Contact: Martin R. West, Brown University, (401) 863-6467

STANFORD – With both presidential candidates highlighting the critical need for competition in U.S. public education in their final national debate, a new multi-national study released today by Education Next shows that competition from private schools improves achievement for both public and private school students and decreases the amount spent per pupil. Until now, no study has systematically measured the causal impact of competition by looking at variation across countries. Using data from 29 countries, Brown University’s Martin R. West and University of Munich economist Ludger Woessmann find that competitive pressures from private schools broadly increase the productivity of school systems.

Using data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), West and Woessmann noted that a 10 percent increase in enrollment in private schools improves PISA math test scores by more than 9 percent of a standard deviation, nearly equal to a half of a year’s worth of learning. For science and reading, a 10 percent increase in private school enrollment generates an improvement of more than 5 percent of a standard deviation -- more than one-fifth of a grade-level. And in educational spending, a 10 percent increase in the private school enrollment leads to a $3,209 reduction in spending per student -- on average, more than 5 percent of the total education spending per student through age 15 for OECD countries.

“The results suggest that public school students profit nearly as much from increased private school competition as do a nation’s students as a whole,” West and Woessmann write.
“Spending on education is also reduced, suggesting that school systems are more efficient if they are more competitive.”

West and Woessmann gathered information on the mathematical, scientific, and reading literacy of nearly 220,000 students in 29 of the 30 OECD countries. They were also able to obtain PISA information on student background characteristics and reports on the characteristics of each student’s school, including school resources and whether the school was public or private.

West and Woessmann’s innovative approach to measuring the impact of competition between private and public schools capitalized on the historical fact that the amount of competition in education today has in large part been influenced by the Catholic Church’s decision in the 19th century to build an alternative system of education wherever the state religion was not Catholic. The researchers estimated the statistical relationship between the size of the Catholic population in 1900 and the extent of private schooling today and used the estimate to isolate the causal effect of private school competition on the achievement of individual students. Countries with larger shares of Catholics but without an official Catholic state religion in 1900 have significantly larger shares of privately operated schools in 2003 and their students perform significantly better on the PISA test.

In the Netherlands, more than three-quarters of 15-year-old students attend privately operated schools. Private school shares in Belgium, Ireland, and Korea are well above one-half. By contrast, the share of students attending privately operated schools in Greece, Iceland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Turkey is below 5 percent. Just over 6 percent of the American 15-year-olds sampled by PISA attended private schools. 

American students ranked 24th among the 29 OECD countries included in this study in mathematics, performing almost three-quarters of a grade level behind the OECD mean and almost three grade levels behind the three highest performing countries: Finland, Korea, and the Netherlands.  The performance of American students in science and reading was also well below average.

Read “School Choice International” now available online and in PDF form.

Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at Brown University and an executive editor of Education Next. Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich and heads the Department of Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

---

Copyright © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
Phone: 650-723-1754