De beschikbare data over onderwijs

Schoolkeuze werkt het best - wat een verrassing.

Van de conclusie:

CONCLUSION

Across time, countries, and outcome measures, private provision of educa- tion outshines public provision according to the overwhelming majority of econometric studies. Findings of a statistically significant advantage for pri- vate schooling outnumber findings of a significant advantage for public schooling by a ratio of roughly 8 to 1, and the statistically significant advan- tage for private schools outnumbers by a ratio of more than 3 to 1 the statis- tically insignificant findings.

However, since the funding and regulatory structures of “public” and “private” schools vary widely, this breakdown of the research is insufficiently detailed to be of real use to policymakers. If we want to ascertain the merits of real market reform in education, we must com- pare genuinely marketlike private school systems (which are minimally regulated and are funded, at least in part, directly by parents) with state school monopolies protected from significant market competition (such as the typical U.S. public school system). When we assess the evidence using these more specific criteria, the results are more stark: there are 59 statistically significant findings of marketlike education systems out- performing government monopoly schooling, and only four findings of the reverse, for a ratio of nearly 15 to 1 in favor of free education mar- kets. There are only 13 statistically insignificant findings among market versus monopoly comparisons, and every finding comparing the effi- ciency of market and monopoly schooling is both statistically significant and favors markets.

These results call into question the notion, prevalent in both conserva- tive and liberal circles, that the content of schooling must be overseen by the state in order for schools to achieve optimum performance. It is in fact the least regulated market school systems that show the greatest margin of superiority over state schooling.

Based on the patterns that emerge from the global evidence, policy- makers should seriously consider providing universal access to minimally regulated education markets in which parents, whenever possible, directly pay at least some of the cost of their children’s education. Pro- grams intended to accomplish that objective (such as education tax cred- its) have already been proposed, and partial, scaled-down versions of such programs are already operating in several U.S. states (Schaeffer, 2007).