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velvetpageEvery conservative government I'm familiar with in North America occasionally brings up the issue of school choice - that is, the right of students and parents to choose the school that best fits their values and will give their kids the best education. The mantra usually includes several elements of a moral conservative and economic conservative standpoint: the problem of religious education; the idea that competition provides a motivation to improve; and that engagement increases with the level of choice.
The remedy for all of this is school choice, with or without an actual voucher system, where some or all of the money needed to educate a child follows that child no matter what school she attends. The idea is that schools will start offering specialized programs to attract certain students, while schools who don't start improving will find themselves without enough kids to function.
I'm not against the right to choose a school. There are nations and situations where such a choice could work extremely well. The Netherlands has had school choice for ninety years, and 70% of elementary students attend independent schools. There are also smaller models of school choice that work pretty well in Ontario - for example, French Immersion, magnet schools, and specialized programs are all examples of school choice on a limited scale, within a school board. I've chosen one of those for my own children. As of day one of Senior Kindergarten, I'm happy with it. :) The third reason I provided above - engagement - is entirely true and a very good thing.
That said, I don't think broader school choice would work in a larger context in most situations in North America at the moment.
First, I don't believe that the government should be paying for religious education in any form. (Yes, that means I'd like to see the amalgamation of the Catholic and public school boards in Ontario.) I could see a reasonable compromise here, where a class in "moral education" could be chosen by the parents, including three or four different strands of religious-based moral education, such as is done in Quebec. But I don't see the need to use a publicly-funded school system to inculcate religious education. That's what Sunday School is for.
But even if you support religious education as a right, there are reasons why school choice on a broad scale is not the best of ideas right now, and most of them come down to that second point: competition provides a motive to improve failing schools.
This is the real red herring. It's treating a school like a business, and there are several ways in which this doesn't work. When a business is having trouble attracting customers, what does it do? First, it investigates the problem, polling customers or former customers, examining their product or service for flaws, and acting on what they find. People get fired and hired, and money is poured into improving the product or service. They adjust their pricing to be more competitive, narrowing their expenses as far as possible and possibly eliminating all profit for a while while they build themselves up. Then they advertise their new and improved status, or their niche market. Sometimes they do one and not the others, in which case their improvement is likely to be short-lived.
When a school is not succeeding, it also looks at data to figure out why. Test results are compared with other schools, as are socio-economic data on the students. Usually, it's found that the schools having trouble are in poor neighbourhoods where the parents have less education overall and less engagement in their children's education that would parents in a more suburban neighbourhood. In some cities, the poor neighbourhoods are vast, and access to a better-performing school is difficult even if the child has the right to it, because one of the things better-off parents buy with their money is reliable transportation. If Mom doesn't have a car, how exactly is the child to get where they're choosing to go? What if the public transportation system isn't good enough or the culture not open enough to consider having children under ten riding it alone while parents work? One of the things the Netherlands has going for it with its school choice model is an excellent public transportation network, a higher population density meaning shorter distances for almost everything, and more heterogeneous neighbourhoods in most cities. The slums/suburbs divide is much reduced.
So what does a failing school do to improve? First, its students are fleeing - those who have the option to flee, that is, most of whom are from a higher socio-economic level than those left behind. So it's losing funding. This makes it difficult to pour money into revamping the product being offered. Without extra funds, the school has no hope of offering a better education, because a good education revolves around two things: access to books, and access to excellent teaching. (The third, parental involvement, is not within the school's realm of influence to secure.) Failing schools which are not offered extra money to improve, have no hope of doing so. They can't raise sufficient funds outside of the vouchers, they can't go into debt to fund the improvement, and the pool of money available to them is shrinking. Hiring or firing personnel also takes money, and comes with a catch-22. If you hire experienced people who have the special training you need, you're going to have to pay for them. If you fire experienced people, you may be able to hire cheaper teachers, but they will have less training and less experience, and the chances of them being good additions to the team are somewhat slimmer than if you can afford to pay them better.
