School Choice is Changing the Teaching

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School Choice is Changing the
Teaching Profession
Charter schools are recruiting teachers from the best colleges
Why Students in Some
Countries Do Better
International evidence on the importance of education policy
ILLUSTRATION BY BRAD HOLLAND
by LUDGER WOESSMANN
I
n the K–12 education market, where countries
the world over publicly finance and manage the
great majority of their schools, the institutions
and policies established by various levels of government must create incentives for school personnel to use their resources in ways that maximize performance. In the private sector, where firms
are disciplined by market competition, it is usually
assumed that resources are used effectively because firms
would otherwise fail to profit. Inefficiency leads to higher
costs and higher prices—practically an invitation to competitors to lure away customers. But the relative lack of
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competition in the K–12 education sector tends to dull
the incentives to improve quality and restrain costs.
Moreover, in the public system, the ability of parents
and students to ensure that they receive a high-quality
education is constrained by the enormous obstacles to
leaving a bad school. Families must rely almost exclusively
on the government, school administrators, and school personnel to monitor one another’s behavior and to create
appropriate quality-control measures.
Within a country’s educational system, the relevant
institutions and policies include the ways in which a
society finances and manages its schools, how a society
S U M M E R 2 0 0 1 / E D U C AT I O N M AT T E R S
67
International Rankings (Figure 1)
aside their other interests and focus
mainly on raising student achievement.
United States is below average.
Math
Science
International Evidence
Singapore
Korea
Japan
Hong Kong
Czech Rep.
Belgium
Netherlands
Slovak Rep.
Switzerland
Austria
Israel*
Slovenia
Hungary
Russian Fed.
France
Austria
Ireland
Canada
Thailand
Sweden
Germany
New Zealand
United States
United Kingdom
Denmark
Norway
Latvia
Iceland
Romania
Spain
Greece
Cyprus
Lithuania
Portugal
Iran
Kuwait*
Colombia
622
592
588
576
543.5
539
528.5
527.5
525.5
524
522
519.5
519.5
518
515
514
513.5
510.5
508.5
498
496.5
490
488
486
483.5
482
477.5
473
468
467.5
462
460
452.5
438.5
414.5
392
377
0
576
550
551
508.5
553.5
498
538.5
527
503
538.5
524
545
536
511
474.5
524.5
516.5
515
509
511.5
515
503
521
512.5
458.5
505
460
478
469
497
473
441.5
439.5
454
453
430
399
100 200 300 400 500 600
0
100 200 300 400 500 600
TIMSS score (international mean = 500)
* Test scores in Israel and Kuwait reflect only 8th-grade results. All others are averages of 7th- and 8th-grade results.
SOURCE: Third International Mathematics and Science Study; 1995 7th/8th-grade results
assesses student performance, and who
is empowered to make basic educational
decisions, such as which curricula to follow, which teachers to hire, and what
textbooks to purchase. If resources are to
be used effectively, policies must create
incentives that encourage school personnel to behave in ways that do not
necessarily further their own interests.
68
For instance, without the right incentives, teachers may avoid using the most
promising teaching strategies, preferring
to use the techniques they find most
convenient. In terms of policy, one might
speculate that if a nation assesses the
performance of students with some sort
of national exam and uses this information to monitor teachers, teachers will put
E D U C AT I O N M AT T E R S / S U M M E R 2 0 0 1
This study asks two basic questions: Do
policy and institutional variation help to
explain variation in student performance?
If so, which policies and institutions are
most conducive to student performance?
To answer these questions, I turn to the
international evidence on student achievement. This is because the institutions
within a country do not vary enough to
test how different institutions affect student achievement. Only the international
evidence, which encompasses many education systems with a wide variety of
institutional structures, has the potential
to show which institutions heavily affect
student performance. My working
hypothesis is that differences in educational institutions explain more of the
international variation in student performance than differences in the resources
nations devote to schooling.
