Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Notes 251
attention to the quality of the local school districts and the property taxes that are imposed
for their financing. The seminal paper describing the Tiebout model is C.M.Tiebout, “A pure
theory of local expenditures,” Journal of Political Economy, 64(5) (1956), p. 416.
39 See Hoxby, 2000, supra note 37, p. 1215.
40 Ibid., p. 1228. According to Hoxby, these estimated effects are all significant at the 5 percent
level except for the educational attainment figure, which is significant at the 10 percent level.
41 Ibid., pp. 1230–1.
42 Ibid., p. 1237.
43 Greene, in Hepburn, supra note 2, pp. 143–4.
44 Matthew Ladner and Matthew J.Brouillette, “The impact of charter schools and public
school choice on public school districts in Wayne County, Michigan,” Howard Law Journal,
45 (2002), p. 399.
45 For instance, some of the best funded public school systems in the United States are among
the worst performing. Take, for example, the District of Columbia, which spends $8,000 per
pupil, relative to the national average of $6,000, while its student performance is among the
worst in the nation. John G.Goodman, “School choice vs. school choice,” Howard Law
Journal, 45 (2002), p. 379. On a nationally administered math test, eighth grade DC students
ranked 41st among the 50 US states, and fourth grade students ranked 40th on the nationally
administered reading test. In a 1996 report, the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility
and Management Assistance Authority remarked that “the longer students stay in the
District’s public school system, the less likely they are to succeed.” However, Reschovsky
and Imazeki speculate that this discrepancy between input and output may be due to, “a set
of factors outside the control of local school districts that require some districts to pay higher
salaries than others in order to attract teachers with similar qualifications to carry out similar
teaching assignments.” They claim that factors such as, “the racial and ethnic composition of
the student body, land costs, and a range of variables that influence the attractiveness of any
geographical area, such as weather conditions and crime rates” will have a large impact on
the expenditures that will be required to attract and keep teachers in particular schools.
Therefore, the higher expenditures in districts such as Washington DC may simply reflect
the higher salaries demanded by teachers. Andrew Reschovsky and Jennifer Imazeki,
“Achieving educational adequacy through school finance reform,” Journal of Education
Finance, 26:4 (2001), p. 377.
46 Caroline M.Hoxby, “School choice and school competition: evidence from the United
States,” working paper, p. 46, available at:
post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/sweden.pdf.
47 Helen F. Ladd, “School vouchers: a critical view,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(4)
(2002), pp. 7–8.
48 For an international review of the charter school movement see T.R.Williams, “Educational
governance: a paper prepared for the panel on the role of government,” Report to the Panel
on the Role of Government in Ontario (2003), available at: http://www.lawlib.utoronto.ca/investing/reports/rp46.pdf.
49 See United States Charter Schools, “Overview of charter schools” (October, 1999), available
at: http://www.uscharterschools.org/pub/uscs_docs/o/index.htm.
50 Williams, supra note 48, p. 32.
51 See the extensive discussion on this experience in Julian Le Grand, Motivation, Agency and
Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), Chapter 8. The 1988 Education
Reform Act transferred significant operating authority from local governments directly to
schools. School governing bodies were given significant responsibility for all aspects of a
school’s operations. Funding for the schools was determined on the basis of student
enrollment, and schools were required to accept as many students as their physical capacity
would allow.