Schools are not businesses. They don't have the same options to increase their funding, and without that funding they are limited in their opportunities to improve their product. They are not competing on an even playing field - recent research suggests that 69% of the difference in test scores between high-performing and low-performing schools can be explained by socio-economic factors, so schools in poorer neighbourhoods are at a significant disadvantage.
The key to success is not competition, because competition implies that some will succeed and some will fail. That's it's nature. We can't afford to fail at educating our children. It shouldn't even be an option - but as long as school choice is occupying space on the political spectrum as a factor in the debate about improving schools, it will be.
The key to the success in the Netherlands - in addition to the opportunity to work out an awful lot of bugs in ninety years - rests in several facts. The first is that kids from lower socio-economic levels bring more money to their schools than kids from higher SELs. This means that the school in the poor neighbourhood is getting more money right at the outset than the school in the better-off neighbourhood five kilometres away. The second is that all teachers, at public and independent schools, are under the same nationally-bargained union contract, so schools cannot reduce their budgets by undercutting the wages of their teachers, or by hiring or firing willy-nilly. They have a contract to respect, and failure to respect it would land them in court. So hiring and firing is about suitability to the school, not money. The third is a facet of a densely-populated country, where a good public transportation system is in place and where socio-economic differences in neighbourhoods are less pronounced than they often are in North America.
So, before completely-open school choice can be contemplated in any part of North America, the following things need to be in place:
1) A formula that provides extra funding for students who statistically require more resources;
2) Collective agreements ensuring that teachers are paid the same no matter which school they are in, and that they have similar minimal qualifications, whether the school is independent or public, so that pay is based on education and experience and nothing else;
3) An expectation that any school accepting vouchers is funding the school entirely with the vouchers - that is, no tuition top-ups that skew the ability of some students to choose that school;
4) Transportation systems, either from regional education authorities or municipal governments, that ensure any child has the option to attend any school in the municipality regardless of their parents' ownership of a vehicle;
5) The belief, by parents, students, and educators, that failure is not an option. Schools may compete on specifics, but on the basics, all must be able to provide a good education to every student on their rolls.
When those things are in place, a jurisdiction is ready for school choice - but it may find it no longer needs it.
The remedy for all of this is school choice, with or without an actual voucher system, where some or all of the money needed to educate a child follows that child no matter what school she attends. The idea is that schools will start offering specialized programs to attract certain students, while schools who don't start improving will find themselves without enough kids to function.
I'm not against the right to choose a school. There are nations and situations where such a choice could work extremely well. The Netherlands has had school choice for ninety years, and 70% of elementary students attend independent schools. There are also smaller models of school choice that work pretty well in Ontario - for example, French Immersion, magnet schools, and specialized programs are all examples of school choice on a limited scale, within a school board. I've chosen one of those for my own children. As of day one of Senior Kindergarten, I'm happy with it. :) The third reason I provided above - engagement - is entirely true and a very good thing.
That said, I don't think broader school choice would work in a larger context in most situations in North America at the moment.
First, I don't believe that the government should be paying for religious education in any form. (Yes, that means I'd like to see the amalgamation of the Catholic and public school boards in Ontario.) I could see a reasonable compromise here, where a class in "moral education" could be chosen by the parents, including three or four different strands of religious-based moral education, such as is done in Quebec. But I don't see the need to use a publicly-funded school system to inculcate religious education. That's what Sunday School is for.
But even if you support religious education as a right, there are reasons why school choice on a broad scale is not the best of ideas right now, and most of them come down to that second point: competition provides a motive to improve failing schools.
This is the real red herring. It's treating a school like a business, and there are several ways in which this doesn't work. When a business is having trouble attracting customers, what does it do? First, it investigates the problem, polling customers or former customers, examining their product or service for flaws, and acting on what they find. People get fired and hired, and money is poured into improving the product or service. They adjust their pricing to be more competitive, narrowing their expenses as far as possible and possibly eliminating all profit for a while while they build themselves up. Then they advertise their new and improved status, or their niche market. Sometimes they do one and not the others, in which case their improvement is likely to be short-lived.
