The Choice of Public, Private, or Home Schooling

Over two percent of school children are home schooled and eleven percent sent to private school. I estimate models of school choice using household-level data from three rounds of the National Household Education Survey merged to secondary data sets. Families are inclined to avoid low quality public schools. For families leaving the public school system, they are relatively more likely to exit to home schooling rather than private schools if the mother has abundant time but scarce income, and if the state public school …nance system is centralized, making Tiebout sorting less e¢ cient and private schooling more costly. These e¤ects are especially strong among well-educated parents and younger children. The home schooling of older children is more sensitive to child-speci…c behavioral needs. JEL Classi…cation Numbers: D13, I21, I22. Department of Economics and Management, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN 46135; [email protected]. I am grateful to Robert Pollak, Edward Greenberg, Barton Hamilton, Charles Moul, Tom Downes, Emily Pas, and seminar participants at the Southern Economic Association, the Econometric Society, the American Education Finance Association, the Midwest Economics Association, Washington University, Kansas State University, and Louisiana State University for helpful comments on various drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Randall Reback who provided data on state school …nance laws and to the Washington University Department of Economics which provided research support to fund acquisition of unpublished NHES data.