Study Finds That Private, For-Profit School Management Improves School Outcomes

NEW BOOKS

Impact of For-Profit and Non-Profit Management on Student Achievement: The Philadelphia Experiment, by Paul E. Peterson and Matthew M. Chingos, was prepared by two Harvard researchers who examined a restructuring of the Philadelphia public-school system. In 2002, 30 low-performing elementary and middle schools were assigned to for-profit companies, 16 schools went to nonprofit groups, 21 were restructured by the local government, and another 16 were simply given more money. The researchers compared the students’ performance at each school in 2001 and 2002 with their performance in 2003 through 2006, and found that the schools managed by for-profit groups outperformed their nonprofit- and district-managed counterparts in math, though the effects of for-profit management on reading performance was not significant. The study discusses its data, results, and limitations, and how it differs from a 2006 report by the Rand Corporation, which also looked at the Philadelphia school-system restructuring but found “no impact of private management on student test-score performance in either reading or mathematics.”

Publisher: John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138; (617) 495-0558; http://www.ksg.harvard.edu; 30 pages; available free for download on the university’s Web site.