When Educators Are the Learners: Private Contracting by Public Schools / Silke J. Forbes, Nora E. Gordon.

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Forbes, Silke J

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w18185.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2012.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: We investigate decision-making and the potential for social learning among school administrators in the market for school reform consulting services. Specifically, we estimate whether public schools are more likely to choose given Comprehensive School Reform service providers if their "peer" schools--defined by common governance or geography--have performed unusually well with those providers in the past. We find strong evidence that schools tend to contract with providers used by other schools in their own districts in the past, regardless of past performance. In addition, our point estimates are consistent with school administrators using information from peers to choose the plans they perceive to have performed best in the past. Despite choosing a market with an unusually comprehensive data source on contracts between public schools and private firms, our statistical power is sufficiently weak that we cannot reject the absence of social learning.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w18185 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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June 2012.

We investigate decision-making and the potential for social learning among school administrators in the market for school reform consulting services. Specifically, we estimate whether public schools are more likely to choose given Comprehensive School Reform service providers if their "peer" schools--defined by common governance or geography--have performed unusually well with those providers in the past. We find strong evidence that schools tend to contract with providers used by other schools in their own districts in the past, regardless of past performance. In addition, our point estimates are consistent with school administrators using information from peers to choose the plans they perceive to have performed best in the past. Despite choosing a market with an unusually comprehensive data source on contracts between public schools and private firms, our statistical power is sufficiently weak that we cannot reject the absence of social learning.