National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, September 2001
As we have previously reported in the Education Gadfly, Columbia's National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education keeps pumping out scholarly papers and you can now find quite a collection on the Center's website. The latest to catch our eye, written by center director Henry Levin and researcher Clive Belfield, reviews 35 studies of the effects of competition on education outcomes. Bottom line: "A sizable majority of these studies report beneficial effects of competition across all outcomes." Those outcomes include graduation rates, school efficiency and teacher pay as well as academic achievement. Moreover, there is evidence that the greater the competition the stronger the outcomes, although these gains are modest. (For example: "A one standard deviation increase in competition would probably increase test scores by approximately .1 standard deviations or about four percentiles.") You can request a copy from the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Box 181, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027-6608. You can get one faster by surfing to http://www.ncspe.org, going to "publications", then to paper #35, where you'll find both an abstract and a link to the PDF version.