A large body of empirical evidence on
the effects of resources on student
achievement already exists. It overwhelmingly shows that, at given spending levels, an increase in resources does
not generally raise educational performance. Studies summarized by Eric
Hanushek of the Hoover Institution
have shown the lack of a strong, systematic relationship between resources
and performance within the United
States, within developing countries, and
among countries. Likewise, studies by
Erich Gundlach and myself at the Kiel
Institute of World Economics have
found no systematic relationship
between resources and performance
across time within most countries in
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and
within some countries in East Asia.
Data from the Third International
Mathematics and Science Study
(TIMSS) again show that differences
from country to country in per-pupil
spending do not help in understanding
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INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE WOESSMANN
differences in educational performance.
The simple correlation between spending
per student and average TIMSS test
scores is 0.13 in primary school and 0.16
in middle school, on a scale where 1.0
denotes an absolute positive correlation
between the two variables and 0 signals
no correlation (see figure 2).This means
that school productivity, the ratio of educational performance to the level of
spending, differs widely across schooling systems.
There is no consensus on the lack of
a strong positive relationship between
educational resources and performance,
however. In the within-country literature, some scholars have questioned the
use of meta-analyses, while others have
suggested the use of alternative measures of school performance, such as students’ future labor-market performance.
Still others point to controlled and quasicontrolled empirical experiments that
have shown that more resources can lead
to higher achievement. Notwithstanding
this debate, the international variation in
student performance levels in mathematics and science is a fact, and it is generally accepted that differences in the
amount of resources given to the education sector do not fully explain why performance levels vary.
Data from the Third International Mathematics
and Science Study show that differences
from country to country in per-pupil spending
do not help in understanding differences
in educational performance.
Spending and Achievement (Figure 2)
Internationally, one finds only a weak connection between per-pupil
spending and student performance in middle school.
625
Low spenders;
high achievement
7th/8th-grade TIMSS score
Data
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High spenders;
high achievement
Singapore
575
This study uses data from 39 countries
to analyze how various institutions affect
educational performance at the student
level. I constructed a student-level database that combines data from TIMSS
with data on education systems from
the OECD.TIMSS is the latest, largest,
and most extensive international student achievement test ever conducted. In
1994–95, representative samples of students in more than 40 countries were
tested (for various reasons, data files
were available for only 39 countries for
this study). Countries participating in
the study were required to administer
tests to students in the middle-school
years, but could choose whether or not
data on teachers, and school- and country-level data on the distribution of decision-making powers within the education system. TIMSS does not include
data on spending, so current national
public spending per student in secondary
education in international dollars was
calculated on the basis of UNESCO
and World Bank data. Further countrylevel data on institutional features of
the education system—mainly concerning the distribution of decisionmaking powers and the size of the private-schooling market—come from the
to participate in the primary and final
school years. This paper focuses on the
middle-school years, where students
enrolled in the two adjacent grades containing the largest proportion of 13-yearold students (7th- and 8th-graders in
most countries) were tested.This data set
includes data on more than 250,000 individual students, who form a representative sample of a population of more than
30 million students in the 39 countries.
TIMSS contains student-level data
on achievement and family background
and various institutional data: class-level
Japan
Korea
Czech Republic
Hong Kong
Slovenia
Netherlands
Hungary
Austria
525 Slovak Republic
Ireland Australia Canada Belgium
Israel Germany
Russia
UK
Sweden US
Thailand
New Zealand
France Norway
Switzerland
Spain
Iceland
475
Denmark
Romania Latvia
Greece
Lithuania
Cyprus
Portugal
Iran
425
Colombia
Low spenders;
low achievement
375
0
$1,000
$2,000
Kuwait
High spenders;
low achievement
$3,000
$4,000
$5,000
$6,000
$7,000
$8,000
Annual spending per student
S U M M E R 2 0 0 1 / E D U C AT I O N M AT T E R S
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OECD educational indicators.
