M.Ed. / This qualitative phenomenological study focuses on school choice as challenge to principals of Sharpeville public primary schools. Different aspects of these choices are explored. School choice is an important component of parental involvement in the education of their children. Parents and learners tend to be open about their right through the support of the Schools Act 84 of 1996. You may not discriminate on the basis of race trough the language policy at your school. This means that you may not use language as a cover or smoke screen to keep learners out of your school on the basis of their race. The Constitution (Act 108 of 1996) stipulates that no unfair discrimination may take place against anyone on any of the following grounds: race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic of social origin, colour, sexual orientation, (for example homosexuality), age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth. The question then arises, what makes learners of public primary schools choose the schools that are not in the areas where they live? What is interesting in the ex Model C schools that they cannot get in township schools? There are many aspects which give meaning to concept 'school choice'. In order for parents to view school choice as priority in education, certain of these aspects need to be considered. These include qualities that are desired in school, the , climate of the school that is conducive to teaching and learning. Kinds of activities enjoyed together by all in the school, the effective school management. In addition to exploring these aspects, the study investigates what attracts the children including what gives challenges to school principals. The findings of this study show that a school is able to market itself if it has a vision and mission statement, quality education, ethos, excellent pass rate and if 71 it serves the needs of the community. Learners maintain relationships with schools that serve as learning organisation. Moloi (2002:7) explains that a learning organisation acknowledges the importance of individual and group processes to enhance learning in their environments. The process whereby the data was collected is described. This included interviews of individual learners, the data analysis is examined and the themes that emerge are discussed within the framework of the existing literature on how parents choose schools for their children. The study concludes with a discussion of the implication for further research. Guidelines to the principals are suggested. These guidelines are for the enhancement of school choice.

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In Sweden, there has been an increased discrepancy between increasing merit ratings and decreasing results in international surveys such as PISA. At the same time, since the 1990s, Sweden has had several reforms that resulted in increased competition, decentralization and trust-based evaluations. Several studies have shown that grade leniency depends on school provider as well as level of competition between schools. This study focuses on how grade inflation in municipality schools for 9th graders is affected when an independent school is established nearby, using a fixed-effects model at the municipality level but with control variables at the individual level. I study all Swedish 9th graders between 2003-2017. An alternative specification with school fixed effects is also presented. I find that grades are set more leniently in competitive municipalities and that grade deviance is highly correlated with socio-economic factors. It is also concluded that the effect size is small in comparison to the average provider difference and individual level characteristics. The study extends the literature by focusing on grade inflation amongst municipality schools, and by focusing on the change in grade inflation rather than the average effect over time in terms of provider differences.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the economics of education and market design. The first two chapters are united in their attention on school choice issues. Chapter 1 considers a specific application, whereas chapter 2 focuses on a matching mechanism widely used in multiple applications. Both chapters 1 and 3 explore equity concerns in education but through very different lenses (affirmative action vs. educational investment) and very different settings (the United States vs. Vietnam). Chapter 1 addresses the diversity issue that is especially prevalent in elite schools that select students based on exams. Whereas previous studies only consider the direct impact on elite schools, I quantify the effects of two widely-discussed affirmative action plans on both elite and regular schools in New York City. I find that the two plans have quite different effects. First, there is a trade-off between improving diversity and maintaining student quality in elite schools as measured by state test scores in middle school. Despite taking into account the socioeconomic status of students' neighborhoods, the Chicago plan gives rise mostly to reshuffling within elite schools. Thus, both the overall racial composition and quality of incoming students are largely preserved as in the status quo. In contrast, the Top 7% plan, which would accept into the elite sector students in the top 7% by academic performance of each public middle school, causes considerable flows of students between the elite and regular sectors. The elite sector experiences a substantial increase in the proportions of Black and Hispanic students, along with a decrease in average student quality. Analyzing the difference between the outcomes of these two policies provides some insight into how the two objectives—diversity and peer quality in elite schools—might be better balanced in general. The second difference between the plans arises because they transform the distribution of diversity across schools in different ways. The Chicago plan reduces the differences among schools within the elite sector, while the Top 7% plan reduces the gap in diversity between the two sectors even as it