Choice, Competition and Pupil Achievement

By S. Gibbons, Stephen Machin, Olmo Silva. Social Science Research Network, 2008

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Choice and competition in education have recently found growing support from both policy-makers and academics. Yet evidence on the actual benefits of market-orientated reforms is at best mixed. Moreover, although the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear, in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts. In this paper, we study whether pupils in Primary schools in England with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited; and whether Primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation. In simple least squares regression models we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement, but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance. Yet this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting. In fact, an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited. Only when we restrict our attention to Voluntary Aided schools, which have more freedom in managing their governance and admission practices, do we find some evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement.

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of School Choice on Pupil Achievement, Segregation and Costs: Swedish Evidence (2007, unknown): “Hoxby and Rockoff (2004) find in Chicago positive effects of charter school attendance for lower elementary grades but no effects for upper elementary grades.”
Valuing School Quality Using Boundary Discontinuities. CEE DP 132. (2013, background): “Gibbons et al. (2008) provide more details on the overall differences between these two groups of schools.”
Framing and selling global education policy: the promotion of public–private partnerships for education in low-income contexts (2012, background): “…or even negative effects they can have, above all in terms of education inequalities, such as Braun, Jenkins, and Grigg (2006), Easterly (2001), Gibbons, Machin, and Silva (2008), Levin (1999), Lubienski (2003), Whitty and Power (2000), etc.16 On occasion, critical authors are quoted in the…”
Econometric methods for causal evaluation of education policies and practices: a non‐technical guide (2011, background): “When estimating the effect of school choice and competition on student performance in English primary schools, Gibbons, Machin, and Silva ( 2008 ) exploit the fact that boundaries of admission districts effectively limit choice and competition.”