Differential Effectiveness of Schools

9512009 Altonji私立学校是否比公立学校更有效的问题是目前关于代金券、特许学校和其他将增加教育选择的改革的作用的全国辩论的中心。这个问题在研究人员中引起了很大争议。如果私立学校确实以更低的成本提供更好的教育，那么扩大学校教育选择的理由就更充分了。由于天主教学校约占美国私立学校招生人数的三分之二，评估天主教学校的有效性是评估私立学校教育的重要组成部分。围绕天主教学校对成绩和其他结果的影响的分歧集中在非随机选择天主教学校的问题上。该项目将调查天主教学校的影响如何随着种族、性别、父母教育、家庭收入等个人特征以及社区特征和学校特征的不同而变化。该项目将解决天主教学校的选择问题，利用这样一个事实，即靠近天主教学校对天主教徒上天主教学校的概率有很大影响，但对非天主教徒则不会。这使得可以利用宗教偏好和接近天主教学校之间的相互作用来从统计上确定天主教学校的影响。对接近程度和宗教偏好将使用单独的控制。这一方法将通过1972年全国高中班级纵向调查和收入动态小组研究来实施，前者报告居民的邮政编码，后者报告人口普查区域。该项目将利用1995年PSID中的一项教育补充资料，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。小组数据集将与有关社区和社区、当地公立学校以及距离最近的天主教学校的距离和特点的信息进行匹配。各种工具变量和控制函数估计器将被用来估计天主教学校的影响，宗教偏好和邻近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.