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We study whether autonomous schools, which are publicly funded but can operate more independently than government-run schools, affect student achievement and school segregation across 15 countries over 16 years. Our triple-differences regressions exploit between-grade variation in the share of students attending autonomous schools within a given country and year. While autonomous schools do not affect overall achievement, effects are positive for high-socioeconomic status students and negative for immigrants. Impacts on segregation mirror these findings, with evidence of increased segregation by socioeconomic and immigrant status. Rather than creating "a rising tide that lifts all boats," autonomous schools increase inequality

Public spending on education has increased significantly in Latin America over the last several decades. Yet, the question remains as to whether greater spending translates into a more equitable distribution of resources. We address this issue by measuring inequality in per-pupil spending between regions of varying socioeconomic status (SES) within five different countries: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The results show that while Brazil's funding gap has narrowed over time, this federal nation has the widest socioeconomic spending divide, due to large inequalities in local revenues between high and low SES regions. School funding in Colombia has become more regressive over time, though its gap is half the size of Brazil's. Meanwhile, the distribution of school funding in Peru has changed, shifting from regressive (benefiting the richest regions) to progressive (benefiting the poorest regions). Education spending in Chile and in Ecuador have instead been consistently progressive. However, while the progressiveness of funding in Ecuador is driven by transfers targeting disadvantaged rural areas, the funding formulas in Chile address socioeconomic inequalities beyond the rural-urban gap.

The worldwide school closures in early 2020 led to losses in learning that will not easily be made up for even if schools quickly return to their prior performance levels. These losses will have lasting economic impacts both on the affected students and on each nation unless they are effectively remediated. While the precise learning losses are not yet known, existing research suggests that the students in grades 1-12 affected by the closures might expect some 3 percent lower income over their entire lifetimes. For nations, the lower long-term growth related to such losses might yield an average of 1.5 percent lower annual GDP for the remainder of the century. These economic losses would grow if schools are unable to re-start quickly. The economic losses will be more deeply felt by disadvantaged students. All indications are that students whose families are less able to support out-of-school learning will face larger learning losses than their more advantaged peers, which in turn will translate into deeper losses of lifetime earnings. The present value of the economic losses to nations reach huge proportions. Just returning schools to where they were in 2019 will not avoid such losses. Only making them better can. While a variety of approaches might be attempted, existing research indicates that close attention to the modified re-opening of schools offers strategies that could ameliorate the losses. Specifically, with the expected increase in video-based instruction, matching the skills of the teaching force to the new range of tasks and activities could quickly move schools to heightened performance. Additionally, because the prior disruptions are likely to increase the variations in learning levels within individual classrooms, pivoting to more individualised instruction could leave all students better off as schools resume. As schools move to re-establish their programmes even as the pandemic continues, it is natural to focus considerable attention on the mechanics and logistics of safe re-opening. But the long-term economic impacts also require serious attention, because the losses already suffered demand more than the best of currently considered re-opening approaches.

In 1981, Chile introduced nationwide school choice by providing vouchers to any student wishing to attend private school. As a result, more than 1,000 private schools entered the market, and the private enrollment rate increased by 20 percentage points, with greater impacts in larger, more urban, and wealthier communities. Using differences across roughly 300 municipalities, this paper shows that the first-order effect of this program was increased sorting, as the "best" public-school students switched to the private sector. A simple method was used to make the more general point that if choice leads to sorting, then one cannot determine its impact on achievement solely by assessing whether public schools improve in response to competition or by measuring whether students benefit from attending private schools. Rather, one has to look at changes in aggregate outcomes in entire educational markets. Finally, using test scores, repetition rates, and grade for age as measures of achievement, no evidence was found that the large reallocation of students from public to private schools improved average educational performance in Chile. (Contains 48 references, 12 tables, and 12 figures.) (Author/RT)

