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2 August 2005 Education needs real choice School choice, simply put, means
giving parents the means to choose the school that best meets their
child’s needs. That could be the local state school, an independent
school, an integrated school or a Kura Kaupapa Maori. Under choice, parents choose the
school and the government funding is made available to allow parents
to exercise that choice. It is not a difficult policy to get your
head around, and it is hardly radical in New Zealand – it’s
the way things work in the early childhood education (ECE) and tertiary
education sectors. There is no justification for denying
parents – already empowered to choose an early childhood centre
or doctor for their child – choice over schools. Nor is there any justification for parents to be restricted in the schools they can send their children to, simply because they do not have the means to pay for a particular type of education. The school choice movement is all about extending to the poor the same choices that the rich already have. While many New Zealanders do well
in the school system, many others do not. Achievement data show
that Maori and Pasifika students are far more likely to leave school
without a qualification. The latest school leaver data show that
Maori students leaving school with NCEA Level 3 or equivalent were
over five times more likely to have attended an independent school
than a state school (4.8 times for Pasifika and 2.5 times for Pakeha). Why would we want to deny anyone
the right to access the education that gives such results just because
their family cannot afford it? There is only one answer, we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t – and we
shouldn’t; and the good thing is that there are clear policy
paths for providing access to private, or any type of education
– for who-ever wants to choose it, rich or poor. Harvard University education policy
expert Caroline Hoxby outlined some of those ‘school choice’
paths in her article in these pages a couple of weeks back. She
showed how regulators can easily design policy so that choice in
education is not the privilege of a few in society but is open to
all; and how it can be designed for whatever the social goals of
a country or city happen to be. A growing body of research supports
the view that choice can play a useful role in lifting student achievement.
Research by Professor Hoxby has shown that competition from private
schools led to increased achievement per dollar spent at regular
public schools and that achievement increases were greatest at schools
facing the most competition. She also found that public schools
in areas with larger concentrations of Catholic schools performed
better across a number of achievement indicators than those facing
less competition. School choice is a policy that works if it is well-designed – and it is mainstream. Countries such as the Netherlands,
Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Australia, Chile and Canada – among
others – all have school choice in one form or another. And
it is not some sort of Johnny-come-lately policy – the Netherlands
has had school choice since 1917! Sweden introduced school choice
in 1992, and since then the subsequent opening up of its education
system has introduced competition from independent schools, which
has improved test results in state schools. Support for school choice spans
political divides. It is not necessarily a left/right issue. In
Canada, governments of various political persuasions support funding
for independent and religious schools. Under Tony Blair’s Labour
Government, the United Kingdom is working on a range of measures
to give parents more educational choice. Many Democrats in the United
States support Charter schools – the fastest growing school
choice segment. School choice enjoys considerable
support among parents – two New Zealand surveys in the past
two years, and several overseas studies, have found wide support:
A National Business Review poll conducted in 2003 found that
52 percent of respondents thought private education was better than
state education (with the highest support – 63 percent –
among Maori) and nearly half said they would send their children
to private schools if they could. The Maxim Institute’s recent
Colmar Brunton survey found that 84 percent of parents believed
that individual schools should be allowed to teach their individual
community’s positive values. Opponents of school choice in New
Zealand are becoming increasingly isolated from the mainstream of
thinking on school reform and, more importantly, the wishes of parents.
The backlash against the government’s anti-choice ‘20
free hours’ ECE policy is further proof of that. Opposition is driven by rigid adherence
to outdated ideologies. But it is also based in part on a fundamental
misunderstanding of New Zealand’s educational reform experience.
In her recent Education Review opinion piece, Debbie Te Whaiti
repeated myths that have grown up around those reforms. The first of these is that New
Zealand introduced ‘market’ schooling reforms in the late
1980s and early 1990s, and that these reforms ‘failed’.
The reality is that the market model never existed. The so-called
‘market’ schooling model was so encumbered by poor funding
policies, centralisation and tight regulation that it could scarcely
be labelled a market model. Weaknesses in the model included
the failure to open up the supply side of the education sector,
the fact that unpopular schools were not allowed to fail, the one-size
fits-all school governance structure and the national teacher pay
scale. If the reforms failed (a big if), it was government that
failed, not markets. Te Whaiti also repeats the myth
that New Zealand’s school reforms led to greater segregation
of enrolments, and cites the Smithfield research in support of her
argument. Although the Smithfield authors claim that dezoning increased
segregation in schools, the evidence they present showed that segregation
along social-class lines actually declined in the years immediately
after the removal of zoning. Although segregation rose somewhat
thereafter, it remained below the level that existed prior to the
removal of zoning. In other words, the removal of zoning made schools
less segregated on social class lines. While there was some increase
in ethnic segregation, this could have been due to positive factors
such as Maori choosing KKM over ‘mainstream’ schooling. Te Whaiti also claims that the
reforms increased educational inequality. This is simply a variant
of the oft-repeated argument that choice benefits the ‘rich’.
But school choice is designed to benefit all groups in society and
is likely to benefit the disadvantaged the most. This is because
the ‘rich’ already have choice, given that they are better
placed than the poor to buy houses in areas with high-performing
state schools and are more likely to be able to afford to send their
children to independent schools. Who responded the most when the
shackles of school zoning were removed in the early 1990s? Research
shows that it was Maori and Pasifika families. For both groups,
the proportion of students from both groups attending ‘non-local’
schools approximately doubled between 1990 and 1995. This same research
recognised that school zoning, a restriction on choice, served the
interests of the privileged when it argued that “It ... was
mainly the well-off who managed to send their children to other
than local schools under zoning”. The misguided belief that choice
generates inequality is inconsistent with OECD data, which shows
that several countries with more choice in schooling than New Zealand
(Sweden, Australia and the Netherlands, for example) achieve high
performance and low inequality in education outcomes. Improving educational performance
is a complex task and school choice is not a silver bullet. It is
just one of a raft of policies needed together to achieve improved
educational outcomes, and it must be done right. Well-designed ‘market’
reforms have an important role to play in lifting educational achievement
by providing incentives for schools to meet children’s and
local community’s needs. The starting point for any reform
should be the removal of the distinction in funding between public
and private schools. School funding should be tied to each student,
so all schools – whether public, private, not-for-profit, for-profit,
community or church – would receive the same funding for similar
students and families would have real education options. The current divide is arbitrary
and artificial and fails to recognise that the ‘publicness’
of a school should be defined by whether or not it serves the public
interest, rather than whether it is public or private. This would need to be accompanied
by other reforms, including changes to teacher pay arrangements,
amendments to the rules surrounding school governance and the introduction
of a new system of school accountability. Schools should also be
given more autonomy so they are allowed to craft educational solutions
that are suited to the children in their community. Working together, parents and professional
educators are far better placed than Wellington-based teacher union
leaders and educrats to determine what is best for individual children. No doubt New Zealand’s teacher
union leaders would oppose such a reform programme. Their industrial
era tactics – the policy equivalent of negative English rugby
– are consistent with those of teacher unions the world over. Children should not be held hostage
to the whims of political elites just because they are poor and
their parents do not have the money to access anything but their
local school. Norman LaRocque is policy advisor to the New Zealand Business Roundtable. For more information, contact: Norman LaRocque Web: www.nzbr.org.nz |