Education policies promoting school choice have long been viewed as a means to enhance school productivity, but they also raise concerns about exacerbating socioeconomic segregation and increasing inequality. This paper examines the effects of expanding school choice by providing public alternatives to traditional public schools in mixed public-private education systems. I use rich administrative data from British Columbia's (BC) Ministry of Education, covering all students in the province and linked to parental tax records and students' long-term outcomes, to study the expansion of French Immersion in BC, where a provincially funded private sector and a popular French Immersion program in public schools offer an abundance of choice options. Applying unordered choice models and allowing for spillover effects of new programs on nearby schools, I estimate the effects of expanding French Immersion programs by leveraging their staggered rollout across schools and cohorts to implement a difference-in-differences strategy using a heterogeneity-robust estimator. I find the expansion of French Immersion is driven primarily by a decline in the market share of traditional public schools, with higher-income families significantly more likely to choose French Immersion and to benefit from the expansion, raising concerns about increased segregation and inequality in the school system. In contrast, students with English as a second language (ESL) are unlikely to take-up French Immersion and experience adverse effects on their outcomes, suggesting spillover effects that alter social interactions and school quality. I show that families respond to these spillovers by sorting across alternatives in ways that cannot be explained by compliance, with higher income families increasing their likelihood of enrolling in private schools in some locations, while ESL students are more likely to opt for public schools in others. Notably, gains experienced by lower-income students residing near new programs suggest that expanding the access to French Immersion for certain groups could yield substantial long-term benefits.

Misspecification is theoretically linked with updating failures, but empirical evidence has been lacking. We document the empirical relevance and estimate the impact of misspecification on updating. We collect a novel high-frequency dataset on students' beliefs about grades in a freshman course. Students are overconfident, their beliefs do not improve over time, and they overestimate the testing noise by a factor of 3. Our RCT exogenously shocks and improves students' belief in the testing noise. Treated students reduce their prediction errors by 32%. We estimate the impact of misspecification structurally and find that a lower bound of 25% of prediction errors can be attributed to misspecification. Our finding suggests that misspecification is a major obstacle to processing information correctly, but it can be alleviated via simple interventions.

Special needs education is essential for addressing the unique needs of students with disabilities. However, market incentives can disadvantage these students due to the higher costs of providing specialized services. This paper investigates how funding models shape the provision of special education through two policy changes in British Columbia. The first reform eliminated targeted funding for specific special needs categories, creating variation that sheds light on the choice between a reporting-based model —where funding is tied to each identified student— and a census-based model, where funding is based on total district enrollment. I find that the removal of funding incentives led to lower identification rates and reduced services for affected students within the public sector. The second policy change increased funding for identified special needs students in independent schools to match the levels provided in public schools. I analyze how these increased funding incentives impact the sorting of students with disabilities between public and private schools, as well as their educational outcomes. This paper sheds light on the critical role that financial incentives play in the provision of education for students with special needs.

I investigate the impact of a large-scale class size reduction policy in British Columbia, triggered by a 2016 Supreme Court of Canada ruling. The ruling mandated school districts to reinstate historical class size limits, initially set decades prior and removed in 2002, and led British Columbia to allocate increased funding to facilitate these changes. The policy's implementation provides a natural experiment, where historical variation in class size rules across districts creates plausibly exogenous differences in treatment intensity among schools and districts. Using an event study design, I estimate the effects of this policy on student outcomes and examine how the effects differ across schools with varying baseline academic performance and concentrations of disadvantaged students.