School Accountability, Autonomy, Choice, and the Equity of Student Achievement se titula el artículo publicado por la OECD (dciembre 2007) de Gabriela Schütz, Martin R. West, Ludger Wößmann, el cual analiza los datos del PISA 2003, a nivel de alumnos, para abordar el tema de cómo incide la autonomía de los colegios en la equidad de las oportunidades de estudios y de resultados.

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Abstract

School systems aspire to provide equal opportunity for all, irrespective of socio-economic status (SES). Much of the criticism of recent school reforms that introduce accountability, autonomy, and choice emphasizes their potentially negative consequences for equity. This report provides new evidence on how national features of accountability, autonomy, and choice are related to the equality of opportunity across countries. We estimate whether student achievement depends more or less on SES in school systems employing these institutional features. The rigorous micro-econometric analyses are based on the PISA 2003 data for more than 180,000 students from 27 OECD countries.

The main empirical result is that rather than harming disadvantaged students, accountability, autonomy, and choice appear to be tides that lift all boats. The additional choice created by public funding for private schools in particular is associated with a strong reduction in the dependence of student achievement on SES.

External exit exams have a strong positive effect for all students that is slightly smaller for low-SES students. The positive effect of regularly using subjective teacher ratings to assess students is substantially larger for low-SES students. The effect of many other accountability devices does not differ significantly by student SES. School autonomy in determining course content is associated with higher equality of opportunity, while equality of opportunity is lower in countries where more schools have autonomy in hiring teachers. Autonomy in formulating the budget and in establishing starting salaries is not associated with the equity of student outcomes. Inequality of opportunity is substantially higher in school systems that track students at early ages.

Índice

1. INTRODUCTION

2. A BASIC MODEL

2.1 The Model
2.2 Interpretation of the Interaction Effects
2.3 Results

3. ACCOUNTABILITY

3.1 Background
3.2 New Results

4. AUTONOMY

4.1 Background
4.2 New Results

5. CHOICE

5.1 Background
5.2 New Results
5.3 Choice-based Systems vs. Selection-based Systems: Early Tracking

6. CONCLUSION

APPENDIX A: DATABASE AND DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS
A.1 The PISA 2003 Database and Its Measures of Cognitive Skills
A.2 Construction of a Student-Level Micro Database for the Estimation
A.3 Data on Accountability, Autonomy, and Choice
A.4 Background Controls
A.5 Tables of Descriptive Statistics

APPENDIX B: ECONOMETRIC MODELING
B.1 Cross-Country Data and Potential Bias
B.2 Micro-Econometric Issues of Hierarchically Structured Data: Multi-Level Error Components and Sampling Weights
B.3 Data Imputation and Its Implications for the Estimation Model

APPENDIX C: ADDITIONAL TABLES

REFERENCES

Conclusions

This report presents new evidence on the association between school accountability, autonomy, and choice and the equity of educational achievement as measured by performance on the international PISA 2003 student achievement test. In the midst of an ongoing wave of market-oriented reforms in school systems around the globe, observers in many countries worry about the implications of these strategies for the equality of opportunity essential for open societies. Critics of market-oriented reforms contend that additional choice and competition in schooling in particular are likely to reduce equity. Quite to the contrary, our results suggest that the additional choice resulting from government funding for privately operated schools enhances the equality of educational opportunity, benefiting low-SES students even more than high-SES students.

More generally, the results presented above suggest that rather than harming disadvantaged students, accountability, autonomy, and choice are tides that lift all boats. In some cases – in particular, external exams, internal teacher monitoring, and school autonomy in hiring teachers – the tides seem to lift the performance of high-SES students more than that of low-SES students, but even the latter score higher where these incentive-based policies are in place. In other cases, low-SES students profit more from accountability, autonomy, and choice than high-SES students. Policies that have additional benefits for low-SES students include the regular use of teachers’ subjective ratings to assess students, school influence on staffing decisions, school autonomy in determining course content, private operation, government funding, and more equalized government funding between private and public schools. In each of these areas, market-oriented reforms simultaneously advance both efficiency and equity.

The remaining measures of accountability, autonomy, and choice analyzed in this report show no differential effect for children with different socio-economic backgrounds. They affect low-SES students in the same way they affect high-SES students. The institutions we find to be neutral with respect to equity include the monitoring of teacher lessons by external inspectors; the regular use of standardized tests; the use of assessments to make decisions on student retention or promotion, to group students, to monitor school progress, or to compare the school to district or national performance or to other schools; autonomy in budget formulation and in establishing starting salaries; and the two available proxies for public school choice.

The beneficial consequences of choice among privately operated schools for equity reveal that choicebased systems function quite differently from more traditional selection-based systems. Specifically, systems that track their students into different types of schools at an early age substantially reduce the equality of educational opportunity for children with different family backgrounds.

The most important caveat to the analyses presented in this report is that they draw on a limited number of observations at the country level. We measure all institutional variables at the country level in order to circumvent the problem of self-selection within countries. While this approach enhances the reliability of our findings, it also precludes more detailed analyses, for example of ways in which accountability, autonomy, and choice policies may interact with each other to influence equity.

The bottom line from our analyses, however, is that there is not a single case where a policy designed to introduce accountability, autonomy, or choice into schooling benefits high-SES students to the detriment of low-SES students, i.e. where the former gain but the latter suffer. This suggests that fears of equity efficiency tradeoffs and cream-skimming in implementing market-oriented educational reforms are not merely exaggerated, but are largely mistaken. International evidence on the institutional determinants of efficiency and equity in schooling confirms that more efficient school systems can also be equitable if schools are induced to challenge all students to reach their full potential (cf. Arrow et al. 2000; Wößmann and Peterson 2007).