I performed the analysis at the level
of the individual student (not the class,
school, district, or country) because this
directly links student performance to
the teaching environment. This allowed
me to control for the influence of each
individual student’s background, assess
the influence of the actual resource level
and teacher characteristics each student
faces, and look at the institutional features that are relevant to individual students. Previous international studies
have used country-level data to analyze
what influences student performance.
These macro approaches cannot control for individual influences on a student’s performance. Country-level analyses are also limited because they can
analyze only institutions that work at the
country level, such as centralized exams,
and not institutional features that work
at lower levels, such as teachers’ influence
over the curriculum.
The trouble with performing the
analysis at the individual level is that
there are no independent, individual
observations for many variables. Within
the TIMSS data set, the primary sampling unit (or PSU) is the school, not the
independence of individual observations
and reducing the number of independent
observations on these variables. For
instance, in comparing students in countries with centralized exams with those
with no centralized exams, there were
only 39 independent observations (the
number of countries in the TIMSS sample). Unless the econometric method is
adjusted to account for the lack of variation in some of the independent variables, the findings will appear more
robust than they are. I use a statistical
method known as robust linear regression with countries as strata and schools
(or countries where appropriate) as the
primary sampling unit to calculate
appropriate standard errors for my findings and to adjust for this potential bias.
Results
This study deals with five main institutional features of a nation’s educational
system: 1) centralized exams; 2) the distribution of decision-making power
between schools and their governing
bodies; 3) the level of influence that
teachers and teacher unions have on
school policy; 4) the distribution of deci-
Schools have a high degree of autonomy in the
Netherlands, where 73 percent of decisions are
made at the local level. By contrast, Greece,
Norway, and Portugal allow local school personnel
to make fewer than 25 percent of the decisions.
student or classroom. Individual students who attend the same school may
share some characteristics that are not
captured by survey data; the individual
observations are not wholly independent of one another. Also, several of the
resource and institutional variables, such
as the school’s decision-making responsibility and the existence of national
examinations, are measured at the school
or country level, further decreasing the
70
sion-making power among levels of government, from local to national; and 5)
the extent of competition from the private-school sector (see Figure 3).
Before we can test hypotheses, we
must control for the effects of family
background and the level of resources
devoted to education. In this study, the
educational level achieved by the students’ parents was strongly positively
related to students’ educational per-
E D U C AT I O N M AT T E R S / S U M M E R 2 0 0 1
formance. Students of parents who completed secondary school (or higher)
achieved considerably more than students of parents who finished only primary school.The effect of a family’s having more books at home, shorthand for
the educational and social background
of the family, was even stronger than
that of the highest educational level
achieved by the parents. The performance of students increases steadily as
you go from students having fewer than
10 books at home to those having more
than 200 books. Students scored 54
points better in math and 57 in science
(on a range with an international average of 500 and an international standard
deviation of 100) when they had more
than 200 books at home compared with
students who had fewer than 10. Just
how big are these effects? Quite large.
Consider that the average test-score difference between 7th- and 8th- graders is
40 points in math and 47 in science.
The results for school spending are
consistent with the literature: no strong
positive relationship exists between
spending and student performance.
When other factors are taken into
account, higher spending and smaller
class sizes seem to correspond to inferior
mathematics and science results, though
the overall effect is relatively small. Nevertheless, providing schools with the
proper instructional materials and supplies seems to have a positive effect on
performance. Students in schools whose
principals reported that they do not suffer from inadequate instructional materials scored 7 points higher in math and
science relative to students in schools
whose principals reported that they were
somewhat limited by inadequate materials. Students in schools with a great
shortage of materials scored 6 points
worse in math and 12 in science. Both of
these findings should be interpreted
with care, however: inadequate supplies
may have led to poor achievement, or
principals of low-achieving schools may
tend to blame their poor achievement on
inadequate supplies.