increases within-sector dispersion. Both plans result in considerable changes in school assignments in the regular school sector, thus affecting the average student quality in these schools. Chapter 2, joint work with Guillaume Haeringer and Silvio Ravaioli, uses a lab experiment to study learning dynamics when participants receive feedback in centralized matching mechanisms. Our design allows for two types of learning: to coordinate within the same environment as well as to understand the underlying mechanisms. We provide additional evidence to previous work that the majority of the deviations from truth-telling, the dominant strategy in the Deferred Acceptance mechanism, are those that do not affect payoffs. Furthermore, by explicitly analyzing learning, we can confirm that at least some of the participants learn about the optimality of truth-telling, and their departures from it happen primarily when they face the same environment being repeated. Finally, we find that when learning to coordinate, agents tend to retain their previous strategy when the payoff from this strategy is high. This is suggestive evidence of reinforcement learning. Chapter 3 documents the pattern of educational investments for high school students across different demographics and their effects on performance on the college entrance exam and in college. Survey data from Vietnam shows that high school students from higher-income households have higher education expenditure and participation in extra classes (both at the extensive and intensive margin). Minority and rural students invest less than their non-minority and urban counterparts even after controlling for income. Out of these investments, only extra classes during the school year education expenditure other than that on extra classes are effective in increasing college entrance exam scores. In terms of college performance, a higher entrance exam score leads to a slightly higher grade point average at graduation, controlling for academic department fixed effects and investments in high school. Neither education expenditure or participation in extra classes in high school show any significant effects on college performance, except that already captured in the entrance exam scores. I record multiple gender differences. Female high school students tend to receive more investments. Even though they perform slightly worse on the entrance exam than their male peers with the same investments, they perform better in college, given the same entrance exam scores.

This diploma thesis examines the pupil selection to Marie Montessori pedagogical classes and schools. The aim of the thesis was to find out how the individual schools choose pupils in Marie Montessori classes and schools. Furthermore, it was examined what reasons parents have to choose this pedagogy for their child and what conditions parents and pupils have to fulfill for admission to this education. Last but not least, I analyzed how the admission procedure is taking place. The basic research design was a multi-case study. I chose four primary schools with this pedagogy in the big city as well as in smaller towns. I divided the research into two parts. In the first part I conducted semi-structured interviews with employees of selected schools and with parents of children from Montessori classes. In the second part I observed the first class admission interviews. I have found out that each school has defined pupil selection requirements and that these requirements vary considerably between schools. Parents opt for the Montessori School because of its individual approach to individuals. Teachers believe that it is appropriate that parents apply the same educational methods at home and that they would like to apply this as an admission criterion. The whole admission interviews were the same as in...

Under 1990-talet infördes radikala, marknadsorienterade reformer i Sverige som gav upphov till utökade möjligheter att välja andra skolor än de kommunala. Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka huruvida föräldrar värderar att bo i ett område med fler skolalternativ. Vi gör detta genom att studera effekten av andelen friskoleelever i en kommun på bostadspriser i kommunen. Studien använder paneldata på kommunnivå från 2010 till 2018 hämtad från Statistiska Centralbyrån (SCB) och Skolverket. Det empiriska sambandet analyseras med fixed effects modeller vilket möjliggör kontroll för års- och kommunfixa effekter. Resultatet visar att det finns ett positivt men statistiskt icke-signifikant samband mellan andelen friskoleelever och huspriser. Resultatet är robust mot en rad utförda känslighetstester. Studien finner således inte belägg för att föräldrar söker sig till områden med fler skolalternativ. Detta ger vare sig stöd för fortsatt implementering av liknande reformer som främjar alternativ till den kommunala skolan eller reformer som reducerar möjligheterna till skolval. / During the 1990s radical, market oriented reforms were implemented in Sweden which allowed for increased opportunities to choose other schools than the public. The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether parents value living in an area with more school options. We do this by studying the effect of the share of pupils who are enrolled in a private school in a municipality on housing prices in that municipality. The study uses paneldata on the municipality level from 2010 to 2018 gathered from Statistics Sweden and the Swedish National Agency for Education. The empirical relationship is analyzed using fixed effects models which makes it possible to control for year and municipality fixed effects. The results show that a positive but statistically insignificant relationship exists between the share of private school students and housing prices. The result remains robust for different sensitivity tests. Therefore, the study does not find support for the assumption that parents value living in an area with more school options, which neither provides basis for further implementation of similar reforms that promote alternatives to public school nor reforms that reduce school choice.