This paper reviews the research evidence on vouchers and considers the factors that make education vouchers a "live issue" in U.S. education policy. These factors can be articulated in terms of Levin's notions of freedom of choice, productive efficiency, equity, and social cohesion. It is possible to construct a reasonable case for voucher reform based on economic principles, triangulated evidence, and the absence of a strong set of counter-arguments. However, it is equally plausible to reject this case after considering the principles, evidence, and counter-arguments more closely. Moreover, voucher schemes are a trivial component of U.S. schooling, with some ambivalence on both the right and the left, and no popular mandate. Hence, vouchers are not a "live issue"; there is much discussion, but little action. Nonetheless, voucher schemes are part of a general trend toward liberalization of supply and demand of education. This trend includes a range of policy initiatives, including greater competition, greater accountability, and more contract schooling. A new example of this trend is tuition tax credits. Evaluating these credits may be even more complicated and politically charged than the debate over voucher schemes. (Contains 54 references.) (Author/RT)

Argentina and Chile have longstanding policies that give public subsidies to private schools. This paper uses data from 1997 from Argentina and Chile to compare the academic outcomes of seventh and eighth graders in public and private schools. Three types of private schools are analyzed: Catholic schools that are subsidized by the government, nonreligious schools that are subsidized, and private schools that receive no subsidies. The analyses suggest a mixed portrait of private school effectiveness. In both countries, Catholic subsidized schools are somewhat more effective than public schools in producing student outcomes, although these results are probably an upper limit to the true effects, due to selection bias. These effects may be due, in part, to the unique missions, policies, and resources characteristic of the Catholic sector, although empirical research to substantiate this is sparse. In contrast, there are few differences in outcomes between public and nonreligious subsidized schools in Chile. Enrollments in nonreligious subsidized private schools are substantially larger in Chile. The diminished effectiveness of these schools in Chile may be due, in part, to their different objectives. Again, however, research is not sufficient to explain why different types of private schools may produce different results. (Author)

We build and estimate a dynamic model of teenagers' choices of schooling and crime, incorporating four factors that may contribute to the different routes taken by different teenagers: heterogeneous endowments, unequal opportunities, uncertainties about one's own ability, and contemporaneous shocks. We estimate the model using administrative panel data from Chile that link school records with juvenile criminal records. Counterfactual policy experiments suggest that, for teenagers with disadvantaged backgrounds, interventions that combine mild improvement in their schooling opportunities with free tuition (by adding 22 USD per enrollee-year to the existing voucher) would lead to an 11% decrease in the fraction of those ever arrested by age 18 and a 17% increase in the fraction of those consistently enrolled throughout primary and secondary education. [This report was financially supported by Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (CONICYT/ FONDAP/15130009) and partially supported by the supercomputing infrastructure of the NLHPC (ECM-02).]

What are the key contents related to democratic life in the curricula of civic and citizenship education in Latin American countries? What values and dimensions are most emphasized? This document summarizes the results of a comparative analysis of civic/citizenship curricula for primary and secondary education in six Latin American countries (Colombia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico and Paraguay) that participated in the International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS-2009) conducted by International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The document comprises four parts. The first section takes stock of the state of democratic belief in the region, drawing upon the most significant opinion studies of the past decade, so as to offer broader meaning bases for curriculum analysis and, more generally, for educational work in the field of citizenship. The second section describes the organizational (or structural) characteristics of the curricula of the six countries and presents a framework of categories for their comparative analysis. The subsequent section describes and analyses the contents of the six curricula examined and how they deal with the values, institutions and citizenship relations in their civic (political) and civil (coexistence) dimensions. On the basis of the most significant findings, the closing section includes some reflections regarding curriculum development with regard to citizenship. A list of the official curriculum documents of the six countries included in the analysis is provided in an annex. A bibliography is included.