When a school is not succeeding, it also looks at data to figure out why. Test results are compared with other schools, as are socio-economic data on the students. Usually, it's found that the schools having trouble are in poor neighbourhoods where the parents have less education overall and less engagement in their children's education that would parents in a more suburban neighbourhood. In some cities, the poor neighbourhoods are vast, and access to a better-performing school is difficult even if the child has the right to it, because one of the things better-off parents buy with their money is reliable transportation. If Mom doesn't have a car, how exactly is the child to get where they're choosing to go? What if the public transportation system isn't good enough or the culture not open enough to consider having children under ten riding it alone while parents work? One of the things the Netherlands has going for it with its school choice model is an excellent public transportation network, a higher population density meaning shorter distances for almost everything, and more heterogeneous neighbourhoods in most cities. The slums/suburbs divide is much reduced.
So what does a failing school do to improve? First, its students are fleeing - those who have the option to flee, that is, most of whom are from a higher socio-economic level than those left behind. So it's losing funding. This makes it difficult to pour money into revamping the product being offered. Without extra funds, the school has no hope of offering a better education, because a good education revolves around two things: access to books, and access to excellent teaching. (The third, parental involvement, is not within the school's realm of influence to secure.) Failing schools which are not offered extra money to improve, have no hope of doing so. They can't raise sufficient funds outside of the vouchers, they can't go into debt to fund the improvement, and the pool of money available to them is shrinking. Hiring or firing personnel also takes money, and comes with a catch-22. If you hire experienced people who have the special training you need, you're going to have to pay for them. If you fire experienced people, you may be able to hire cheaper teachers, but they will have less training and less experience, and the chances of them being good additions to the team are somewhat slimmer than if you can afford to pay them better.
Schools are not businesses. They don't have the same options to increase their funding, and without that funding they are limited in their opportunities to improve their product. They are not competing on an even playing field - recent research suggests that 69% of the difference in test scores between high-performing and low-performing schools can be explained by socio-economic factors, so schools in poorer neighbourhoods are at a significant disadvantage.
The key to success is not competition, because competition implies that some will succeed and some will fail. That's it's nature. We can't afford to fail at educating our children. It shouldn't even be an option - but as long as school choice is occupying space on the political spectrum as a factor in the debate about improving schools, it will be.
The key to the success in the Netherlands - in addition to the opportunity to work out an awful lot of bugs in ninety years - rests in several facts. The first is that kids from lower socio-economic levels bring more money to their schools than kids from higher SELs. This means that the school in the poor neighbourhood is getting more money right at the outset than the school in the better-off neighbourhood five kilometres away. The second is that all teachers, at public and independent schools, are under the same nationally-bargained union contract, so schools cannot reduce their budgets by undercutting the wages of their teachers, or by hiring or firing willy-nilly. They have a contract to respect, and failure to respect it would land them in court. So hiring and firing is about suitability to the school, not money. The third is a facet of a densely-populated country, where a good public transportation system is in place and where socio-economic differences in neighbourhoods are less pronounced than they often are in North America.
So, before completely-open school choice can be contemplated in any part of North America, the following things need to be in place:
1) A formula that provides extra funding for students who statistically require more resources;
2) Collective agreements ensuring that teachers are paid the same no matter which school they are in, and that they have similar minimal qualifications, whether the school is independent or public, so that pay is based on education and experience and nothing else;
3) An expectation that any school accepting vouchers is funding the school entirely with the vouchers - that is, no tuition top-ups that skew the ability of some students to choose that school;
4) Transportation systems, either from regional education authorities or municipal governments, that ensure any child has the option to attend any school in the municipality regardless of their parents' ownership of a vehicle;
5) The belief, by parents, students, and educators, that failure is not an option. Schools may compete on specifics, but on the basics, all must be able to provide a good education to every student on their rolls.
When those things are in place, a jurisdiction is ready for school choice - but it may find it no longer needs it.