The Case For School Choice: Executive Summary

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Canadian Education in a Global Context

The Canadian system of public education is inefficient and inadequate: 33 percent of Canadian high-school graduates are functionally illiterate; 27 percent of Canadian adolescents drop out of high school with no diploma. The academic achievement of our students is mediocre compared to that of their peers in other countries. Public-opinion polls show that confidence in the system is at a 30-year low. If it is not to become obsolete, Canadian education needs to be redesigned.

Over the past 30 years, our Ministries of Education have tinkered with a variety of reforms, including smaller classes and higher salaries, in an effort to improve the public education system. In doing so, they have tripled the real cost of education. Despite their variety and expense, these reforms have failed to improve student achievement, and failed to solve the problem of mounting public frustration with the education system.

Other countries have much to teach us. United States, New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden have pioneered systems of public education that are characterized by accountability and parental choice. The tools they have used are charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, and school assessments. Evidence suggests that if the Canadian education system supported greater parental choice, student achievement would improve. It certainly has done elsewhere.

In the United States and New Zealand, researchers have measured the effects of the school choice on student learning and parental satisfaction. In both countries, evidence suggests that the new policy instruments are having a statistically significant impact on both. In all four countries, United States, New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden, school choice is responsible for a wide range of benefits: greater responsiveness of schools to parental concerns, greater awareness of educational issues, and a more dynamic, innovative and equitable education system.

The United States

Three school-choice movements have developed in the United States over the past decade: charter schools, educational vouchers, and tax credits. They have been rigorously analyzed and a growing body of research documents their impact on student learning.

Charter schools have been dubbed America's research and development centers for education and they have won the approval of many teachers who had once resisted them. Students at charter schools are making greater academic progress than their peers because charter schools are more innovative, focused, energetic, and responsive to their students' needs.

Voucher programs, growing in number and popularity across the United States, are demonstrating three facts about education. First, many lower-income families rejoice at the opportunity vouchers give them to move their children into better schools. Second, students who use vouchers learn more than they would have if they had stayed in government schools. Third, government schools respond to vouchers by improving the quality and variety of programs they offer to the majority of children who remain.

For the first time in education history, researchers studying the effects of vouchers have been able to control for the effects of selectivity on student test scores. That is, researchers were able to make sure that the students who used vouchers were not brighter and did not have more motivated parents or more advantageous family backgrounds than did the students at government schools to whom they were compared. The studies were thus able to determine that the improvement in voucher-student test scores was due to the voucher and not to the students' greater aptitude for learning. This is a landmark in education research. It predicts the impact that systemic education reform might have on the student population as a whole if parental choice became more widely available.

The most powerful example of this comes from a Harvard study of New York City's School Choice Scholarship Program (SCSP). Low-income students randomly selected from applicants to SCSP out-performed their control-group peers in both reading and math by statistically significant margins after only a year in their new school. Voucher parents were more satisfied with the education, student safety and attendance, and with the relative absence of fighting, cheating, vandalism, and racial conflict within their chosen schools. Dan McKinley, the executive director of another private voucher program, explains why: "this is about children who need help getting into the schools that are best for them" (Williams1997: B4).

New Zealand

Ten years ago, New Zealand restructured its education system: it transformed government-administered schools into locally managed charter schools, created a new, autonomous public agency to assess them, and established a small voucher program for low-income students. Research concludes that schools have become more innovative, focused, energetic, and responsive to the needs of students since they became charter schools. Teachers and principals believe that the impact of the reforms on teaching content, teaching style, and children's learning has been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks to the new system, teachers, principals, parents, and communities have each gained a new sense of responsibility for children's schooling.

Among parents of voucher students, 97 percent report to be satisfied or very satisfied with the education their children are receiving at an independent school.

Denmark

Denmark's education system has always maintained the parents' right to choose their children's education. In Denmark, all children, regardless of their parents' income, have access to publicly funded vouchers. One result is that Denmark has an unparalleled diversity of independent schools. Another is that, because government schools are motivated by competition to respond to parental concerns, the government schools are well respected. School choice has improved both the quality and the public perception of government schools.

Sweden

In 1991, Sweden created a voucher program that enabled families to send their children to any school, government-run or independent, without paying fees. The policy has stimulated a rapid growth in innovative independent schools and encouraged municipal schools to respond to parental concerns. School choice has also united politicians, nearly all of whom now support vouchers.

Implications for Canada

In Canada, public frustration with the education system has been building for a generation, but the educational establishment has yet to propose a viable solution to the problem. International evidence suggests that public vouchers, private vouchers, or charter schools offer plausible answers. If we reject these solutions, it seems probable that Canadian education will continue to cost more and yield less.

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Last Modified: Monday, September 20, 1999.