School Choice and Educational Returns in the EU: With a Focus on Finland and Estonia

Abstract

The article discusses latent school choice developments in the two neighboring countries, Finland and Estonia, investigating the impact of school choice regime on educational returns. To support the discussion we conducted a comparative study of 21 education systems in Europe and explored whether there might be an association between educational returns and the extent of school choice and equal educational opportunities. Educational returns are operationalized by the PISA 2009 country level score, school choice and unequal educational opportunities indices are constructed by applying the first principal component over multiple variables.