Does Transparency Lead to Better Education? The Effects in the Netherlands of Publishing School Performance Indicators on the Internet

Publishing information about school performance on the Internet is
currently a ‘hype’ around the world. Many countries publish this information
because they believe that this will benefit schools and parents. The assumption is
that parents will use this information to assess the performance of schools and
consequently choose a school on the basis of this information. Changes in school
choice would then form a strong signal to schools to improve performance, with
the net result being a better school system. This expectation, however, does not
hold true in reality; the information is not used much by parents and, hence, their
behavior does not send a strong signal to schools. This does not mean that the
publication of school performance data on the Internet has no effect. School
administrators do frequently refer to the information in order to know what is
happening at other schools. They interpret and analyze this information in the
context of competition with other schools, benchmarking themselves and learning
from others. Schools do change their behavior in response to the influences of the
information being public, albeit not in a deterministic and predictable manner.