Voucher system: promising solutions

This reference is used to annotate "I would never send my kids to school" (2017) by Piotr Wozniak

World Bank Policy Research Working Paper from 2003 provides a promising analysis of the voucher system:

In the public archetype a centralized education ministry designs a national curriculum, finances education out of general revenues, and pays capital and operating costs directly. It also makes all managerial and staffing decisions, negotiates teacher salaries directly with one or more national unions, remunerates and promotes teachers on the basis of negotiated, experience-related criteria, employs evaluations as indicators of need and not performance, and assigns students to schools. Critics of the archetypal system contend that its consequences are usually inordinate education sector employment, too many unmotivated teachers, unnecessarily high taxes, school administrators indifferent to families, and passive parents with no option but to enroll their children in schools with which they are dissatisfied. Instead, these critics advocate voucher systems, which depart from the archetype in three key aspects. First, students are not assigned to just one school but have choices among, depending on the details of the program’s design, other public or private schools. The other common designation for voucher systems, systems of “school choice,” draws its name from this facet. Second, schools have intense incentives to expand student enrollments. [...] The idea is to shift the entity to whom schools are primarily accountable for their performance from the ministry, which is politically compromised in its efforts to enforce quality standards or even “captured” by the teachers unions, to parents and students themselves, who are the best judges of the education they want

Link: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c723/3bd4c6931170ecbd3b464cdd154c66333002.pdf

Authors: Varun Gauri, Ayesha Vawda

Backlink: Education reform