This working paper aims to give an overview of the national policies that exist in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) and initial teacher education. Information on this topic was initially gathered via a survey, in the form of a country questionnaire, which was conducted as part of the analytical strand of the the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study entitled "ICT and Initial Teacher Education." All of this work has been carried out under the auspices of the "New Millennium Learners" project. Responses to the survey were received from the following countries: Austria, Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Chile, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Some of the responses have been used in this report. In addition, desk research was conducted for 31 OECD countries. Special attention was given to the dates and to the last revisions of the documents in order to ensure the relevance of the information collected. Official country reports, work plans, official texts (decrees, laws) and articles constitute the main material of this study. Multiple sources have been used: databases, official government websites, key stakeholders. The review was completed in January 2009; therefore, reforms and updates of the policies implemented after January 2009 have not been taken into account. On the basis of these documents, three categories are proposed for understanding the extent to which countries have addressed the issue of ICT and initial teacher education: (1) Lack of relevant information concerning ICT and initial teacher education; (2) Category 2: Developing awareness of the stakes of ICT and initial teacher education; and (3) Category 3: Inclusion of ICT in initial teacher education at several levels. The first part of this report presents a comparison of national policies by classifying each of them in one of these three categories. The second part of this report proposes a complementary analysis of these results by first discussing some limits to the initial broad classification of countries in these categories and then presenting key elements of comparison in order to estimate the level of coherence of these policies. Country Questionnaire is appended. (Contains 4 tables and 41 notes.)

This literature review on school choice analyses the impact of choice schemes on students and on school systems focusing on equity. Reviewing the evidence can be difficult, as the literature is often fragmented and inconclusive, and the political importance of this research often results in high-profile attention given to individual studies rather than systemically understanding collected from a larger empirical base (Berends, Cannata and Goldring, 2011). Different political groups use evidence that supports their positions in favour or against school choice, and their positions relative to school choice are largely based on their ideologies, rather than on empirical work and evidence of effectiveness (Levin and Belfield, 2004). This report steps away from the ideological debate and provides research-based evidence on the impact of choice on disadvantaged students and schools. As "only with data on the consequences of different plans for school choice will we be able to reach sensible judgements rooted in experience (Fuller and Elmore, 1996, p. 8)". It uses analysis and statements that are supported empirically and attempts to cover the widest possible scope of research, and provide responses to the key question of how to balance choice with equity considerations. (Contains 7 tables, 4 figures, 5 boxes and 13 footnotes.)

This paper discusses the most relevant issues concerning teacher evaluation in primary and secondary education by reviewing the recent literature and analysing current practices within the OECD countries. First, it provides a conceptual framework highlighting key features of teacher evaluation schemes. In particular, it emphasises the importance of clarifying the purposes of teacher appraisal, whether summative when designed to assure that the practices enhancing student learning are undertaken or formative when conducted for further professional development objectives. It also encompasses the diverse criteria and instruments commonly used to assess teachers as well as the actors generally involved in the process and potential consequences for teachers' professional life. Second, it deals with a number of contentious points, including the question of the use of student outcomes to measure teaching performance, the advantages and drawbacks of different approaches given the purpose emphasised and resource restrictions, the implementation difficulties resulting from different stakeholders' interests and possible ways to overcome these obstacles. Finally, it provides an account of current empirical evidence, pointing out mixed results stemming from difficulties in assessing the effects of such evaluation schemes on teaching quality, teachers' motivation and student learning. It concludes by considering the circumstances under which teacher evaluation systems seem to be more effective, fair and reliable. Developing a comprehensive approach to evaluate teachers is critical to make demands for educational best practice compatible with teachers' appropriation of the process as well as to enhance the decisive attractiveness and recognition of the teaching profession. (Contains 1 table.)

Education plays an essential role in preparing the children of immigrants for participation in the labour market and society. Giving these children opportunities to fully develop their potential is vital for future economic growth and social cohesion in OECD countries. But migrant students in most OECD countries tend to have lower education outcomes than their native peers. Extensive previous research has described the system level, school level and individual level factors that influence the education outcomes of migrant students. Building on such previous research, this paper looks at the ways in which "education policies" can influence these factors to help provide better educational opportunities for migrant students. (Contains 7 footnotes.) [This review was prepared for the OECD Thematic Review on Migrant Education. It was presented and discussed at the Second Meeting of the Group of National Experts on the Education of Migrants in Paris on 13-14 October 2008.]

