TY  - JOUR
AU  - Uribe,Claudia
AU  - Murnane,Richard J.
AU  - Willett,John B.
AU  - Somers,Marie Andrée
TI  - Expanding School Enrollment by Subsidizing Private Schools: Lessons from Bogotá
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11670
PY  - 2005
Y2  - October 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11670
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11670.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Richard Murnane
Graduate School of Education
Harvard University
6 Appian Way - Gutman 469
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/496-4820
Fax: 617/496-3095
E-Mail: richard_murnane@harvard.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2005-10-03
AB  - Many countries use tax revenues to subsidize private schools. Whether these policies meet social objectives depends, in part, on the relative quality of education provided by the two types of schools. We use data on elementary school students and their teachers in Bogotá, Colombia to examine difference in resource mixes and differences in the relative effectiveness of public and private schools. We find that, on average, the schools in the two sectors are equally effective. However, they produce education using very different resource combinations. Moreover, there are large differences in the effectiveness of schools in both sectors, especially in the private sector. The results of our analysis shed light on the quantity-quality tradeoff that governments in many developing countries face in deciding how to use scarce educational resources.
ER  -