Designing Effective PPPs in Education: Does governance design matter more than private provision

My presentation from the 2026 AERA meetings.

This paper examines publicly funded school choice as a form of education public-private partnership (PPP) and evaluates whether cross-national differences in system performance correspond to institutional design rather than private provision alone. Using structured comparative case analysis and policy benchmarking data, six countries and the fragmented U.S. model are assessed across four policy dimensions: competition, autonomy, accountability, and information. Two summary indicators, which are alignment (developmental intensity) and coherence (dispersion across domains), are constructed to capture configurational differences across systems. In this small sample, higher-performing systems tend to exhibit both stronger alignment and greater internal coherence, while fragmented configurations are associated with more variable outcomes. The analysis is descriptive and does not estimate causal effects, but it identifies cross-case regularities consistent with theories of policy complementarity in governance.