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Abstract
This paper analyzes the consequences of integration in public education. I show that the flight from the integrated multicultural public schools to private education increases private educational expenditures and, as a result, decreases fertility among more affluent parents whose children flee. In contrast, among less prosperous parents integration in public education decreases their children's human-capital levels. I demonstrate that the poor, who cannot opt out, incur greater costs than the rich, who can resort to private education. I also analyze the overall society-wide effect of the integration policy and derive a condition that determines precisely whether this policy increases or decreases the average level of human capital in society.
Acknowledgements
I thank Colin Green and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank participants in seminars and the 2nd City Break Conference (Athens 2008) for their comments on the previous versions of this paper.
Notes
1. Although flight to another, less desegregated, public school may also be an option (Reber Citation2005), as Lankford and Wyckoff Citation(2006) note, in the areas where the open enrollment plans have been established to achieve desegregation, the public school choice available to parents is quite limited. As they note, whites living in school attendance areas having relatively ‘too few’ whites in the local public school have no public school choice at all.
2. Very high rates of private school attendance have been also observed among the US-born Asians (Betts and Fairlie Citation2001; Fairlie and Resch Citation2002).
3. For example, Freeman Citation(1994) reports that among African-American males aged 18–34 in 1993, 12.7% of the work force were incarcerated and 36.7% of the work force were under supervision of the criminal justice system.
4. To provide an illustrative example, Betts and Fairlie (Citation2003, p. 989, note 4) refer to an observation that, for instance, in a ‘methods’ class at Cal State Long Beach would-be teachers, who will probably wind up in classrooms with a large number of students not fluent in English, were encouraged to find ways to avoid writing, instead of emphasizing it.
5. For a survey of a recent literature on endogenous fertility and growth, see Galor Citation(2005); cf. also Azarnert (Citation2008, Citation2009).
6. In this case the particular tax levied in order to finance public education is irrelevant for the analysis. For example, it could be a lump sum tax or a local property tax along with direct aid received exogenously from the government (as e.g. in Nechyba Citation2003); cf. also Azarnert (Citation2010a, Citation2010b).
7. The disincentive effect of taxation has been well recognized in the literature (see Azarnert Citation(2004) and references therein).
8. Some references to the large literature on this subject can be found in Epple, Figlio, and Romanao (2004), De la Croix and Doepke Citation(2009), Azarnert Citation(2010a); cf. also Benabou Citation(2002).
9. This is an approximation to the situation in the integrated urban areas where the exit of whites has not been complete. In contrast, in the segregated suburban areas, where students' population in public schools is almost entirely white, whites show much lower interest in private education (Lankford and Wyckoff Citation2006, among others), which is consistent with the prediction of the present model.
10. The time constraint requires that
11. An assumption that ensures that all parents invest in the education of their children if
.
12. Notice that from Equation (12), it is immediately clear that in the potential case of no integration in public education (), it is optimal for everyone to remain in the public school.