Inferring school quality from rankings: the impact of school choice

School choice reforms allow families to apply to non-local schools and assign additional funding to schools based on families' demand. For these reforms to promote high-quality schools, families need to infer school quality from past performance, but past performance also depends on student abi...

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Main Author: Herresthal, C
Format: Working paper
Published: University of Oxford 2015
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author Herresthal, C
author_facet Herresthal, C
author_sort Herresthal, C
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description School choice reforms allow families to apply to non-local schools and assign additional funding to schools based on families' demand. For these reforms to promote high-quality schools, families need to infer school quality from past performance, but past performance also depends on student ability. Because reforms alter the allocation of students to schools, it is unclear whether performance becomes more or less informative about quality. I model families as trading off estimated quality against proximity, and analyze a steady-state Bayesian-Nash equilibrium. I show that performance-based rankings become more informative about quality only if oversubscribed schools can choose whom to accept.
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spelling oxford-uuid:5d1e276b-7f53-4037-ad5a-a31c3e5d6a732022-03-26T17:32:25ZInferring school quality from rankings: the impact of school choiceWorking paperhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_8042uuid:5d1e276b-7f53-4037-ad5a-a31c3e5d6a73Bulk import via SwordSymplectic ElementsUniversity of Oxford2015Herresthal, CSchool choice reforms allow families to apply to non-local schools and assign additional funding to schools based on families' demand. For these reforms to promote high-quality schools, families need to infer school quality from past performance, but past performance also depends on student ability. Because reforms alter the allocation of students to schools, it is unclear whether performance becomes more or less informative about quality. I model families as trading off estimated quality against proximity, and analyze a steady-state Bayesian-Nash equilibrium. I show that performance-based rankings become more informative about quality only if oversubscribed schools can choose whom to accept.
spellingShingle Herresthal, C
Inferring school quality from rankings: the impact of school choice
title Inferring school quality from rankings: the impact of school choice
title_full Inferring school quality from rankings: the impact of school choice
title_fullStr Inferring school quality from rankings: the impact of school choice
title_full_unstemmed Inferring school quality from rankings: the impact of school choice
title_short Inferring school quality from rankings: the impact of school choice
title_sort inferring school quality from rankings the impact of school choice
work_keys_str_mv AT herresthalc inferringschoolqualityfromrankingstheimpactofschoolchoice