The Chilean authorities plan to raise budgetary allocations over the medium term for a variety of social programmes, including education, health care and housing. This incremental spending will need to be carried out in a cost-efficient manner to make sure that it yields commensurate improvements in social outcomes. Chile's health indicators show that it fares relatively well in relation to comparator countries in the OECD area and in Latin America. But this is less so in the case of education, where secondary and tertiary educational attainment remain low, despite a significant increase over the years, and performance is poor on the basis of standardised test scores, such as PISA. Even though comparison with countries in the OECD area is difficult, a sizeable housing deficit has yet to be closed in Chile. To meet these various challenges, efforts will need to be stepped up to: i) narrow the disparities in performance that currently exist among schools with students from varying backgrounds through use of the "differentiated" voucher scheme and additional measures to improve the quality of teaching and management; ii) improve risk sharing among private and public health insurers, while increasing the coverage of health insurance to a broader variety of pathologies under AUGE; and iii) continue to tackle the shortage of housing, while enhancing the quality of subsidised housing units and their surrounding neighbourhoods for the poorest segments of society. This paper relates to the "2007 Economic Survey of Chile" (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/chile). (Contains 9 footnotes, 10 figures, and 6 tables.)

Do some forms of student (and school) assessment hinder the introduction of innovative educational practices and the development of innovation skills in education systems? This report focuses on the impact of high-stake summative assessment on innovation and argues that it is possible to reconcile high-stakes assessments and examinations through innovative approaches to testing. While necessary, assessment based on high-stake examinations often acts as an incentive to teach or study "to the test". It may thus limit risk-taking by teachers, students and parents, for instance. The problem may be amplified if a system of accountability and incentives uses the results of these examinations and tests to assess teachers and schools. What should be done to ensure that the systems used to assess education systems do not stifle the risk-taking inherent to innovation--and that they foster innovation skills in students? This study proposes three main ways of combining assessment and innovation: 1) developing a wide range of performance measurements for both students and schools; 2) rethinking the alignment of standards and assessment; 3) measuring the impact of assessments on teaching and learning. One way of influencing teaching and learning might be to modify high-stake testing. Systems will adapt to this, and both teaching and learning will focus on acquiring the right skills. Rather than testing the content of learning, standards could relate to cognitive skills such as problem-solving, communicating and reasoning--with test/examination developers adapting those skills to subjects such as mathematics, science or literary analysis. Similarly, more use might be made of innovative assessment methods based on information and communication technologies, inasmuch as these may feature simulation or interactivity, for instance, at a reasonable cost. Focusing the assessment on cognitive processes rather than content would leave more scope for teachers to put in place innovative teaching/learning strategies. This does, however, assume a high standard of professionalism in teachers and an adequate system of continuing training and knowledge management. As a single type of assessment cannot fully capture student learning, one effective strategy might also be to multiply the number of measurements and thus relieve the pressure on students and teachers to perform well in a single, high-visibility, high-stake test. At the same time, this larger number of measurements could provide the necessary input for systems based on accountability, diagnosis and assessment of the effectiveness of innovative practice. Finally, assessing the technical standard of tests and examinations is an integral part of their development, but it is less common to address the impact they have on teaching/learning or the validity of how their results are used. Since assessment is an integral part of the education process, it is just as important to assess tests and examinations as it is other educational practices in order to achieve improvements and innovation in educational assessment, but also in educational practice. (Contains 12 notes.)

