The paper approaches the issue of school choice in an indirect manner by investigating the effectiveness of public, private government-dependent and private independent schools in 19 OECD countries selected from the PISA 2000 survey for this purpose. In a multi-level approach we estimate these...

We consider the question whether pupils from the lower social strata perform better in private government-dependent schools than in public or private-independent schools, using the PISA 2000 data on European high schools. In the eighty’s, Coleman and Hoffer (1987) found in the USA that the...

Denominational schooling makes up an important part of European educational systems. Given its specificity, denominational schooling can be expected to place a greater weight on values teaching and moral education. As such, it may be more effective in bringing about certain attitudes and...

Compulsory school education in Italy produces poor results in terms of 15-year olds’ performance on PISA tests, compared with other OECD countries, despite a relatively high level of expenditure. While the influence of social background is smaller than in many OECD countries, it is largely...

We apply propensity score matching to the estimation of differential school effectiveness between the publicly funded private sector and the public one, in a sample of 26 countries. This technique allows us to distinguish between school choice and school effectiveness processes and thus, to...

The effect of two characteristics of school populations on reading skills will be estimated in this paper: share and diversity, both on the ethnic and the social-cultural dimension. We use the cross-national PISA-data 2006, both for the 15 years old native pupils and the pupils with a migrant...

Traditionally, the Norwegian compulsory education system has focused strongly on the linked goals of equal opportunities to learn, comprehensive and inclusive education. While some of these objectives have been met successfully, a number of educational outcomes, notably measures of pupil...