Competition Turns Out To Be Good For Schools

The May 3rd issue of The Economist ran an interesting article on the effects of voucher programs on public schools. (Free to Choose, and Learn)

The article looks at a number of voucher programs around the world, with a particular focus on those systems where students are picked on a lottery system.

The lottery is preferred (by economists) as it randomizes kids in the program and those left behind.

Students in the voucher programs do much better than those not in.

This seems to conflict with what the Freakonomics guys report in their book, where they found vouchers seem to have no impact on student performance.

At the end, there is this:

"More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves. Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition."

What was Caroline Hoxby's study? Does anyone have a link?

I find myself leaning more and more toward introducing competition in American public schools.
The Swedish reference is intriguing. The article says that in 1999 Sweden gave parents the right to choose any school -- public, private, religious, etc. The only restriction was a "first-come-first-serve" admission criteria. This would certain limit the ability of a school to "cherry-pick" only the best students.

Does anyone have more information on how the Swedish school choice system is working out? It sounds really too good to be true. But maybe improving schools is really much simpler than educrats believe. Less money, better performance, let the market work.

Could it really be that easy?