Differential Effectiveness of Schools

关于私立学校是否比公立学校更有效的问题是当前全国关于教育券、特许学校和其他增加教育选择的改革的争论的中心。这个问题一直是研究人员争论的主题。如果私立学校确实以较低的成本提供更好的教育，那么扩大学校选择的理由就得到了加强。天主教学校占美国私立学校入学人数的三分之二左右，因此评估天主教学校的有效性是私立学校评估的重要组成部分。围绕天主教学校对成绩和其他结果的影响的分歧集中在天主教学校的非随机选择问题上。该项目将调查天主教学校的影响如何随种族、性别、父母教育程度、家庭收入等个人特征以及社区特征和学校特征而变化。该项目将利用邻近天主教学校对天主教徒而非天主教徒上天主教学校的概率有很大影响这一事实，来解决天主教学校的选择问题。这允许使用宗教偏好和接近天主教学校之间的相互作用来统计确定天主教学校的影响。将对距离和宗教偏好分别进行控制。该方法将使用1972年全国高中班级纵向调查（报告居民的邮政编码）和收入动态小组研究（报告人口普查区）来实施。该项目将利用1995年PSID的一份教育补编，该补编提供有关就读学校类型的信息，并将PSID地理编码数据扩展到1994年。面板数据集将与邻里和社区、当地公立学校以及最近的天主教学校的距离和特点的信息相匹配。我们将使用各种工具变量和控制函数估计器来估计天主教学校的影响，其中宗教偏好和邻近度之间的相互作用是关键的外生变量。

9512009 Altonji The question of whether private schools are more effective than public schools is at the center of the current national debate over the role of vouchers, charter schools, and other reforms that would increase choice in education. The question has been the subject of much controversy among researchers. If private schools do in fact provide better education at lower cost, then the case for expansion of choice in schooling is strengthened. Since Catholic schools account for about two thirds of private school enrollment in the U.S., assessing the effectiveness of Aatholic schools is an important part of the assessment of private schooling. The disagreement surrounding the effects of Catholic schools on achievement scores and other outcomes centers around the problem of nonrandom selection into Catholic schools. This project will investigate how Catholic school effects vary with individual characteristics such as race, gender, parental education, family income, and with neighborhood characteristics and school characteristics. The project will address the selection problem for Catholic schools by taking advantage of the fact that proximity to Catholic schools has a strong effect on the probability of Catholic school attendance for Catholics but not for non-Catholics. This permits the use of the interaction between religious preference and proximity to Catholic schools to statistically identify Catholic school effects. Separate controls for both proximity and religious preference will be used. The approach will be implemented using the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972, which reports zipcode of resident, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which reports Census tract. The project will take advantage of an education supplement in the 1995 PSID the provides information about type of school attended and the extension of the PSID geocode data through 1994. The panel data sets will be matched to information on th e neighborhood and community, local public schools, and the distance to and characteristics of the nearest Catholic schools. Various instrumental variables and control function estimators will be used to estimate Catholic school effects, with the interaction between religious preferences and proximity as the key exogenous variable.