The Long Term Legacy of School Choice

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project will evaluate the effect of attending a better school on long term outcomes for secondary school students - such as access to, and success in, higher education, and beyond that to include labour market success reflected in earnings. Unlike other research that looks at the effects of schools attended on outcomes, this research will focus on the effect of NOT going to one's most preferred school. The aim is to focus on the consequences of school choice.The analysis will be quantitative and will involve detailed statistical analysis of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE). This dataset follows 17000 young people from age 14 through the education system and into the labour market. They are now 25 and the last sweep of the dataset is about to become available to researchers. The dataset gives rich information about the child, the parents, and the school. The outcomes that we will go beyond investigate are the educational attainments that is the usual focus of attention for researchers (GCSE's and A-levels) to include well-being, mental health, being bullied, absence, crime, teen sex and pregnancy, and a range of non-cognitive skills (conscientiousness, and the like). Importantly, these students are followed through their higher education experience so we can investigate the impact of being in a second best school on: aspirations to higher education, application, attending an elite institution, dropping-out, and degree class. Finally, the data now contains some earnings and employment information from the subjects' early experiences of the labour market.School choice involves a trade-off between school proximity and school quality. One might most prefer a local excellent school but if that is not available the choice might be between a local school, that is of satisfactory quality, and a more distant school that is of better quality. The choices that parents make for their children will balance the better school quality against the inconvenience of extra travel time, among other things. This new research will exploit earlier research that analyses the preferences that parents have for schools for their children - based on the preferences expressed by all parents in England for two recent cohorts. This earlier research provides statistical estimates of the extent to which parents are prepared to trade off lesser proximity for better quality. We use our knowledge of this trade-off in this much richer dataset. We can calculate the distance between home and school attended in the LSYPE data and we know the quality of that school - for example, in terms of % with 5+ A-C GCSEs. And we can see the location of other schools that one might have attended and we observe their quality and proximity. Our estimates allow us to calculate the probability of attending each potential school, from our knowledge of the admission criteria. The work will inform policymakers about the benefits of providing better choices, and will inform parents about the benefits of making better choices.