This paper compares the changing role of local government in developing countries' education systems. Using case studies, it examines the role of local government in Zimbabwe, Chile, India, and Tanzania, thus offering a representative range of low- and middle-income countries. Each of the countries attempted to use local government as a source of additional revenue for schooling and as a mechanism for introducing greater equality and democracy into the schooling system. The booklet considers the nature and extent of local government involvement in schooling in relation to management and policy-making; finance of education; provision of school buildings; staff provisions, such as teacher recruitment, deployment, appraisal, promotion, and training; curriculum planning, development, and implementation; and monitoring and evaluation. After each case study, some general points concerning trends in local government provision of schooling and some reasons for these trends are suggested, followed by a discussion of the equity and efficiency of these provisions. The findings reveal that the historical, political, and economic circumstances of each country accounted for the differences as well as similarities in the nature and extent of local government provisions. The article outlines some issues and questions that could inform future research on schooling in South Africa. (Contains 21 references.) (RJM)

This paper examines how schools choose class size and how households sort in response to those choices. Focusing on the highly liberalized Chilean education market, we develop a model in which schools are heterogeneous in an underlying productivity parameter, class size is a component of school quality, households are heterogeneous in income and hence willingness to pay for school quality, and schools are subject to a class-size cap. The model offers an explanation for two distinct empirical patterns observed among private schools that accept government vouchers: (i) There is an inverted-U relationship between class size and household income in equilibrium, which will tend to bias cross-sectional estimates of the effect of class size on student performance. (ii) Some schools at the class size cap adjust prices (or enrollments) to avoid adding another classroom, which produces stacking at enrollments that are multiples of the class size cap. This generates discontinuities in the relationship between enrollment and household characteristics at those points, violating the assumptions underlying regression-discontinuity (RD) research designs. This result suggests that caution is warranted in applying the RD approach in settings in which parents have substantial school choice and schools are free to set prices and influence their enrollments.

The three papers which make up this report all deal with the potential impact on learning of investments in school resources: textbooks, school facilities, and teacher training. The first two papers use data from a longitudinal study of young people in Chile. The linkage between education and labor market entry is addressed in the first paper. These conclusions are drawn: educational variables are more powerful predictors of occupational attainment than family social status, and educational quality variables are much more powerful predictors of occupational attainment than educational attainment or achievement. The second paper examines factors that explain changes in academic achievement levels between the end of primary and the end of secondary school. It concludes that among the relatively small percentage of students who both completed secondary school and took the university entrance exam, changes in achievement levels are explained primarily by differences in the quality of the educational experience rather than in the differences in family background. Using data from a questionnaire observation study of actual teaching-learning behavior in Chilean classrooms, the third paper examines patterns of textbook use and concludes that teachers vary widely in attitudes toward and use of texts, that students have a much more positive perception of texts than do teachers, and that the main problems in textbook use are negative teacher attitudes and the inability of poorer children to buy them. (YLB)

Part 1 of this paper reviews major research findings on the relationship of teacher characteristics to student achievement. Of the 16 teacher variables analyzed, those identified as important to student performance are teacher certification, ability and achievement, experience, inservice training, expectations for students, and methods. Policy recommendations include the development and improvement of teacher training programs in developing countries, accompanied by thorough research into the demographic, structural, and cultural context for each program and focusing on the development of teacher knowledge and ability in specific subject areas. The authors also recommend further research on the impact on learning of the unique relationships between teacher and student as well as the threshold effects of teacher competence variables. Part 2 of the paper reviews an empirical study of the effect of teacher training and teacher competence on student science achievement in the countries of Chile and India. Verbal IQ shows the strongest effect on student achievement, followed by teaching methods, teacher training and home background. (Author/WD)

The impact of competition on academic outcomes is likely to depend on whether parents are informed about schools' effectiveness or valued added (which may or may not be correlated with absolute measures of their quality), and on whether this information influences their school choices, thereby affecting schools' market outcomes. To explore these issues, this paper considers Chile's SNED program, which seeks to identify effective schools, selecting them from within "homogeneous groups" of arguably comparable institutions. Its results are widely disseminated, and the information it generates is quite different from that conveyed by a simple test-based ranking of schools (which in Chile, turns out to largely resemble a ranking based on socioeconomic status). We rely on a sharp regression discontinuity to estimate the effect that being identified as a SNED winner has on schools' enrollment, tuition levels, and socioeconomic composition. Through five applications of the program, we find no consistent evidence that winning a SNED award affects these outcomes. This suggests that information on school effectiveness--at least as it is calculated and delivered by the SNED--might not much affect school markets.