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INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE WOESSMANN
The quality of a nation’s teaching
force also affects student performance
and therefore must be controlled for. If
teachers’ age is held constant, then more
years of experience are positively related
to student performance. But if teachers’ experience is held constant, teachers’
age is negatively related to student performance. This may reflect the positive
effects of having more-experienced teachers combined with the negative effects of
large age differences between teachers
and students. Aging teachers may not
understand a younger generation as well
as younger teachers, and their motivation
levels may be in decline as well.
Teachers who finished secondary
school plus some teacher training added
16 points to students’ math scores and
24 to science (compared with teachers
who did not complete secondary education). Having a bachelor’s degree added
11 points to students’ math scores, 12
points to science. Possessing a master’s
or doctorate added 26 points in math, 32
in science. Overall, the effects of teachers’ educational levels were larger in science than in math.
Altogether, the relationship between
school resources and student performance is ambiguous. Per-pupil spending
and smaller class size do not have positive
effects, while having decent instructional
materials and experienced, well-educated
teachers do show positive effects.
Centralized exams. Of the 39 countries in this study, 15 have some kind of
centralized exams, in the sense that an
administrative body beyond the schooling level writes and administers the
exams to all students. This can profoundly alter the incentive structure
within the educational system by measuring student performance against an
external standard, making performance
comparable across classes and schools. It
makes it easier to tell whether a given student’s poor performance is an exception
within a class or whether the whole class
is doing poorly relative to the country as
a whole. In other words, centralized
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In schools where teacher unions had a lot
of influence over the curriculum, students
performed 32 points worse in math,
18 points in science.
exams make it obvious whether it is the
student or the teacher who is to blame.
This reduces the teachers’ leeway and
creates incentives to use resources more
effectively. It makes the whole system
transparent: parents can assess the performance of children, teachers, and
schools; heads of schools can assess the
performance of teachers; and the government and administration can assess
the performance of different schools.
Centralized exams also alter the
incentive structure for students by making their performance more transparent to employers and advanced educational institutions. Their rewards for
learning thus should grow and become
more visible. Without external assessments, students in a class looking to
maximize their joint welfare will encourage one another not to study very hard.
Centralized exams render this strategy
futile. All in all, given this analysis, we
should expect centralized exams to boost
student performance.
And they seem to. All things being
equal, students in countries with centralized exams scored 16 points higher
in math and 11 points higher in science,
although the science finding is not statistically significant due to the small
number of countries in the sample (see
Figure 3 for results). Furthermore, students in schools where external exams or
standardized tests heavily influence the
curriculum scored 4 points higher in
math, though there appears to be no
effect in science. This suggests that science tests may lend themselves less readily to standardization.
Decision-making between schools and
their governing bodies. Some school systems are characterized by a high degree
of centralization, where decisions on a
wide range of issues are taken out of
the schools’ hands. Other school systems are highly decentralized; most decisions are made at the local level. For
instance, schools have a high degree of
autonomy in the Netherlands, where 73
percent of decisions are made at the
local level, according to the OECD. By
contrast, Greece, Norway, and Portugal
allow local school personnel to make
fewer than 25 percent of the decisions.
Here the question is, What is the division of decision-making powers between
schools and the government in a country, and how do these divisions affect
student achievement?
The effects of granting more autonomy to schools are hard to predict. On
the one hand, schools need a high degree
of autonomy in order to respond to the
demands of parents—a prerequisite for
competition. Also, the educators within
a school should have more knowledge of
effective teaching strategies for their students than central administrators. Likewise, individual teachers should know
what are the best textbooks and supplies
for their students. Heads of schools
should also have more knowledge than
central administrators about which
teachers to hire and who deserves promotion or a raise in salary.
On the other hand, enhanced autonomy makes it easier for school personnel to reduce their workload, unless they
are subject to external monitoring and
evaluation. The more flexibility a school
has, the more important it is to have
external standards and assessments.
Putting decisions on the size of the
school budget in the hands of school
personnel might also harm performance;
it is clearly in their interest to garner
S U M M E R 2 0 0 1 / E D U C AT I O N M AT T E R S
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Policies Matter (Figure 3)
An analysis of TIMSS data shows that weak unions, school-based control over hiring and
salaries, centralized exams, and a healthy private-school sector lead to higher student achievement.
