Journal Article

Private/Public School Choice and Student Performance Revisited

Stevans, Lonnie K., Sessions, David N.

2000

Overview

This paper examines the differences in an index of standardized test performance of urban private/public school seniors by race, using a sample of 4172 students from the 1992 US National Education Longitudinal Survey. In addition to using 257 exogenous variables to control for individual traits, family background, etc., we treat both student performance and school choice as jointly endogenous in the context of a simultaneous equations model with a latent variable: school choice. We find that while White students perform marginally better in private relative to public schools, a performance gain for private school minority students was not realized. Given the additional finding that school characteristics/quality do not affect minority student performance, we conclude that 'school choice' is mostly taken advantage of by White urban residents.

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group,Taylor and Francis Journals,Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subject: Academic Achievement / Achievement tests / Bias / Catholic Schools / Education / Educational evaluation / Endogenous / Family school relationship / Graduation rate / High School Seniors / High Schools / Hispanic Americans / Learning / Longitudinal Studies / Minority Groups / Minority students / Older people / Parent Participation / Performance evaluation / Private Schools / Public Schools / Race / School Choice / Secondary School Students / Social background / Standardized Tests / Students / Success / Test Results / Urban Schools / Variables / White people / White Students