October 1, 2011

Mickey D's in Education?

By Gary Jason
If, as I expect and pray for, voucher systems continue to be expanded and implemented around the country, several questions will become important.  One of them is, what form will private voucher schools take?  Will they (and should they) all be independent schools? A recent article in the Cato journal Policy Analysis deals with this issue in an intriguing way.  Economists Gregory Elacqua, Humberto Santos, Dane Contreras, and Felipe Salazar have done a study of Chile's national voucher system comparing three of the most common sorts of schools there: public schools, independent private schools, and franchise private schools.  By analyzing the results from national tests, the authors came up with some remarkable and intriguing results. As the authors note, it is not clear a priori what the optimally efficient size of any school operation is.  One might argue that large operations -- school chains or franchises -- would be optimal, for several reasons....(Read Full Article)