Shuffling Students, Shaping Futures? The impact of school closures and the opening of voucher schools on student achievement, school segregation and exclusion from society
The purpose of our project is to investigate how changes in school segregation—resulting from closures of public schools and the opening of new voucher schools—impact student achievement, labour market exclusion and political participation among affected students. More broadly, the project will contribute to research on how one’s peers in school and other school-level factors affect these outcomes
Details
- Period: 2026-01-01 – 2029-12-31
- Budget: 5,591,000 SEK
- Funder: Swedish Research Council
Description
In recent decades, school segregation in Sweden and other countries has increased, and we have also seen growing disparities in student achievement between students.
However, based on the international research literature, it remains unclear how and if the increase in school segregation should be addressed by policymakers. First, it is uncertain what role school segregation and peer effects actually play in students' academic and career outcomes, particularly in the long term. Second, it is unclear what outcomes can be expected from measures aimed at counteracting school segregation such as closures of ethnically and socioeconomically segregated schools, and redesigned school choice systems.
Our project aims to help fill these gaps in previous international research, which also has a strong bearing on the Swedish discourse. We will employ a quasi-experimental design, leveraging school closures and openings as unanticipated natural experiments combined with state-of-the-art Swedish registry data.
Principal investigator Marcus Österman says:
The research design provides a strong foundation for both addressing more specific questions regarding the effects of school openings and school closures as well as broader questions concerning how school children are affected by their peers and their schools.