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School choice: a Subtext special edition Welcome to this special edition of Subtext, which focuses on the issue of school choice. School choice has been a topic of considerable policy discussion in New Zealand since school zoning was removed in the early 1990s. This has been particularly true in recent times with the partial reintroduction of zoning in 2000, and this year we’ve seen reports of increasing Auckland house prices in ‘desirable’ school zones and pupils being kicked out of schools in Christchurch because of the use of false addresses. The issue has also been in the news internationally. In the United States, school choice initiatives such as charter schools, contract schools and voucher schemes have kept the issue at the top of the education agenda. This looks set to increase given the US Supreme Court’s favourable decision on the constitutionality of vouchers in the Zelman case. The first signs of that are now appearing, with the state of Colorado legislature now on the verge of passing a comprehensive school voucher bill. While much of the international attention on vouchers has been focused on voucher programmes in US cities such as Cleveland and Milwaukee, a much wider (and quieter) school choice revolution has been happening across a range of developed and developing countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. We have devoted this edition of Subtext to the topic of school choice and highlight how it has been implemented in six highly different countries:
These are only a handful of the many countries that have introduced school choice policies. What is clear from these examples (and others such as Ireland, Australia, the Philippines, Chile, Belgium, some Canadian provinces and elsewhere) is that there is a wide range of school choice models on the international stage — with varying strengths and weaknesses and often with quite different origins. New Zealand provides some funding to non-government schools — a form of voucher. In addition, a successful voucher pilot — the Targeted Individual Entitlement (TIE) scheme — was introduced in New Zealand in the mid-1990s. The scheme was closed to new entrants by the Labour government. In this Subtext, we highlight some points from an evaluation of the TIE scheme. The Education Forum believes that parents should have the right to choose a school for their children. Without a system whereby government funding follows the student — to the public or private school of their choosing, many New Zealand families will be denied real choice in education. The Education Forum believes that policy debates need to stop focusing on public and private schools. In our view, the ‘publicness’ of a school should be defined by whether that school helps to meet the country’s educational, social and economic objectives, not by whether the bricks and mortar are publicly or privately owned. Funding policy should be geared to overcoming students’ barriers to learning, not feeding ideological biases against education providers that who happen to be privately owned. We hope the articles and information in this edition of Subtext are useful to you in outlining the variety and range of school choice schemes around the world and can contribute to a more rational debate on the merits of alternative funding systems for New Zealand schools.
Norman LaRocque |
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