International Evidence on School Competition, Autonomy, and Accountability: A Review

Abstract

This article reviews evidence from four international student achievement tests on the effects on student performance of competition from privately managed schools, schools' freedom to make autonomous decisions, and accountability introduced by external exit exams. The multivariate cross-country regressions are performed at the level of individual students and control for extensive family and school background information. The results reveal that students perform better in countries with more competition from privately managed schools, in countries where public funding ensures that all families can make choices, in schools that have freedom to make autonomous process and personnel decisions, where teachers have both freedom and incentives to select appropriate teaching methods, where parents take interest in teaching matters, and where school autonomy is combined with external exams that provide an information basis allowing for well-informed choices and holding schools accountable for their autonomous decisions.

Notes

¹For evidence on the lack of substantial resource effects in general, and class-size effects in particular (cf. Gundlach, Wößmann, & Gmelin (2001); Hanushek (2003); Hanushek (1994); Wößmann (2002, 2005a); Wößmann & West (2006)

²By contrast, all studies on international educational performance find strong effects of family background on educational performance, with students from better educated homes with a higher socioeconomic status performing substantially better (cf. Fuchs & Wößmann, 2004, 2007; Schütz, Ursprung, & Wößmann, 2005; Wößmann, 2003c). Unfortunately, these family-background features are not subject to easy policy control.

³Exceptions are Canada and Germany, where central exams are a regional feature.

⁴Recent examples of studies based on the kind of variation in competition, autonomy, and accountability that exists within countries, which attempt to make sure that the estimates are not confounded by other effects, are discussed in the appropriate sections that follow.

⁵This and the following section draw from Wößmann (2005c) in many parts.

⁶Compare Bishop and Wößmann (2004) for a more elaborate theoretical model of institutional effects in education.

⁷In PISA, the mean of 500 was scaled for the group of OECD countries only. As a consequence, the mean of all countries participating in PISA is somewhat lower than 500.

⁸Here, financial independence is measured as receiving less than 50% of the core funding for basic educational services from government agencies.

⁹For methodological details of the econometric techniques, compare Wößmann (2003b, 2003c) and Fuchs and Wößmann (2007).

¹⁰The results are only briefly summarized here. For considerably more detail, compare Wößmann (2002, 2003c) for the results using TIMSS data, Wößmann (2003a, 2003b) for TIMSS-Repeat, Fuchs and Wößmann (2007) and Wößmann (2005d) for PISA, Wößmann (2005b) for all three, and Fuchs and Wößmann (2004) for PIRLS.

¹¹Compare, for example, Chubb and Moe (1990); Shleifer (1998); Epple and Romano (1998); Nechyba (2000); and Gradstein, Justman, and Meier (2004).

¹²These results refer to the OECD countries participating in TIMSS, for whom consistent data on the share of private schools are available.

¹³Compare Hoxby (2003a) for a collection of recent research on the economics of school choice.

¹⁴Compare, for example, Hoxby (1999), Behrman and King (2001), Nechyba (2003), and Bishop and Wößmann (2004).

¹⁵Two recent collections of work on accountability are Evers and Walberg (2002) and Peterson and West (2003).

¹⁶The main part of the remaining international performance variation can be attributed to international variation in average student and family background.

¹⁷ Atkinson et al. (2004) provided a survey of additional studies on performance-related teacher pay, the more rigorous of which also tend to find a positive relationship between financial teacher incentives and student outcomes.