This paper examines improvement in teacher education in Chile, which had an excellent system of teacher education until the 1970s. Educational change targeting elementary and secondary schools did not affect teacher education institutions, and there was no power to initiate such change. The national government pushed improvements by offering to fund projects presented by teacher education programs on a competitive basis. A small coordinating team was established in 1997 to conduct the selection process. The team also monitored and assessed the projects and institutions. Institutions could opt for a general overhaul of their teacher education programs or select just one area for improvement. Most opted for widespread changes. The paper examines how improvements have been occurring, focusing on four categories: theoretical focus, content and teacher preparation processes, learning to teach through continued practical experiences, and teacher educator and student teacher quality and instructional resource allocation. The paper highlights three ways in which this program illustrates the change process: policy-driven change, common constraints in institutional change, and mediations in change. (Contains 10 references.) (SM)

In this essay, Paul Vallas--education reform expert and key advisor to the government of Haiti in developing its national education plan--discusses his plan for Haiti. The paper explores the successes and challenges of education reform in Haiti, before and after the earthquake that devastated the nation in 2010. The essay describes the improvements made in other parts of the world distraught by natural disasters. Vallas explores how lessons learned could be adapted and emulated in a country like Haiti that is desperate for reform, with over 50 percent of its population under the age of 18. He describes two examples of success in systems impacted by natural disasters: post-earthquake Chile and post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Vallas' paper demonstrates that there is an attainable plan for education in a Haiti determined to create a quality, accessible, and affordable education for its population, the majority of which are of school-going age. By examining the successes and challenges of education reform in Chile and New Orleans, along with the history and culture of Haiti, Vallas provides a coherent blueprint for the future of education in Haiti. [This report was written with Tressa Pankovits. Introduction by Elizabeth White. The report was produced as part of the Program on America and the Global Economy (PAGE).]