.33
Teacher unions don't
strongly influence curriculum
.19
.29
Increasing private
enrollment by 10%
.13
.16
Centralized
exams
.11
.13
School autonomy
in hiring teachers
Math results
.05
Science results
.11
School autonomy in
setting teacher salaries
.15
.00
.05
.10
.15
.20
.25
.30
.35
Effect on student performance
(measured in standard deviations*)
* A standard deviation is 100 points, somewhat more than the difference between the United States' and Japan's performance
in mathematics (see Figure 1).
additional funds for themselves or
resources that lighten their workload.
We should expect, then, that giving
schools the power to set their own budgets, performance goals, and standards of
what to teach will have an adverse impact
on student achievement. Such powers
are probably best left to central authorities. By contrast, decisions on how to
meet the goals and standards, such as the
choice of teaching techniques and the
purchase of supplies, are best left to
points better in math, 6 in science. Students in countries with centralized textbook approval scored 10 points better in
math, 6 in science.These findings are not
statistically significant due to the small
number of independent observations,
but they are nonetheless suggestive.
Students in schools that had primary
responsibility for setting the school budget scored 6 points worse in math and 3
in science (the science effect, however, is
statistically insignificant). By contrast,
All things equal, students in countries with
centralized exams scored 16 points higher
in math and 11 points higher in science.
schools, as long as an effective monitoring and assessment program is in place.
The first variable I analyze is
whether having a centrally designed
curriculum and a centralized list of
approved textbooks is conducive to student performance. These are essentially
decisions about what schools are
expected to cover. Students in countries with centralized curricula scored 11
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giving schools autonomy in purchasing
their supplies goes hand in hand with
superior achievement.This is also true for
decisions on hiring teachers. Students in
schools that hire their own teachers scored
13 points higher in math, 5 in science.
Students in schools that determine their
own teacher salaries scored 11 points
higher in math, 15 in science. Centralized decision-making on curriculum issues
E D U C AT I O N M AT T E R S / S U M M E R 2 0 0 1
seems to prevent schools from seeking to
reduce their workload and thus raises
student achievement. Conversely, local
control of teacher recruitment and compensation may allow schools to retain a
more effective staff.
The influence of teachers. Within
schools, the incentives that teachers face
and their ability to influence the process
also affect student achievement. Besides
a student’s family, teachers probably have
the greatest impact on student achievement. Since they cannot be easily monitored, they also have a great deal of
freedom to pursue their teaching in
whatever way they wish. Often they face
conflicting interests. They clearly have a
genuine interest in increasing their
income at a given workload or decreasing their workload at a given income.
Nonetheless, seeing their students learning also gives teachers pleasure, which
encourages them to work harder no matter what their income. Furthermore,
teachers who perform poorly may face
negative consequences from their heads
of school or from parents. The institutional setting will influence them to
behave more in one way than another.
It is important to emphasize the difference between teachers acting individually and as part of a union, for these
settings may have very different consequences for student achievement.When
teachers act collectively, they are a potentially powerful political interest group;
their sheer numbers give them voting
power that politicians cannot ignore.The
aim of teacher unions is to promote the
interests of teachers and to defend them
against the interests of other groups.The
unions, therefore, will focus on the interests that are not advanced by other interest groups—mainly, increasing teachers’
pay and decreasing their workload.They
can also exert collective bargaining power.
In doing so, they will advance the interest of the median teacher, favoring a leveling of salary scales instead of differentiation by merit. Other things equal,
strong teacher unions should promote
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INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE WOESSMANN
behavior that is detrimental to student
performance. Harvard University economist Caroline Hoxby’s research has
shown that teacher unionization helps
explain why schools can perform worse
when given more resources. Hoxby found
that teacher unions act to increase school
resources but reduce the productivity
with which these resources are used.The
cumulative effect is a reduction in school
productivity (the ratio of student performance to spending).
