School choice programs in Israel are showing remarkable long-term success, providing a roadmap for education reformers in the United States.
A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that participants in a school choice program in Tel Aviv earned five to seven percentage points more than typical students by age 30. The school choice program also led to a decline in welfare payments from the government.
“The evidence clearly suggests that allowing children to choose freely at age 13 which secondary school they wish to attend, not only improved sharply their high school outcomes six years later, but it also impacted positively their path to post-secondary schooling, increased meaningfully their earnings about a decade and a half later and reduced their dependency on the public welfare system,” the study said.
The Tel Aviv School Choice Program was implemented in one of the city’s nine school districts for students starting seventh grade in 1994 or 1995. The program allowed students to rank five options of secondary schools, with the Ministry of Education assigning schools in order to avoid over-enrollment and maintain socio-economic balance. The program was eventually expanded to the entire city in 1999.
Despite the study’s limited measure of students in Israel, the success of school choice can be extrapolated to other developed countries as well. “Both the high school system in Israel and its high-stakes exit exams are very similar to those in other countries,” according to the study.
Students from poor families were the primary beneficiaries of the school choice program. These students became more likely to enroll in academic and teachers’ colleges, with a decline in vocational degrees.
State and local governments in the U.S. have increasingly been implementing school choice programs in the past decade. The study suggests that these programs will still show success two decades from now when school choice students reach adulthood.
While many educational studies measure success using test scores administered while the student is still in school, this study opted to look at long-term success using later-in-life indicators instead. “Since the ultimate goal of education is to improve lifetime well-being, attention shifted recently to long-term consequences at adulthood, for example post-secondary schooling,” the study’s author wrote. This is why the study measured indicators around age 30.
The study was conducted by Victor Lavy, an economics professor at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, and published by the NBER Working Paper Series.
