Project description

This project aims to develop a system-oriented, openly applicable concept for the assessment of educational policy alternatives, in order to enable cost-effectiveness analyses for diverse educational governance issues. Since the costs and effects of particular educational policy measures are reciprocally related, the project will assess the chances and limits of a general accounting and simulation model for assessing the expenditures and yields of the education system. For instance, particular measures resulting from educational effects in the domain of school education, which can be deduced from educational research findings, allow for alternative assumptions regarding transitions, school leaving figures and educational pathways. A standard cost model, for example, can be applied when calculating the respective costs of an intervention and the fiscal benefits that might result from an altered school career. Modelling is based on retrospective data, and shall be made applicable to the future by means of forecasting educational participation.
In order to validate whether this procedure is appropriate with regard to assessing educational policy alternatives, four concrete case studies will be conducted. These exemplary questions are selected from the domain of school education and they will reflect crucial structural, institutional and legal framework conditions of educational governance and financing:

• governance of means allocation to school, dependent on social cost (social index)
• all-day school provisions and diverse forms of extracurricular opportunities in comparison to half-day schools
• repeating a school year, either because of being  relegated or voluntarily, versus abolishment of such regulations
• special school-based support for special needs in comparison with an integrative (inclusive) model of providing for students with special educational needs

Following the above described goals, we will assess the costs and effects of different options for action. At the same time, the four case studies also provide for implementing a prototypical total cost model that is reduced to certain questions of school educational governance.

Co-operations

Professor Dr. Kerstin Schneider (Bergische Universität Wuppertal)
Dipl.-Ök. Anna Makles (Bergische Universität Wuppertal)
Dipl.-Ök. Andrea Riedel (Bergische Universität Wuppertal)

Funding

Federal Ministry of Education and Research