DC Accepted Papers Paper:
Free to Choose: Did School Vouchers Fix Swedish Education System?
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
The performance of Swedish students on OECD PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) has been steadily declining in the years 2003-2012 consistently across the reading, mathematics, and science section of the test. As of 1992, Sweden introduced a voucher system, which enabled parents to enroll their kids in charter institutions (independent schools). These offer the same coursework offered by public schools but allow for greater customization of learning pathways. The problem in evaluating their performance is that they attracted a disproportionate number of high socioeconomic status students, which can potentially bias the results. The paper uses Propensity Score Matching method to correct for bias and properly assess the performance of schools. The main findings are that: i) performance of students at both public and independent schools declined (2003-2012) and picked up (2015-2018) over the considered time-frame, although independent schools have been consistently outperforming public schools in all three domains tested by PISA; ii) the gap between the two types of schools does not entirely reabsorb after correcting for selection bias.
