School Choice: A Market Approach to Education Reform
As the end of the school year approaches, it’s not too soon to start thinking about school choices for next year. Most parents wish for their children to get the best education possible, but the options often seem limited by their circumstances. However, this need not be the case.
School choice is an educational reform movement that aims to give parents the right to choose a school for their child, and it is based on the free market concept that competition will provide schools with incentives to improve their performance and better serve their students. Low income students are often the primary targets of school choice reform efforts. However, some critics are concerned that students will benefit from school choice unequally and that allowing some schools to fail will not increase the quality of schools overall. Regardless, it seems that the discussion about school choice is slowly moving away from whether it is beneficial to how it should best be implemented. [1]
School choice can appear in several different forms.
Residential school choice (choosing to live in a neighborhood with a good school) and tuition (enrolling in private schools) are still the most common ways that families choose schools. For example, in 2003, 24% of parents with children in public schools report that they moved to a neighborhood so their children could attend the local school. [2]
Other forms of school choice include:
- State-funded tax credits, tax deductions and education savings accounts that provide parents with money to use towards educational expenses;
- Public and private vouchers, which act like scholarships that allow students to attend public or private schools of their choosing;
- Magnet schools, which offer specialized programs designed to attract students to a particular area in an effort to reduce segregation;
- Home-schooling, where parents instruct their children in the home;
- Charter schools, which are public schools that operate independently of the district in which they are located.
- Intradistrict, interdistrict and open enrollment programs that allow students to select from any school in their district, region or state. [3]
On our site we evaluate a number of nonprofits working for school choice, doing everything from researching the effectiveness of school choice, to raising awareness about schooling options among parents, to offering scholarships to help students attend the schools of their choice, and even to running charter schools. Included on this page are some of the most highly-rated charities endeavoring in this area.
[1] National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education, "School Choice: Doing It the Right Way Makes a Difference," November 2003.
[2] U.S. Department of Education. “The Condition of Education in 2004.” Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. June 2004.
[3] “Types of School Choice.” The Heritage Foundation. 20 April 2008. <http://www.heritage.org/research/education/schoolchoice/typesofschoolchoiceRD.cfm>