In 1992, the Swedish education system was reformed and by that, school choice was introduced. The intention of the reform was that competition between schools would improve the level of education; however, the results among Swedish pupils have deteriorated and the differences between schools have increased since the introduction. This has caused much debate on school choice, and especially school choice in relation to socioeconomic background and segregation. This study examines whether GIS can be used to detect possible relations between the school choices, socioeconomic backgrounds and residential areas of pupils in Uppsala Municipality in Sweden. Most of the previously conducted research do not use GIS as a tool, despite the spatial aspect of this issue. By mapping the data, any geographical patterns can easier be detected, patterns which can be hard to observe in other data presentation methods such as tables or graphs. The school choices and the commuting pattern among pupils applying for preschool or year six have been visualized in relation to the social index of their corresponding living areas. Four areas and four schools have been selected as samples in order to evaluate the issue from the perspective of both the pupils and the schools. The results show that GIS is an effective way of presenting complex data and a useful tool for detecting geographical clusters. The differences in choices made by pupils of dissimilar social background can be visually detected by comparing the maps to each other. The preschool pupils tend to apply for the nearest schools, while some of the pupils applying for year six are willing to travel further distances in order to get to a more popular school or an area less socially vulnerable than their residential area.  Furthermore, some deviant school choice patterns can easily be explained by examining the surrounding environment; the map can reveal for instance that the pupils had no other choice to make, that geographical obstructions such as water bodies or large streets act like separators or that the social index of a residential area perhaps do not match the affiliation felt by the inhabitants. Due to the complexity of school choice and segregation, a GIS might not be used alone for concluding on a relation between the two. However, it is a very useful tool for indicating occurrences of the phenomena and, most important, highlighting areas that are interesting for further investigation. / År 1992 reformerades det svenska utbildningssystemet och med det implementerades det fria skolvalet. Avsikten med reformen var att konkurrensen mellan skolor skulle förbättra utbildningsnivån, dock har resultaten bland svenska elever försämrats och skillnaderna mellan skolor ökat sedan introduktionen. Detta har orsakat mycket debatt om skolval och speciellt skolval i förhållande till socioekonomisk bakgrund och segregation. Denna studie undersöker om GIS kan användas för att upptäcka eventuella sammanhang mellan skolval, socioekonomiska bakgrunder och bostadsområden bland elever i Uppsala kommun i Sverige. Det mesta av tidigare forskning inom ämnet använder inte GIS som ett verktyg, detta trots problemställningens rumsliga aspekt. Genom att kartera data öppnas möjligheter för att enklare upptäcka geografiska mönster som kan vara svåra att observera med andra presentationsmetoder som tabeller eller diagram. Skolval och pendling bland elever som har ansökt om plats i förskoleklass eller till årskurs sex har visualiserats och blivit satt i sammanhang med den sociala indexen för elevernas bostadsområden. Fyra områden och fyra skolor har valts ut för att kunna utvärdera frågan ur både elevers och skolors perspektiv. Resultaten visar att GIS är ett effektivt sätt att presentera komplexa data och ett användbart verktyg för att upptäcka geografiska kluster. Skillnaderna i skolval bland elever av olika sociala bakgrunder kan upptäckas visuellt genom att jämföra kartor med varandra. Förskoleklasselever tenderar att ansöka om närmaste skola, medan några av eleverna som ska börja årskurs sex är villiga att resa längre avstånd för att komma till en mer populär skola eller till ett område som är mindre socialt utsatt än deras bostadsområde. Dessutom kan vissa avvikande skolvalsmönster enkelt förklaras genom att undersöka den omgivande miljön; kartan kan till exempel avslöja att eleverna inte hade några andra valmöjligheter, att geografiska hinder såsom vattendrag eller stora gator agerar som avgränsare eller att det sociala indexet till ett bostadsområde inte matchar den sociala tillhörigheten invånarna själva upplever. På grund av komplexiteten bakom skolval och segregation, bör GIS inte användas ensamt för att konkludera om det finns ett samband mellan de två. Det är dock ett mycket användbart verktyg för att indikera förekomster av fenomenet och framförallt för att lyfta fram områden som är intressanta för vidare utredning.

