In recent decades, a number of countries and jurisdictions have introduced school choice programmes. These include countries such as Chile, New Zealand and Sweden, as well as the US state of Florida, and US cities such as Cleveland (Ohio), Edgewood (part of San Antonio, Texas) and Milwaukee (Wisconsin). The move toward increased choice and competition in these countries and jurisdictions has generated considerable attention and discussion amongst both advocates and opponents of these policies.

The ongoing mix of euphoria and alarmism about school choice programmes could cause many reform advocates and activists to forget that few people are aware of such programmes, and that most of the advocates are over-reacting to small changes in funding and governance policies. Choice programmes introduced to date are much closer to policy adjustments than the institutional transformation suggested by serious, systemic core education problems. In some countries, the changes affect only a small fraction of families with school-age children. In each jurisdiction, restrictions on potential school choices and those who can choose without changing their residence guarantee little alteration in the system, and thus only modest adjustments in the nature of primary and secondary schooling practices. The sometimes fiery discussions of restriction-laden parental choice programmes are a potentially devastating distraction. Broken, reform-resistant school systems that short-change nearly everyone need a public debate focused on policy changes capable of transforming every family’s menu of schooling options.

For parental choice to qualify as a transformation catalyst, the freedom of parents to choose a school, and producers to define the schooling options, must be sufficient to foster a dynamic, broadly accessible, diverse menu of autonomous schooling options. It means that government funds targeted for primary and secondary schooling must follow children to the school preferred by their parents. There must be no preferential treatment of children enrolled in government-run schools, or formal entry barriers to education entrepreneurs, non-profit or for-profit. School operators, unable to attract enough students to finance themselves, must yield their facilities and staff to other education or non-education uses. Private accreditation is preferable to licensing by the government.

An often overlooked but critical element is market-determined tuition prices. Market-determined prices are absolutely necessary to maximise innovation and the rate of improvement, to optimise the overall level of investment and to promote the development of school choices as diverse as the children who live within an area. So that market forces can determine tuition prices, parents must be free to supplement government tuition payments with tuition co-payments, often referred to as add-ons.

Especially prominent in the current climate are the parental choice programmes of Chile, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States. Unfortunately, each of these programmes lacks many of the critical elements necessary for the policy changes to qualify as transformation catalysts, or even as very insightful experiments. Indeed, most of the critical elements are completely absent in the programmes of these countries. It is too soon to rule out gradual, evolutionary progress to a parental choice reform catalyst. However, it is apparent that the existing programmes will yield a rate of evolutionary policy reform that is, at best, slow. Key constraints appear to be quite stubborn. In certain countries, even the direction of incremental change is not encouraging. Some of the choice initiatives were accompanied by tighter central control of schooling practices, including an extension of politics and regulation to what were formerly independent schools.

To a still unknown extent, those modest, restriction-laden programmes are typecasting parental choice programmes as just limited escape valves for the most disadvantaged children in the worst public schools. Escape-valve versions of parental choice create the false impression that the education problems are isolated rather than systemic.

Choice advocates need to prevent limited choice programmes from being perceived as ‘real reform’, and advocate policies that represent a genuine reform catalyst. The minimum starting point may be well short of separation of school and state, or even the elimination of government-run schools, but it appears to be well beyond the scope of the policy changes made by Chile, New Zealand, Sweden and some places in the United States. It seems that the minimum starting point must remove proponents of the status quo from positions that allow them strong influence over the rules that define the schooling options and limit the amount of choice granted by new programmes. It is true that “school choice policies are sweeping the globe”.1 But, so far, “the center holds”.