Introduction: High-stake testing plays a crucial role in many educational systems, guiding policies of accountability, resource allocation, and even school choice (OECD, 2013). However, non-representative patterns of attendance can skew how useful these measures are for accomplishing their main objective. Are we really measuring the quality or performance of a school if a non-representative sample of their students are taking the test? In this paper, we study the effect of high-stake testing on student composition of attendance on the day of the test. We implement an event study framework to estimate the effect of testing on attendance using a daily panel from Chile's school system population. We examine the impact on low and high performers between 2nd and 10th grades from the year 2011 to 2018, and estimate the effect of high-stake testing on attendance patterns for different types of students. We are also working on a method for better understanding differences in attendance within schools to help (i) improve current imputation methods, and (ii) identify schools that could potentially be incentivizing non-representative patterns of attendance. Our analysis reveals that the effect of high-stakes testing on attendance is highly heterogeneous across grades, and younger students are more affected than the rest. Most notably, the increased attendance of higher-performing students (measured according to their GPA) seems to be crucial to selective patterns of attendance. In our effort to uncover what lies behind these estimates, three main findings emerge. First, exemptions seem to not play a role in our results, since the event study estimates with and without exempted students are almost identical. Second, testing alone seems not to be a driver of changes in the student test pool for the test. We find no effect of student attendance to a no-stakes test delivered in the same way as the high-stakes test except for the consequences. Finally, we present evidence that low-performing students are less likely to receive information about the test and passing it to their parents. They are also less prepared for the assessment and declare having received incentives to make the school get good results more often, even if individual scores are never published. This paper makes several contributions to the existing literature (Cuesta et al, 2020; Figlio & Loeb, 2011; Cullen & Reback, 2006; Jacob, 2005; Figlio & Getzler, 2002). First, the results starkly contrast with the previous focus on low performers exclusion on test-scores. We show the critical role of students who are not at the bottom of the performance distribution on differential attendance patterns. Second, we document that testing alone does not affect attendance by comparing no-stakes and high-stakes results. Third, our preliminary findings have several implications for how testing agencies should present test-results and prevent absences. Lastly, we are developing a model that uses machine learning techniques to handle big-data, predict attendance, and impute predicted attendance given that some students are not absent because of the test. This model will help us to evaluate how the test is affecting attendance for every school, and to provide useful information to prevent absences. Data Description: We mainly use three datasets. First, we build a registry with all the students and schools that participated in high-stakes and no-stakes tests during 2011-2018. Second, we use the SIGE daily attendance datasets for the same period. Finally, we use a census of student's GPA to classify students according to their academic performance. Table 1 shows the description of our data. Results: Our empirical strategy consists of an event study for each grade tested using the national daily attendance panel described before. As seen in Figure 2, our analysis reveals 4 main results: (1) The effect of high-stake testing is highly heterogenous across grades, and younger students are more affected than the rest; (2) The overall impact of the effect of the test masks substantial heterogeneity across different levels of GPA for high-stake testing; (3) The increased attendance of students in the middle and the top of the GPA distribution is crucial for selective patterns of attendance; and (4) The effect of high-stake testing is also heterogenous across years. We then turn into three exercises to get a better understanding of our findings. We analyze the role of the exemption legislation by running the event study with and without exempted students. Exempted students are generally low-performers and must present a validated certificate crediting permanent special needs (i.e. blindness, autism spectrum disorder or intellectual disability among others). If those students know that their score will not count for the school achievement, they may not have incentives to attend school for the test. Also, we study the possibility that students self-exclude themselves because of the testing situation's disutility and the absence of individual consequences. To handle this, we run an event study for a no-stakes test and compare it to the high-stakes results. We take advantage that the Chilean testing agency delivers a no-stakes standardized test to a sample of schools in several years to improve the test's psychometric properties. Finally, we use unpublished student and parents' questionnaires to give more insights on what might explain our findings. We examine whether low-performing students are less likely to receive differential information or incentives than higher-performing students, among other alternatives. A critical aspect of the impact of testing on attendance is that non-representative attendance does not necessarily imply that schools manipulate the pool of test-takers. Low-performing students might have been absent anyway. In that regard, we are developing a machine learning model to study the change in the attendance distribution of every school. We seek to compare the observed attendance to what it would have had looked if no test had taken place. Then, we want to show the distribution of test-scores in three scenarios: no imputation, imputing all absences, and using the distribution of students who would have come to school if no test had taken place.

This paper is for policymakers, advocates, and analysts who understand that the issues surrounding the introduction of more market-based mechanisms into education are complex and who accept the view that evidence is useful in sorting out the issues. It uses the market framework of demand, supply, and market pricing to organize the extensive but disparate evidence on the effects of market-based reforms in the United States, Chile, and New Zealand. It critically examines the relevant evidence on how choice and competition affect educational outcomes, especially for urban schools. It provides guidance to policymakers on all sides of this complex issue. After an introduction that examines the market framework and policy implications, four chapters discuss (1) "Demand: Parental Choice" (e.g., choice and competition, adverse impacts on schools left behind, and non-market arguments for expanding choice); (2) "Supply: Providing More Options within the Public School System" (e.g., site-based management and charter schools and education management organizations); (3) "Supply: Public Funding for Private Schools" (e.g., private elementary and high schools and the relative costs of private schools); and (4) "Market Prices and Alternative Mechanisms" (market prices and teacher labor markets). (Contains 63 references.) (SM)