A Lesson from our Neighbors to the North: How School Choice Works

Advocates of school choice have long argued that parents ought to have the right to choose the best schools for their children, that students shouldn’t be relegated to schools based on arbitrary factors, such as a family’s zip code. If parents have the right to choose, the argument goes, then schools become like other service-providing organizations: they must compete for students (and the dollars that come with those students). Competition yields better performance. Better performance means better education for students. Good schools prosper; bad schools close. The nation produces well-educated men and women prepared for our increasing global economy.

Researchers continue to look for places where they can test this theory, and Canada happens to provide a ripe arena. Here’s why: each province oversees its own education system, and four provinces (Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta) each offer two distinct, publicly funded schools systems. One is a secular public school system, and the other contains Catholic schools, also known as “separate schools,” which are open only to children of Catholic families. (Occasionally, children of non-Catholic families are admitted.)

If school choice advocates are correct in their analyses, the fact that Catholic parents can choose between these systems should boost student performance in both school systems. So researchers at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto set out to test this theory by examining student performance in Ontario schools, where both systems receive equal government funding per student.

Their results, published in October, report, “When Catholic families are willing to move between public and separate schools, this creates incentives for both public and separate school systems to improve in order to attract more students.”

Researchers first established that Catholic parents are willing to move their students between schools. (If they weren’t, school leaders wouldn’t have to worry about losing students and funding to stronger schools.) Instead of tracking individual students through the school systems, researchers examined how school openings and closings in one system affect school openings and closings in the other. They discovered that while a school closure has little effect on the alternative system, a new school results in “a sizeable decrease in enrollment at nearby schools affiliated with the alternative board”—an event that has even greater impact in a neighborhood where there is a 50 percent increase in new homes from one year to the next and/or where there is a high proportion of Catholic families.

In such neighborhoods, when a new Catholic school opens, neighboring public school enrollments drop by about 9.6 percent; neighboring Catholic school enrollment drops by 9.7 percent. When a new secular school opens, the enrollments at nearby Catholic schools decline by about 3.9 percent. Neighborhood secular schools lose 9.3 percent of students.

But what about student performance? The last step of the study measured the effects of this movement on student achievement. Researchers compared standardized test scores in reading, math and writing for students in third and sixth grades from 1998 to 2005. That amounted to data for about 325,000 public school students and 165,000 separate school students.

Researchers measured how much a cohort of students—say, those who were in third grade in the 1997-98 school year and in sixth grade in the 2000-01 school year—improved during this time. In neighborhoods with little new housing and few Catholic families, the change was minimal: .2 percent increase in reading and writing, .4 percent boost in math.

But in neighborhoods where there are large Catholic populations and a crop of new housing going up, students’ scores improved between 4 and 9 percent. “The results suggest that if all families—rather than just Catholic families—could exercise choice between school systems, the incentives for public school administrators to improve quality would be strong yet, with potentially significant impacts on student outcomes.”

We might learn something from our neighbors to the north. Opponents of school choice often argue that choice is dangerous to the public school system, but perhaps we’d do well to remember that the public school system exists for one reason: to educate students. We should feel no obligation to protect a system if it isn’t working, and international comparisons of American students suggest that in many districts, public education as it currently exists isn’t working, despite rising costs to taxpayers. If other nations are finding ways to make school choice work—and are offering proof of how competition among schools for enrollment improves student performance—it’s high time parents demand the same opportunities for American students.