By contrast, when teachers act individually, their deep, personal knowledge
of their students and the students’ needs
may increase their effectiveness and thus
outweigh their interest in decreasing
their workload. The effect of teacher
influence may also differ among decision-making areas. A high degree of
teacher leeway in making decisions about
which textbooks to buy should be conducive to student learning, since the
teachers know best how to teach their
students. But a high degree of influence
in determining salary levels or the
amount of subject matter to be covered
should be detrimental to student performance. Altogether, the predicted
effect of increasing the power of individual teachers is uncertain.
Here the results are similar to those
obtained in the analysis of decisionmaking divisions between schools and
administration. Students in schools
whose principals reported that teachers had primary responsibility for determining the school budget scored 13
points worse in math, 5 in science. Likewise, students of teachers who reported
that they had a lot of influence on the
subject matter to be taught performed
worse in science, while the effect in math
was statistically insignificant.
By contrast, students scored 14
points better in math and 7 points better in science if teachers had primary
responsibility for buying supplies.Teachers’ influence on the curriculum needs to
be divided according to the way they
exercise it. Students in schools where
each teacher individually had a lot of
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influence on the curriculum performed
12 points better in math, 11 points in science.Teachers’ being able to choose their
specific textbooks also has a positive
effect in math. But in schools where
teachers acting collectively as a union
had a lot of influence over the curriculum, students performed 32 points worse
in math, 18 points in science.
Overall, these findings on schools’
and teachers’influence give a clear picture.
If schools and teachers can use their intimate knowledge of their students to
choose the best teaching method, then
they can teach more effectively. But if
they can use their influence, whether
acting collectively or individually, to
reduce their workload, then students’
learning opportunities will suffer.
Decision-making among levels of government. Different levels of government—local, intermediate, and national—have varying degrees of control
over school systems worldwide. In the
United States most educational decision-making and basically all fund allocation take place at the local level. In
Germany the responsibility for planning and purchasing educational
resources lies mainly with the intermediate level of government, namely state
authorities. In Greece almost all decisions and basically all funding take place
at the national level.
Local officials and school personnel
might collude in determining the level
and use of funds. Giving the national
level more power can make collusion
harder to achieve, but national officers do
not have enough information to make
wise decisions on allocating resources
among various needs. A self-interested
central administration will also find it
easier to develop excessive bureaucracy
and to divert resources to the central
level. All in all, the intermediate level
may be better positioned to govern the
schools. It may be far enough away to
make lobbying difficult, yet close enough
to effectively monitor the schools.
In this study, students in countries
where schools have more decision-making powers in managing personnel, planning, choosing their instructional methods, and deciding how to use resources
scored significantly higher in science
and higher in math (though the effect in
math is statistically insignificant). If the
percentage of decisions made at the
school level increased by 10 percentage
points, students scored 8 points higher
in science. Students in countries where
a larger share of decisions was made at
the national level scored lower in both
math and science (the effect in math,
however, was statistically insignificant).
The level at which schools are funded
also affects student performance. More
responsibility for purchasing educational
Students in countries with larger shares
of their enrollment in privately managed
schools scored significantly higher in
both math and science.
Here, again, the predicted incentives
are mixed. Local levels of government are
more accountable to parents and possess
more knowledge about the needs of their
particular communities. At the same
time, local officials will have closer ties
to school personnel, making schoolbased interest groups more influential.
resources at the national and local levels
appears to correspond to lower student
achievement, at least in mathematics.
Students performed considerably better
when responsibility for purchasing educational resources resided at an intermediate level of government. This suggests
that an authority that is close enough to
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73
local schools to understand their needs,
yet far enough away to avoid collusion
between local officials and school employees, is the best place to rest responsibility for funding education.
Competition from private schools. The
level of competition that public schools
face from private schools is another important institutional feature.The existence of
more private schools gives parents who
want to raise their children’s achievement
the opportunity to choose whether to send
them to a particular private school or to a
public school.Because the loss of students
to private schools may have negative repercussions for the heads of public schools,
increased competition from private schools
should have a positive effect on the efficiency of resource use in the public schools.
