An education voucher system exists when governments make payments to families that enable their children to enter public or private schools of their choice. The tax-funded payments can be made directly to parents or indirectly to the selected schools; their purpose is to increase parental choice, to promote school competition, and to allow low-income families access to private schools. Some opponents predict that vouchers will destroy the public system, aggravate poverty, and foster segregation. Others fear that voucherreceiving independent schools will be regulated out of recognition. The main purpose of this article is to examine the recent emergence of voucher systems as an interesting phenomenon in its own right. The evidence summarized relates to voucher systems operating in twenty countries, provinces, and states. The typical "funds-follow-the-child" voucher system, in which governments subsidize "schools of choice" in strict proportion to enrollment, appears to be the favorite form. This type of voucher has been adopted by developing countries-notably Bangladesh, Belize, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, and Lesotho-as well as by industrial countries such as Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Much of the recorded experience with such programs is pertinent to the longstanding theoretical debates on the desirability of voucher systems.
This paper reexamines the issue of decentralization and government growth using Canadian data. In addition, and more importantly, it examines the issue raised by Brennan and Buchanan but largely ignored in the literature: collusion among governments to circumvent the discipline of competitive federalism. Just as participants in a conventional market will seek to moderate competitive pressures through attempts to establish a cartel, so will component governments in a federal constitution collude for the same purpose. Evidence reported indicates a positive correlation between collusion and total Canadian government size as well as the size of each separate level of government.
This article argues that policy in relation to education has relied too extensively on the more easily measured costs of production to support a common conclusion of economies of scale in school and/or district size. It argues that there are external costs that increase with size but that can be measured less easily that offset this case. This would imply that the tendency within the education profession to advocate ever-larger school sizes is premature at best. To make the case, it models the choice of school size to emphasize that costs, such as school violence, born by both students and their parents but not (necessarily) by education administrators may result in school sizes that are too big from the perspective of school users. The second and third parts of the article introduces evidence to suggest that school violence is one of these external costs.
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