Education is at the center of upskilling human capital in developing countries, thereby positively influencing economic growth and development. For decades, many education policies targeted at developing countries have been narrowly focused on improving access to basic education (Barrett et al., 2015). However, access to education does not always translate into educational attainment. Thus, beyond the initial goal of expanding access to education in developing countries, there has been a growing focus on delivering quality education on the development agenda for developing countries in recent years. One popular policy instrument in enhancing education quality has been school choice. Analysis of school choice and the subsequent academic performance outcomes can provide new insight on the economics of education to policymakers, schools, parents and students alike. This dissertation consists of three essays, which focus on understanding the demand for public schools and the returns to school quality in a merit-based competitive school assignment system. In particular, these papers investigate how positive recognition of ability through awards can affect the students’ decision-making process; what the students might gain from attending a more selective school; and how students balance between their preferences for school characteristics and maximizing their chances of admission in a competitive school choice market. Altogether, this dissertation highlights the role of information as well as educational background in explaining differences in school choice decisions and achievement outcomes. In chapter 1, I examine the role of positive recognition on students’ school choice decisions and achievement outcomes in the context of academic competitions. Academic competitions are an essential aspect of education. Given the prevalence and the amount of resources spent organizing them, a natural question that arises is the extent of the impact on winners’ education outcomes when their talent is recognized. I exploit the award structure in Vietnam’s annual regional academic competitions to answer this question. By leveraging the pre-determined share of awards, I apply a regression discontinuity design to assess the effects of receiving a Prize and receiving an Honorable Mention. I find that both types of awards lead to improvements in educational outcomes, and the results are persistent after three years. I also find some evidence of specialization associated with receiving a Prize Award. I hypothesize that long-term effects can be partially explained by school choice: winners are significantly more likely to apply to and consequently enroll in higher-quality schools. There are also prominent differences in educational choices and outcomes along gender lines: female students are more sensitive to award receipts than male students. These findings underscore the positive motivational effects of awards, even among the top performers in a highly competitive schooling market. In chapter 2, I explore the impacts of attending a selective school on students’ educational outcomes. Students in Vietnam are assigned to public high schools based on their performance in a placement exam as well as their ranked choice of schools. Public schools are often oversubscribed, which contributes to exogeneous admission score cutoffs below which students are not considered for admission. By applying a regression discontinuity research design to these admission score cutoffs, I find that students who are marginally admitted to their top-choice public schools are exposed to significantly higher-achieving peers while finding themselves at the bottom of the ability distribution. They experience some improvements in standardized test scores at the end of their high school, but fare worse in school-based achievements and graduation outcomes. These findings highlight the importance of the potential trade-offs between attending more selective schools with better peer quality while receiving a lower ordinal rank in the ability distribution in the assigned school. In addition, the impacts of selective schools on students vary along the lines of the students’ own attitude towards studying as well as their middle school educational background. This substantial heterogeneity collectively highlights the importance of considering the students’ past educational background in interpreting how selective schools might impact students’ outcomes. In chapter 3, I investigate students’ preferences, strategic behaviors and welfare outcomes under a competitive school choice market by conducting a survey on school choice participants in two school districts in Vietnam. The original survey data on school choice participants, coupled with administrative data, afford me the opportunity to understand true preferences and strategies without involving strong assumptions on the students’ beliefs. In order to balance out their own preferences and chance of admission in such a competitive setting, the majority of students exhibit strategic behaviors. However, students from less advanced educational backgrounds tend to have large belief errors and are more likely to make strategic mistakes. Consequently, these students are at a disadvantage, as they find themselves among lower-achieving peers in their new schools. With preference data from the survey, I estimate the students’ preferences for school characteristics and find evidence of heterogeneity in students’ preferences for school characteristics: students from more advanced educational backgrounds value school selectivity and teacher qualification more than their peers. Using these estimates to evaluate students’ welfare under the current assignment mechanism as well as a counterfactual strategy-proof deferred acceptance algorithm, I find that switching to deferred acceptance algorithm can be welfare-improving, particularly for high-performing students. Overall, this paper provides a starting point to directly study the drawbacks of manipulable assignment mechanisms by using survey data and highlight the potential disparity in preferences and application strategies that can further widen the gap in educational mobility.

