Nora Gordon
Associate Professor of Public Policy, Georgetown University
In this paper we investigate decision-making and the potential for
social learning among school administrators in the market for school
reform consulting services. Specifically, we estimate whether schools
are more likely to choose specific Comprehensive School Reform plans if
"peer" public schools have performed unusually well during previous
periods of plan implementation. In the absence of concrete data on
social networks among administrators, we consider a range of plausible
peer group boundaries defined by common governance, geography, or
district characteristics. Social learning could be particularly
important in this setting, in which there is essentially a vacuum of
other data on plan efficacy. We find strong evidence that schools that
are located in the same districts tend to contract with the same
providers, regardless of past performance. In addition, our point
estimates suggests school administrators may use information from their
peers to choose the plans they perceive to have performed best in the
past. However, despite choosing a market with an unusually
comprehensive data source on contracts between public schools and
private firms, our statistical power is weak and we cannot reject the
absence of such social learning. We conclude by outlining future
experimental directions for related research.
