An Estimation of the Advantage of Charter over Public Schools

Abstract

Summary This paper presents new evidence on the differences in quality and achievement of public, private, and charter schools by using the educational outcomes for the more than 1,200 schools of the Madrid region over the period 2005–2009. By applying an external test including three different areas, mathematics, writing, and language, the evolution of the achievement of the pupils in the three different types of schools, public, charter, and private, are analyzed. Our results show that charter and, especially, private schools attain better results than public schools and are more responsive to its academic evolution, both at a lower cost. Private schools do their best to converge to the leading schools in their district in the previous year, whereas public schools do not seem to do so. This result holds even after controlling for the number of immigrants in the school, the age of the school, and its size. Also, the results seem quite robust, since we tested the relevance of different variables such as immigration, socioeconomic status, and foreign students and we obtained results that support our main hypothesis.

Does the educational management model matter? New evidence from a quasiexperimental approach

“…Further, this pattern holds for variables such as parents' occupational status, parents' years of schooling, household possessions, the immigration status of pupils, parents' involvement in education, students' motivation and so on. These differences between public and private schools are almost all statistically significant, a result which mirrors the conclusions reached by other studies which have analysed this topic in Spain, using distinct databases (Mancebón et al 2012;Doncel et al 2012) . 6…”

Does Educational Management Model Matter? New Evidence for Spain by a Quasiexperimental Approach

“…includes the descriptive statistics of all the variables drawn from the ED of 2010, grouped by school type (PuS and This is true for variables such as parents' occupational status, parents' years of schooling, household possessions, the immigration status of pupils, parents' involvement in education, students' motivation and so on. The differences between PuS and PrSPS are all statistically significant in all these dimensions, a result which mirrors the conclusions reached by other studies which have analysed this topic in Spain with distinct databases (Mancebón et al, 2012;Calero and Escardibul, 2007;Doncel et al, 2012)…”

The impact of the introduction of bilingual learning on sixth grade educational achievement levels

“…It has even been claimed that studying in charter schools has a negative influence, while studying in a public school has no influence at all [15]. The controversy is ongoing [48] and new evidence has been found in favor of all subjects in private schools in the region of Madrid, even after controlling for variables as significant as the number of immigrants [11,26]. Another institutional factor considered influential in recent research is the introduction by educational institutions of standardized tests.…”