Elephantstrunk

Tory policy group moots scrapping school catchment areas
“If youre living on a rather poor estate, let us say, with one rather failing school on it, or one very unpopular school on it, then you dont really have a choice of good education unless you can go outside your catchment area,” co-chairwoman Baroness Perry said.
The peer, […]

Mark Thoma quotes from the abstract:
These results — both the negative effects of segregation, and the indication that neighborhood segregation matters more than does school segregation — stand up in the face of a variety of statistical tests designed to rule out competing explanations. The segregation effects do not appear to be attributable to differential […]

What about the schools that fail? According to  Sir Cyril Taylor the answer is to close them or let them be taken over by other schools. That hasn’t been popular but where is the alternative?

Sir Cyril’s figures have been garbled at some stage. 80,000 students is more like 100 than 500 schools.
By 1997 definitions there […]

Revisitng what I wrote here. Professor Hoxby has the following prescription for effective school choice:

Supply flexibility, which means that schools should have the ability to open where there is demand for them, expand with increased demand and contract with reduced demand
Money should follow students, which means that funding policies must be designed so that schools […]

As if by magiic but more likely because its the start of a new school year or my attention I notice that Marginal Revolution has picked up an excellent summary of the state of the art in school choice mechanism design. Tyler Cowen gives the following summary of Professor Hoxby’s presecriptions. A successful mechanism […]

Approximately 90,000 children are in the process of transferring from London’s 1,836 primary schools to its 406 secondary schools. Each student may apply to up to 6 secondary schools in an order of preference.
Each school will determine an order of preference for those children that have applied. In most cases it will depend mostly upon […]