Description du projet
Les bases du libre choix d’une école et son impact sur l’éducation
Le concept de choix de l’école laisse aux parents la liberté d’opter pour un lieu d’enseignement alternatif, par exemple une structure privée plutôt qu’un établissement public, afin de garantir la qualité, l’équité et la cohérence de l’éducation de leur enfant. Toutefois, les critiques soutiennent que le choix de l’école est susceptible d’accroître la concurrence entre les établissements, ce qui conduit à un tri plus poussé des élèves en fonction de leurs aptitudes ou de leur statut socio-économique. Or, les implications des politiques de choix de l’école et leurs effets pratiques demeurent flous. Financé par le Conseil européen de la recherche, le projet CompSCHoice vise à créer un cadre qui intègre trois ouvrages économiques distincts et des ensembles de données de recherche portant sur Barcelone et la région de Catalogne. Grâce à son analyse, le projet entend résoudre des problèmes empiriques urgents dans le domaine de l’éducation et apporter un nouvel éclairage sur l’impact sur l’éducation du choix de l’école.
Objectif
School choice is one of the most hotly debated policies in education. Advocates argue that school choice allows equal access to high quality schooling for all. High-income families have always had more choice, either through residential choice or through enrolment in private schools. Therefore increased choice should also improve equity by allowing minority and low-income students to choose too. On the other hand, school choice critics suggest that school choice can increase sorting between schools based on their socio-economics status, suggesting high-income families benefit more from these policies.
Three different and disconnected literatures in economics provide different and often contradicting answers to these questions. We propose a unified theoretical framework that merges these three literatures and allows for a comprehensive analysis on school choice design and its impact on actual choice, outcomes and segregation in schools and neighborhoods. Unique and newly constructed data sets are used to address novel empirical challenges. The data constructed for Barcelona shall become one of the largest and most comprehensive data sets not only on school choice but also on public education worldwide.
Using the data set from Barcelona we 1) estimate families’ preferences and, for the first time, evaluate the efficiency of different mechanism through structural estimation of our model and counterfactual analysis. We then 2) evaluate the impact that peer effects have on parents' choice and on outcomes. Exploiting the occurrence of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the aid programs implemented we aim at 3) estimating the distribution of willingness to pay for quality schools for families with different socio-economics. And last we exploit a policy change in Catalunya in 2009 to 4) provide evidence on how increased flexibility of the school system to adapt for differential maturity levels affects individual short and medium-term outcomes.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
08005 Barcelona
Espagne