Heterogeneous effects of school autonomy in England

The Organizational Economics of School Chains

“…We found that the impact of joining a chain dominates -while the effect of conversion is small and insignificant. This is consistent withNeri and Pasini (2020) -showing that most of the benefits of primary school conversion to academy are concentrated amongst those that join a chain.21 We also investigated whether our results differ for primary/secondary schools and for the sponsor-led/converter academies (results are not tabulated). Our evidence shows that the impact of joining a MAT is almost three times larger for primary schools (8.9% of a standard deviation) than for secondary schools (3.5% of a standard deviation) -but significant for both.…”

“…To do so, we devise a differences-in-differences (DiD) strategy that focuses on 'legacy' students who were enrolled at the school before this joined a chain. This approach has previously been used to study the impact of academisation in England (see, Eyles and Machin, 2019; Bertoni et al, 2020;and Neri and Pasini, 2020) and is similar to the use of 'grandfathered' students by Abdulkadiroglu et al (2016) for US charter takeovers. Its key advantage is that it by-passes the potential endogeneity of pupils' school choice in relation to a school's decision to join a chain by considering only students who were at the school before such decision was taken.…”

“…The use of legacy students is similar to the 'grandfathering' method used by Abdulkadiroglu et al (2016) to study US charter takeovers and has been adapted to investigate the impact of school autonomy in England (see, Eyles and Machin, 2019;Bertoni et al, 2020;and Neri and Pasini, 2020). Given the staggered nature of our 'treatment' -i.e., the time when schools join a chain -we use a 'stacked-byevent design' to deal with the econometric issues highlighted by the recent literature on DiD designs (see for example Goodman-Bacon, 2021).…”