city reaches four, the marginal benefit from further widening of the market falls to zero, or even becomes negative. Besides the influence on the average achievement in the city, the increased school choice leads to higher differentiation among schools. In contrast to the previous result, here we do not observe any threshold, and the effect seems to be independent of scale.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: school choice, school competition, educational quality, school differentiation
• Subjects: I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions