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Unlock the potential of public-private partnerships in education. This groundbreaking study offers fresh empirical evidence on the effectiveness and cost of various educational models in developing countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Delve into rigorous case studies examining voucher programs and faith-based schools, uncovering key insights into school performance, targeting, and cost-effectiveness. Discover how these partnerships impact student achievement, literacy, and numeracy, and learn what factors drive success or failure. Emerging Evidence on Vouchers and Faith-Based Providers in Education is essential reading for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners seeking innovative solutions to improve educational outcomes and promote social mobility in developing nations. Explore the challenges and opportunities of these partnerships and gain a deeper understanding of how to create more effective and equitable education systems.

Increased parental school choice has become a popular education reform strategy, but evidence of its effectiveness in improving student achievement is mixed. In this paper, we examine the rationale for school choice, obstacles to fulfilling its theoretical promise, and results observed to date. We supplement our discussion with data from a survey of Milwaukee principals. Survey findings suggest that school leaders feel competitive pressures from certain types of schools but tend to respond by improving their marketing efforts rather than their educational programs.

Public-private partnerships in education: an overview / Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Harry Anthony Patrinos, and Quentin Wodon -- The effectiveness of franchises and independent private schools in Chile's national voucher program / Gregory Elacqua, Dante Contreras, and Felipe Salazar -- Cognitive ability, heterogeneity, endogeneity and returns to schooling in Chile: outcomes of the 1981 capitation grant scheme / Harry Anthony Patrinos and Chris Sakellariou -- When schools are the ones that choose: the effect of screening in Chile / Dante Contreras, Sebastian Bustos, and Paulina Sepulveda -- How do vouchers work?: evidence from Colombia / Eric Bettinger, Michael Kremer, and Juan E. Saavedra -- The performance of decentralized school systems: evidence from Fe y Alegría in Venezuela / Hunt Allcott and Daniel E. Ortega -- Literacy and numeracy in faith-based and government schools in Sierra Leone / Quentin Wodon and Yvonne Ying -- Comparing faith-based and government schools in the Democratic Republic of Congo / Prospere Backiny-Yetna and Quentin Wodon -- Student achievement in religious and secular secondary schools in Bangladesh / Mohammad Niaz Asadullah, Nazmul Chaudhury and Amit Dar -- Does money matter?: the effect of private educational expenditures on academic performance / Changhui Kang -- Comparing the cost of public, religious, and private schooling in Cameroon / Prospere Backiny-Yetna and Quentin Wodon.

This chapter promotes the application of economic principles of choice and competition to primary and secondary schools. The idea of school choice through vouchers, tax credits or charter schools has gradually gained momentum. Numerous studies have been conducted by economists examining the benefits of competition and choice in education. In the debate between private and public schools, the consensus is that private schools paid for directly by parents tend to be more efficient, more academically effective, better physically maintained, and more responsive to parental curriculum demands than either voucher‐funded private schools or government‐run schools. Although public voucher programs in the United States have been relatively small in scope, initial findings are overall positive, especially among minorities. More complete studies have been made in Sweden, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Chile, where school choice was introduced years ago. The Dutch voucher system is the oldest, starting in 1917, and the private sector accounts for 76% of all students.

Enhancing the role of private sector partners in education can lead to significant improvements in education service delivery. However, the realization of such benefits depends in great part on the design of the partnership between the public and private sectors, on the overall regulatory framework of the country, and on the governmental capacity to oversee and enforce its contracts with the private sector. Under the right terms, private sector participation in education can increase efficiency, choice, and access to education services, particularly for students who tend to fail in traditional education settings. Private-for-profit schools across the world are already serving a vast range of usersâ€\"from elite families to children in poor communities. Through balanced public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education, governments can leverage the specialized skills offered by private organizations as well as overcome operating restrictions such as salary scales and work rules that limit public sector responses. 'The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education' presents a conceptualization of the issues related to PPPs in education, a detailed review of rigorous evaluations, and guidleines on how to create successful PPPs. The book shows how this approach can facilitate service delivery, lead to additional financing, expand equitable access, and improve learning outcomes. The book also discusses the best way to set up these arrangements in practice. This information will be of particular interest to policymakers, teachers, researchers, and development practitioners.

School vouchers are the most contentious form of parental school choice. Vouchers provide government funds that parents can use to send their children to private schools of their choice. Here we examine the empirical question of whether or not a school voucher program in Washington, DC, affected achievement or the rate of high school graduation for participating students. The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has operated in the nations capital since 2004, funded by a federal government appropriation. Because the program was oversubscribed in its early years of operation, and vouchers were awarded by lottery, we were able to use the \"gold standard\" evaluation method of a randomized experiment to determine what impacts the OSP had on student outcomes. Our analysis revealed compelling evidence that the DC voucher program had a positive impact on high school graduation rates, suggestive evidence that the program increased reading achievement, and no evidence that it affected math achievement. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of recent policy developments including the reauthorization of the OSP and the enactment or expansion of more than a dozen school voucher or voucher-type programs throughout the United States in 2011 and 2012.

This paper examines the impact of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program on student achievement for low-income students in upper elementary and middle school who used a voucher to transfer from public to private schools during the first four years of the program. We analyzed student-level longitudinal data from public and private schools taking the same statewide standardized assessment. Overall, voucher students experienced an average achievement loss of 0,15 SDs in mathematics during their first year of attending a private school compared with matched students who remained in a public school. This loss persisted regardless of the length of time spent in a private school. In English/Language Arts, we did not observe statistically meaningful effects. Although school vouchers aim to provide greater educational opportunities for students, the goal of improving the academic performance of low-income students who use a voucher to move to a private school has not yet been realized in Indiana.

Despite Public-Private Partnerships' (PPPs) growing popularity within education policy circles, research on their effects yields contradictory results. The understanding of PPP effects is limited by the prevalence of generalist analyses that neglect to acknowledge the exceptional heterogeneity of the policy frameworks in which PPPs crystallize. Building on a scoping literature review, this paper aims at identifying patterns of effects of main PPP modalities on education (namely vouchers, charter schools and public subsidies for private schools) by considering the mediating role of policy-design variables. Our results show that PPP configurations oriented at the generation of market-like dynamics are frequently found to exacerbate school segregation and educational inequalities. Conversely, those PPP arrangements less conducive to market competition and those that follow an affirmative action rationale (such as targeted vouchers) are more likely to yield more positive effects on learning outcomes than other types of PPPs, without necessarily undermining equity.

We present experimental evidence on the impact of a school choice program in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh that provided students with a voucher to finance attending a private school of their choice. The study design featured a unique two-stage lottery-based allocation of vouchers that created both student-level and market-level experiments, which allows us to study the individual and the aggregate effects of school choice (including spillovers). After two and four years of the program, we find no difference between test scores of lottery winners and losers on Telugu (native language), math, English, and science/social studies, suggesting that the large cross-sectional differences in test scores across public and private schools mostly reflect omitted variables. However, private schools also teach Hindi, which is not taught by the public schools, and lottery winners have much higher test scores in Hindi. Furthermore, the mean cost per student in the private schools in our sample was less than a third of the cost in public schools. Thus, private schools in this setting deliver slightly better test score gains than their public counterparts (better on Hindi and same in other subjects), and do so at a substantially lower cost per student. Finally, we find no evidence of spillovers on public school students who do not apply for the voucher, or on private school students, suggesting that the positive effects on voucher winners did not come at the expense of other students.

A distinctive feature of a clustered observational study is its multilevel or nested data structure arising from the assignment of treatment, in a nonrandom manner, to groups or clusters of units or individuals. Examples are ubiquitous in the health and social sciences including patients in hospitals, employees in firms, and students in schools. What is the optimal matching strategy in a clustered observational study? At first thought, one might start by matching clusters of individuals and then, within matched clusters, continue by matching individuals. But as we discuss in this article, the optimal strategy is the opposite: in typical applications, where the intracluster correlation is not one, it is best to first match individuals and, once all possible combinations of matched individuals are known, then match clusters. In this article, we use dynamic and integer programming to implement this strategy and extend optimal matching methods to hierarchical and multilevel settings. Among other matched designs, our strategy can approximate a paired clustered randomized study by finding the largest sample of matched pairs of treated and control individuals within matched pairs of treated and control clusters that is balanced according to specifications given by the investigator. This strategy directly balances covariates both at the cluster and individual levels and does not require estimating the propensity score, although the propensity score can be balanced as an additional covariate. We illustrate our results with a case study of the comparative effectiveness of public versus private voucher schools in Chile, a question of intense policy debate in the country at the present.