The existence of private schools should
also increase a country’s overall achievement
level. The heads of private schools have
clear monetary incentives to use resources
in ways that maximize student performance—thereby giving more parents reasons to choose their schools.Therefore,the
more privately managed educational institutions there are in a nation,the higher student performance should be.
The degree of competition from private schools varies greatly worldwide.
The Netherlands has by far the highest
share of students attending privately managed schools (76 percent), followed by
the United Kingdom (36 percent) and
South Korea (35 percent). However,
fewer than 1 percent of Dutch schools are
financially independent in the sense that
they receive less than half of their core
funding from government agencies.
Countries with the largest shares of students attending financially independent
private schools are Japan (24 percent),
South Korea (18 percent), and the United
States (16 percent). Australia, Austria,
the Czech Republic, Denmark, France,
Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Norway,
Spain, and Sweden have virtually no independent private schools. Students in
countries with larger shares of their
enrollment in privately managed schools
74
scored significantly higher in both math
and science. If the share of enrollment in
privately managed schools was 10 percentage points higher, students scored 6
points better in math, 5 in science. The
effect was even larger when only those private institutions that were financially
independent were considered.
The Netherlands and Belgium are
the countries with by far the largest
share of public funds going to private
institutions (75 percent and 63 percent,
respectively). Meanwhile, less than half
a percent of public funding goes to private schools in Austria, Greece, Ireland,
New Zealand, the Russian Federation,
and the United States. Countries with a
higher share of public-education spending going to private institutions performed better in math and science
(though the effect in science is statistically insignificant). The effect was even
stronger when only those expenditures
were counted that went to independent
private institutions receiving less than
half of their core funding from government. If the share of public funds going
to independent private schools rose by
1 percentage point, there was a 12 point
increase in math achievement. This suggests that student performance is higher
in educational systems where private
schools take over resource allocation
from public decision-makers.
Institutions Do Matter
Taken together, the effects of all these
institutional variables add up to more
than 210 points in math and 150 in science. In other words, a student who
faced institutions that were all conducive
to student performance would have
scored more than 200 points higher in
math than a student who faced institutions that were all detrimental to student
performance. In short, institutional variation across countries explains far more
of the variation in student test scores
than do differences in the resources
devoted to education.
More specifically, having centralized
E D U C AT I O N M AT T E R S / S U M M E R 2 0 0 1
exams and a large private-schooling
sector seems conducive to student performance. Generally, school autonomy
seems to have a positive impact—but
only when schools are given extensive
decision-making powers over the purchase of supplies, the hiring and rewarding of teachers, and the choosing of
instructional methods. Giving schools
power over designing the curriculum syllabus, approving textbook lists, and determining the school budget seems to be
detrimental to student performance.The
effect of teachers’ influence seems to
depend on how it is exercised. Students
seem to benefit from their teachers’ having influence over the curriculum, but
only when they act as individuals and not
as part of a union. It appears to be better for students if teachers significantly
influence the choice of supplies, but
worse if they have a strong say in the
amount of material to be covered.
The only difference between the
results for math and science is that the
effects of standardization seem to be
more positive in math than in science.
This shows up in the fact that centralized
exams, curricula, and textbook approval
have stronger effects in math than in science. One can speculate that mathematics is easier to standardize, whereas
science may require more creativity and
initiative on the part of teachers.
For education policy, the results of
this study suggest that the crucial question is not one of providing more
resources but of improving the institutional environment in which schools
function. Spending more money within
an institutional system that sets poor
incentives will not improve student performance. An institutional system in
which all the people involved have an
incentive to improve student performance is the only alternative that promises
positive effects.
–Ludger Woessmann is a research associate at
the Kiel Institute of World Economics in Kiel,
Germany. To view his study in its entirety, log
on to www.edmattersmore.org.
www.edmatters.org