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…

Many countries are struggling to reconcile greater flexibility in school choice with the need to ensure quality, equity and coherence in their school systems. This report provides an international perspective on issues related to school choice, especially how certain aspects of school-choice policies may be associated with sorting students into…

The aims of the study were to examine changes in school segregation across different types of municipalities between 1998 and 2011 in Sweden, and to explore the extent to which these changes are the consequences of school choice. Multilevel models were applied to register data using a counterfactual approach. The results showed that school…

A policy of school choice has, in various shapes, been implemented in educational systems across the world during the last decades. Drawing on various empirical and theoretical sources, the aim of this article is to distinguish the key defining elements of the Swedish school choice policy and to present and discuss some of its outcomes in terms of…

This article presents empirical analyses of the effects of independent schools in Sweden. The most important result is that the impact--both the positive and the negative--is relatively marginal. This said, there are now a number of studies that show that when independent schools are established the pupils in municipal schools perform better.…