Education Policy and Social Mobility: The Role of School Choice

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During the past several decades, Federal and state governments have pursued redistributive policies aimed at fostering `equality of economic opportunity`-the idea that while people's incomes may vary, this variance should be due primarily to factors such as individual ability and effort, not to differences in circumstance. This goal has motivated both social welfare policies, as well as mandated school finance equalizations, where state courts or legislatures have sought to equalize school spending between richer and poorer school districts. Despite decades of redistributive policies, numerous empirical studies continue to find evidence of a substantial level of income persistence across generations, even after holding constant many individual characteristics. This proposed research will explore the redistributive effects of education policies, particularly those related to school finance. Specifically, we propose to address the following questions: How do specific types of education policies affect the student body composition across different types of public and private schools? Specifically, it will be determine how these education policies affect where children at different points of the income and ability distributions go to school. The consequences of three types of policies are analyzed: (1) those that affect local control of education finance (e.g. school finance equalizations or centralization of school spending); (2) those that influence the educational choices that students and their families make (e.g. private school vouchers, or increased public school competition); and (3) those that affect the provision of education within schools (e.g. teacher unionization, school size and ability tracking). How do these policies affect the distribution of teacher quality across different types of public and private schools? How do changes in student composition of schools and teacher quality affect the distribution of student outcomes, such as test scores? (That is, what are the redistributive consequences of these policies? And what can be inferred about the effect of education policies on social mobility.) To address these issues, three unique, extensive data sets are utilized, two with detailed individual level data with which it is possible to derive conclusions from a cross section, and also through panel type comparisons over time, and another panel data set with aggregate data concerning teacher quality and the student composition of schools.