Enhancing economic freedom via school choice and competition: Have state laws been enabling enough to generate broad-based effects?

IF 0.9 4区经济学 Q3 ECONOMICS

American Journal of Economics and Sociology Pub Date : 2023-05-16 DOI:10.1111/ajes.12515

John Garen

引用次数: 0

Abstract

An aspect of economic freedom that varies across U.S. states is K-12 educational freedom. Some states allow a degree of choice for families in selecting schools outside public schools for their children. However, the enabling laws for such programs are often quite restrictive and limited to few children. Can this limited degree of competition and choice have a noticeable effect on an entire state's overall K-12 performance? I find strikingly large test score gains for states that have adopted voucher programs and/or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), swamping the effect of per pupil K-12 spending on test scores. Moreover, vouchers and ESAs are associated with less per pupil spending. These effects are robust to a host of specification checks. A key factor is the amount of a program's funding that “follows the student,” even if a small number of students are eligible. Overall, it seems that even a small measure of educational freedom has a large effect.

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通过择校和竞争增强经济自由：州法律是否足以产生广泛的影响？

美国各州经济自由的一个方面是K-12教育自由。一些州允许家庭在一定程度上为孩子选择公立学校以外的学校。然而，这类项目的授权法律往往非常严格，仅限于少数儿童。这种有限程度的竞争和选择会对整个州K-12的整体表现产生显著影响吗?我发现，在那些采用教育券计划和/或教育储蓄账户(Education Savings Accounts，简称esa)的州，考试成绩的提高幅度惊人，远远超过了K-12教育阶段学生人均支出对考试成绩的影响。此外，教育券和教育辅助计划与较低的学生人均支出有关。这些效果对于大量的规范检查是可靠的。一个关键因素是一个项目的资金“跟随学生”的数量，即使有一小部分学生符合条件。总的来说，似乎即使是很小的教育自由也会产生很大的影响。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

American Journal of Economics and Sociology Multiple-

CiteScore

1.90

自引率

12.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (AJES) was founded in 1941, with support from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, to encourage the development of transdisciplinary solutions to social problems. In the introduction to the first issue, John Dewey observed that “the hostile state of the world and the intellectual division that has been built up in so-called ‘social science,’ are … reflections and expressions of the same fundamental causes.” Dewey commended this journal for its intention to promote “synthesis in the social field.” Dewey wrote those words almost six decades after the social science associations split off from the American Historical Association in pursuit of value-free knowledge derived from specialized disciplines. Since he wrote them, academic or disciplinary specialization has become even more pronounced. Multi-disciplinary work is superficially extolled in major universities, but practices and incentives still favor highly specialized work. The result is that academia has become a bastion of analytic excellence, breaking phenomena into components for intensive investigation, but it contributes little synthetic or holistic understanding that can aid society in finding solutions to contemporary problems. Analytic work remains important, but in response to the current lop-sided emphasis on specialization, the board of AJES has decided to return to its roots by emphasizing a more integrated and practical approach to knowledge.