Education Vouchers, the Peer Group Problem, and the Question of Dropouts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper extends the analysis of Epple and Romano (1998a, b), who argue that vouchers encourage private schools to “skim the cream off” public schools. Because the education received by students depends on the quality of their classmates, this loss reduces the quality of education received by those remaining in the public system—the peer group effect. In our model, vouchers allow low‐income students to escape the frustration of having to conform to the uniformity of the public school system. Ultimately, the size of the dropout effect relative to the peer group effect is an empirical question. Nevertheless, to the extent that voucher use reduces the student dropout rate, the peer group externality becomes insufficient in itself to prevent reconsideration of a voucher system on equity as well as efficiency grounds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.132 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".