In 1988, Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s famously conservative prime minister, approved a revolutionary reform: Allow secondary schools to shrug off local control and become autonomous, central government- funded entities. To convert into one of these so-called grant-maintained schools (GMs), a school had to secure the majority vote of its students’ parents. By 1997, some 900 of the United Kingdom’s 3,500 state-funded secondary schools had gone GM (the rough equivalent of a conversion charter school in the United States).
Damon Clark’s father was the principal of a GM school. Two decades later, Clark is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Florida, where he has uncovered the first evidence that GM schools fare better than standard schools on national exams. “GMs increased the pass rate on their Grade 11 exams by about 5 percentage points,” from a 40 percent to a 45 percent pass rate, he says. He further finds that upturns emerged as early as two years after the GM conversion and persisted eight years later, at the end of his study.
In both the United Kingdom and the United States, advocates of charter schools and their analogs contend that giving schools greater autonomy not only will strengthen the schools themselves, but also will put pressure on nearby schools to shape up or lose out on students, teachers, and funding. Yet evidence for these two assertions has been mixed, in part because of methodological issues (for example, small sample sizes, widely varying programs, and difficulty controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status) that bedevil studies of school choice.
The GM policy, however, produced a large natural experiment that eliminated several of these technical problems. In many school districts, parents’ votes for or against the GM switch were quite close, creating two groups of schools — GM and regular — that were otherwise alike. Clark could then compare how these two groups performed on their Grade 11 exams, as well as test whether GM schools goaded their nearby competitors into turning out more successful students.
Although GM schools did indeed earn higher marks, they did not spur on their neighbors, Clark shows. “This is an important finding because we don’t have a ton of great evidence regarding whether charter and voucher models drive all schools to improve,” says Sean Reardon, an associate professor at the Stanford University School of Education.
Clark also could not pinpoint exactly why GM schools outstripped traditional ones. One explanation is cash: Schools received some government incentives to take the GM plunge. “The money does probably matter,” concedes Clark.
“But I also found evidence that the GM schools used their newfound flexibility to make organizational changes,” he says. That evidence includes higher rates of teacher hiring and turnover. “GM and charter schools can make staff changes much more easily than traditional schools,” which must work with teacher unions and other authorities, he notes.
Reardon further cautions, however, that Clark’s research “suggests that autonomy helps schools become better, but not that it helps individual students become better.” He points out that the student composition of GM schools changed somewhat, which might have caused some of the jump in GM school performance. “Whether a given student would do better in a more autonomous school is a different question from whether schools as a whole improve,” he adds.
Nevertheless, Reardon concludes: “This a good article. Clark did his work carefully. And it’s nice to have another piece of evidence from a different system and a different model.”
Damon Clark, “The Performance and Competitive Effects of School Autonomy,” Journal of Political Economy, August 2009.
Read more stories by Alana Conner.