Do Greater School Autonomy and Accountability Make a Difference?

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Introduction
A large body of literature in economics, education, and sociology shows that students attending private schools outperform students attending traditional public schools in a wide range of outcomes. Since a common feature of private schools is their autonomy from school district offices, these findings strengthen initiatives to improve outcomes of public school students through the establishment of charter public schools in the United States, free schools in the United Kingdom, independent public schools in Australia, and community-managed schools in many developing countries. It is often unclear, however, whether private and independent public schools causally improve student outcomes and, even if they do, which characteristics drive such improvements.
Studies attempting to identify the effects of private or charter schooling and to disentangle the various causal mechanisms face several challenges. First, it is difficult to identify the causal effects of independent public or private schooling on students’ outcomes on the basis of most observational data available because unobserved selection bias is pervasive and challenging to address (Altonji et al. 2005a). Although recent natural experimental evidence based on the random assignment of private school vouchers or oversubscribed charter school slots to low-income applicants shows significant positive effects of these schools on student outcomes, it is still difficult to learn precisely which aspects of these schools explain the differences in outcomes. When these studies compare the outcomes between the randomly selected receivers (treatment group) and non-receivers (control group) of private school vouchers or charter school slots, the estimated effects of private...

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... possessing an advanced teaching certificate and employs 8.5 percent of its teachers on a short-term contract. More than 96 percent of schools ability-track their students in English and mathematics classes, but fewer than 15 percent of schools ability-track their students in Korean, science, and social science classes. On average, four percent of high school students came from families on governmental welfare support. Twelve percent of students receive free lunch support from the government. Ethnic minority students are rare; 0.1 percent of the student population.
Finally, Table 1 summarizes student-level data of the NAEA test takers in 2010. Out of the 88,406 students expected to take the NAEA tests in 2010, about three percent missed some of the tests. We normalize the NAEA test scores, which range between 100 and 300, to have mean zero and standard deviation 1.

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