Education Policy and Social Mobility: The Role of School Choice

在过去的几十年里，联邦和州政府一直在推行旨在促进“经济机会平等”的再分配政策--虽然人们的收入可能会有所不同，但这种差异应该主要是由于个人的能力和努力等因素，而不是环境的差异。这一目标既推动了社会福利政策，也推动了强制的学校财政均等化，州法院或立法机构试图在较富裕和较贫穷的学区之间平衡学校支出。尽管实行了几十年的再分配政策，但许多实证研究继续发现，即使在保持许多个人特征不变的情况下，仍有相当程度的收入在几代人之间持续存在。这项拟议的研究将探索教育政策的再分配效应，特别是与学校财务相关的政策。具体地说，我们建议解决以下问题：特定类型的教育政策如何影响不同类型的公立和私立学校的学生身体构成？具体地说，将确定这些教育政策如何影响处于不同收入和能力分配点的儿童的入学情况。分析了三类政策的后果：(1)影响地方教育财政控制的政策(如学校财务均等化或学校支出集中)；(2)影响学生及其家庭作出的教育选择的政策(如私立学校代金券或加剧的公立学校竞争)；以及(3)影响学校内教育提供的政策(如教师工会、学校规模和能力跟踪)。这些政策如何影响不同类型的公立和私立学校的教师质量分布？学校学生构成和教师素质的变化如何影响学生成绩的分布，如考试成绩？(也就是说，这些政策的再分配后果是什么？以及关于教育政策对社会流动的影响可以推断出什么。)为了解决这些问题，使用了三个独特的、广泛的数据集，其中两个具有详细的个人水平数据，可以通过横截面得出结论，也可以通过随时间进行的面板类型比较得出结论，另一个面板数据集具有关于学校教师质量和学生构成的汇总数据。

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.