This dissertation empirically studies market design based centralized school choice. Chapter 1 explores the dynamic relationship between school choices made at different educational stages and how it affects racial segregation across schools. It uses New York City (NYC) public school choice data to ask: "How does the middle school that a student attends affect her high school application and assignment?" The paper takes two approaches to answer the question. First, it exploits quasi-random assignments to middle schools generated by the tie-breaking feature of the admissions system. It finds evidence that students who attend high-achievement middle schools apply and are assigned to high-achievement high schools. Second, based on this empirical evidence, the paper develops and estimates a novel dynamic two-period model of school choice to decompose this effect and analyze the equilibrium consequences of counterfactual policies. In the model, students applying to middle schools are aware that their choices may affect which high schools they eventually attend. Specifically, the middle schools that students attend can change how they rank high schools (the application channel) and how high schools rank their applications (the priority channel). It finds that the application channel is quantitatively more important. Using the estimated model, the paper asks if an early affirmative action policy can address segregation in later stages. It finds that a middle school-only affirmative action policy can alter students' high school applications and thus their assignments, contributing to desegregating high schools. This finding suggests that early intervention in the form of middle school admissions reform can be a useful tool for desegregation. Chapter 2 studies the relationship between the popularity of selective exam schools and their academic performance measures. NYC specialized high schools are highly selective and popular among students and parents. Nevertheless, the reason why those schools are so popular compared to non-specialized high schools has not been studied yet. This paper aims to answer the question in the context of academic performance by studying the relationship among three factors: preference of specialized high schools applicants, peer qualities, and causal effectiveness of those schools. First, a unique feature of the NYC public high school admission system enables linking applicants' preferences on specialized high schools and non-specialized high schools and hence jointly estimating those using their rank-ordered lists. Next, it estimates the value-added measures of high schools and finally links them back to the estimated preference in the first step. The paper finds that the additional valuation that students/parents put on specialized high schools relative to non-specialized high schools is mostly related to the higher peer quality of specialized high schools. Chapter 3 develops a method of inferring students' preferences from school choice data. Recent evidence suggests that market participants make mistakes (even) in a strategically straightforward environment but seldom with significant payoff consequences. This paper explores the implications of such payoff-insignificant mistakes for inferring students' preferences from school choice data. Uncertainties arise from the use of lotteries or other sources in a typical school choice setting; they make certain mistakes more costly than others, thus making some preferences---those whose misrepresentation would be more costly and would thus be avoided by students---more reliably inferable than others. The paper proposes a novel method of exploiting the structure of the uncertainties present in a matching environment to robustly infer student preferences under the Deferred-Acceptance mechanism. Monte Carlo simulations show that the method is superior to existing alternative approaches.

The aim of this study is to examine how the municipality of Trollhattan works to counteractschool segregation in Kronogarden and integrate the schools in the whole municipality. Theclosure of the schools in Kronogarden is in focus in this study, but there is also the ambitionto look more closely at whether the closure of schools as a measure fulfills a function relatedto previous research. The methods used in this study are qualitative text analysis andinterview method, where framing constituted the analytical framework for the empiricalmaterial in order to be able to analyze. The main results of the study show that themunicipality of Trollhattan works in different directions to counteract and solve schoolsegregation. Kronogarden is in focus for Trollhattan's municipality's work regarding bothcounteracting segregation and integration in general. The results also indicate that schoolsegregation has arisen due to other factors such as housing segregation and school choice.Related to previous research, it is stated that the closure of schools as a measure forintegration purposes has seldom proved to be successful in solving school segregation.Through the analysis, it has been emphasized that in the municipality of Trollhattan, there ismore needed than just closing down schools in certain areas to solve school segregation, as itdoes not constitute the core of the problem.