The Impact of School Choice on Educational Performance, Segregation and Costs: Swedish Evidence

• Published in: Policy File 2008
• Main Authors: Bohlmark, Anders, Lindahl, Mikael
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Subjects: Education; Program on Education Policy and Governance, Kennedy School of Government

This paper evaluates school choice at the compulsory-school level by assessing a reform implemented in Sweden in 1992, which opened up for publicly funded but privately operated schools. In many local school markets, this reform led to a significant increase in the quantity of such schools as well as in the share of pupils attending them. We estimate the impact of this increase in private enrolment on short-, medium- and long-term educational outcomes of all pupils using within-municipality variation over time, and controlling for differential prereform municipality trends. We find that an increase in the private school share induces improved short- and medium-term educational outcomes such as average GPA and the fraction of students who chooses an academic high-school track. However, we do not find any impact on long-term educational outcomes such as university attainment and years of schooling. We investigate whether this difference is due to inflated grades in school markets where the reform has had a larger impact, but find no evidence of this being the case. We do not either find that private schooling at the high-school level confound with our estimates in a way that masks actual long-term effects. We further find that more competition from private schools increases overall school costs. There is also evidence of an increased sorting of pupils along socioeconomic and ethnic lines.