The Effects of Institutions on Citizen Behavior: School Choice in Chile

扩大选择是当前许多国家教育改革的主要主题之一。各种形式的学校选择扩大了家长的选择范围。几乎所有这些改革都是基于将市场模式应用于教育，而选择的支持者认为，赋予父母选择其子女就读学校的权力将带来许多好处。随着市场模式应用的发展，选择改革者所作的承诺变得更加雄心勃勃，从提高学校效率的目标扩大到提高家长和学生对其子女就读的学校的满意度。对大多数改革者来说，“制度重要”的论点不是一个命题，而是一个信条。对于改革者来说，当选择成功实施时，父母和学校都会获得许多好处。父母可以选择他们认为对孩子教育重要的学校。（“分配效率”）o学校面临着提高教育质量和以更低成本提供更好教育的压力（“生产效率”）;通过让所有家长都有能力离开他们附近的学校去寻找更好的学校，提高了教育的公平性--这是高收入家长通过居住地点或选择私立学校而享有的特权。学校社区可能成为“成人政治学习”的中心，在那里，参与学校社区的技能和倾向可能会蔓延到其他政策领域和更广泛的政治领域。然而，这些结果所固有的许多理论和政策含义受到了激烈的争议。这项研究建立在施耐德的广泛的工作在美国和他的合作工作与一组智利学者研究的操作和广泛和长期运行的系统在智利的学校选择的影响。在这项合作和比较研究中，他创建了最强大但使用最少的社会科学数据集之一，多波面板研究，以分析家长如何收集和使用有关学校的信息，以及学校本身如何应对择校的竞争压力。通过关注孩子刚刚选择学校的家长，他将对选择学校的附加值进行比现有工作更清晰的测试。通过将这项研究的结果与施耐德在美国所做的大量工作进行比较，他将能够衡量学校选择的影响在多大程度上是特定于环境的。更广泛的影响：除了这项研究的科学效益，这项研究的结果将有助于我们的学校选择作为一种教育改革的理解，并将有重要的影响，在智利和美国的学校选择的未来研究和实践。

Expanding choice is one of the major themes of current educational reform initiatives inmany countries. All forms of school choice expand the range of options available to parents. Almost all these reforms are based on the application of market models to education and the proponents of choice have argued that many benefits will flow from empowering parents to choose the schools their children attend. As the application of market models has developed, the promises made by choice reformers have become more ambitious, expanding from a goal of increasing the efficiency of school to improving the satisfaction of parents and students with the schools their children attend to systemic change. For most reformers, the argument that "institutions matter" is not a proposition, it is an article of faith. For reformers when choice is successfully implemented, many benefits have been found to accrue to both parents and to the schools. Given choice:o Parents can choose schools that match what they believe is important in the educationof their children ("allocative efficiency")o Schools are under pressure to increase the quality of their educational program and todeliver better schooling at a lower cost ("productive efficiency");o Equity in education is increased by giving all parents the ability to leave theirneighborhood schools to find better ones-a privilege that upper income parents havehad via residential location or by opting for private schools.o Schools are under pressure to create stronger, better functioning communities, moreresponsive to parental needs and involvement;o School communities may become centers of "adult political learning", where theskills and inclinations to become involved in the school community might spill overto other policy domains and broader political domains.However, the many theoretical and policy implications inherent in these outcomes arehotly contested. This research builds on Schneider's extensive work in the United Statesand his collaborative work with a group of Chilean scholars to study the operation and the effects of the extensive and long running system of school choice in Chile. In this collaborative and comparative study, he creates one of the most powerful but least used social scientific data sets, a multiple wave panel study, to analyze how parents gather and use information about schools and how the schools themselves respond to the competitive pressure of school choice. By focusing on parents whose children have just chosen schools, he will have a cleaner test of the value added by schools of choice than existing work. By comparing the results of this study with the extensive work that Schneider has done in the United States, he will be able to measure the extent to which the effects of school choice are context specific. Broader Impacts: In addition to the scientific benefits from this study, the results of this study will contribute to our understanding of school choice as an educational reform and will have important implications for both the future study and practice of school choice in Chile and in the United States.