9512009 Altonji The question of whether private schools are more effective than public schools is at the center of the current national debate over the role of vouchers, charter schools, and other reforms that would increase choice in education. The question has been the subject of much controversy among researchers. If private schools do in fact provide better education at lower cost, then the case for expansion of choice in schooling is strengthened. Since Catholic schools account for about two thirds of private school enrollment in the U.S., assessing the effectiveness of Aatholic schools is an important part of the assessment of private schooling. The disagreement surrounding the effects of Catholic schools on achievement scores and other outcomes centers around the problem of nonrandom selection into Catholic schools. This project will investigate how Catholic school effects vary with individual characteristics such as race, gender, parental education, family income, and with neighborhood characteristics and school characteristics. The project will address the selection problem for Catholic schools by taking advantage of the fact that proximity to Catholic schools has a strong effect on the probability of Catholic school attendance for Catholics but not for non-Catholics. This permits the use of the interaction between religious preference and proximity to Catholic schools to statistically identify Catholic school effects. Separate controls for both proximity and religious preference will be used. The approach will be implemented using the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972, which reports zipcode of resident, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which reports Census tract. The project will take advantage of an education supplement in the 1995 PSID the provides information about type of school attended and the extension of the PSID geocode data through 1994. The panel data sets will be matched to information on th e neighborhood and community, local public schools, and the distance to and characteristics of the nearest Catholic schools. Various instrumental variables and control function estimators will be used to estimate Catholic school effects, with the interaction between religious preferences and proximity as the key exogenous variable.
