Does school choice play any role in outcome?
Saw this over at NRO -I've put the info into a table. It would be interesting to see if there are more in depth studies:
Just A Coincidence? [John Hood]
While recently poking around some reports from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), I was reminded of two key facts about national education systems and performance. First, contrary to what the school-reform debate in the U.S. might lead one to believe, America is more reliant on government monopoly to deliver public education than are most developed countries. At the high-school level, only about 9 percent of American students are enrolled in non-government schools, compared to an average of 18 percent in Europe. The differences are even starker when considering only our major OECD competitors:
| Enrollment in | |||
| Non-Gov. | Avg Scores – International Tests | ||
| Schools | Math | Science | |
| Rank-Prcntge | Rank-Score | Rank-Score | |
| Britain | 1-75 | 6-495 | 5-515 |
| Korea | 2-49 | 1-547 | 3-522 |
| Japan | 3-31 | 2-523 | 1-531 |
| France | 4-30 | 5-496 | 6-495 |
| Spain | 5-22 | 7-480 | 8-488 |
| Australia | 6-21 | 3-520 | 2-527 |
| USA | 7-9 | 8-474 | 7-489 |
| Germany | 8-8 | 4-504 | 4-516 |
| Italy | 9-5 | 9-462 | 9-475 |
The correlation may be eye-catching, but it isn't sufficient. Some apologists for the American education monopoly attribute the test-score differences to other factors, and are right to do so up to a point. Fortunately, however, there is good evidence for the proposition that, adjusting for these population and policy differences, school choice does help explain why some countries outperform others.
(By the way, Canada is left out because of unavailable data. So are the Low Countries, because of a lack of data from the Netherlands, which would have made the case even stronger given its private-school majority.)
