A quantitative analysis of Turkish public school admission reform

Around the world, some countries rely on exam based placement into public schools whereas some others rely on home address based placement. Recently, Turkey has changed its public high school admission rule from exam based placement to home address based placement. This raised concerns regarding equality of opportunity since high quality public schools are located in rich neighborhoods. To quantify the effect of the reform, we set up a model in which households differ by exogenous income and student ability and public schools differ by exogenous teacher quality. Public schools’ expenditures are financed by income taxation where income tax rate is determined via majority voting. Households can privately supplement public spending. Each teacher determines effort for each student in her classroom. Students and teachers are matched assortatively based on student ability. Achievement depends on ability, teacher effort, and educational spending. We first show existence of a unique majority voting equilibrium and characterize the pivotal voter. After calibrating the parameters of the model, we exogenously change the matching rule between teachers and students to analyze the reform through a computational experiment. We find that variance of achievement falls by $$17.76\%$$ 17.76 % , mean achievement falls by $$51.15\%$$ 51.15 % , households’ total welfare falls by $$0.115\%$$ 0.115 % , and teachers’ total welfare rises by $$18.1\%$$ 18.1 % .