The effects of school competition on the achievement of Italian students

In this paper, we study the impact of the degree of school competition on the achievement of Italian students. Specifically, competition is measured as the number of schools available to students in a given area. The aim is to evaluate whether an increase in school choice improves the quality of education. Using the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, 2006) dataset we investigate with simple Least Squares regression models, controlling for a host of individual and school characteristics, if secondary school students with a wider range of schools choices perform better than those students whose choice is more limited. We find a significant positive correlation between students' performance and the degree of local schools competition. Moreover, we show that students achieve much better outcomes if schools operating in more competitive environments also experience a higher pressure on academic standards coming from parents. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.