Research project Does the time table matter?

The goal of thls project is to evaluate the effects of an educational policy experiment that transferred decision making authority over the amount of time allocated across subjects from the national level to the school level. It was implemented in 900 of Sweden's approximately 3000 primary and lower secondary schools in the early 2000's.

We aim to study how school based schedule management can affect students' medium- and long­-term outcomes such as grades and national test scores in lower and upper secondary school, entry into higher education, and labor market outcomes. We will study both the average effects and the potentially heterogeneous effects that this reform may have had on various subgroups of students, in order to better understand if the policy reform affected inequality of outcomes.

We will also study the role of teachers and headmasters in relation to the reform. More explicitly, we want to test ifthe estimated effects on student outcomes vary depending on the characteristics of the personnel working in the school, such as their educational background, age, gender and previous work-life experience? Furthermore, we want to know if this policy experiment affected the composition of the teachers in the participating schools?