Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Primary and secondary education 147
and meaningful parental choice. It has been demonstrated that reforms such as extending
school days, imposing national testing, and school accreditation requirements have
“failed to turn around a large-scale decline in education.” 44 Although the reasons for this
failure are far from clear, some possible explanations are that such reforms induce
teachers to “teach-to-the-test,” that time is used inefficiently during the school day, and
that accreditation requirements are too minimal to ensure adequate educational
opportunities. Furthermore, efforts to improve public education through increased
funding have proved similarly dismal. 45
Thus, in light of the generally strong presumptive evidence in favour of increased but
nevertheless bounded parental choice, we seek to consider the different ways in which
this choice can be effectuated. In particular, we review the experience of several different
choice-enhancing experiments that have been adopted in a number of different
jurisdictions. We seek to determine whether public subsidization of parental school
choice for primary and secondary education can respond to the problems identified for
conventional public schools, while respecting received public values and goals that
operate in this area. Specifically, we consider open enrollment programs, charter schools,
and voucher programs.
Open enrollment
In an open enrollment system, parents are permitted to enroll their children in public
schools located in districts other than the one in which they are located. This enables
families residing in districts with chronically poorly performing schools to place their
children in schools of higher quality without having to change their residence.
Regrettably, however, the degree of choice actually conferred on parents in open
enrollment systems is not as great as parents would like. It is often the case that the
popular schools fill up quickly, and students who do not secure placement in one of these
schools will have no choice but to attend an unpopular school. Hoxby notes that “open
enrollment programs have such poorly designed funding that programs that are enacted to
be universal actually degenerate: preferred districts opt out by ensuring that they never
have space to receive students.” 46 Similarly, in examining the decision to move to
enhanced choice in the New Zealand public school system, Ladd notes that, “successful
schools in urban areas had no desire to expand their enrollment. To the contrary, they did
everything they could to maintain the mix of students that made them attractive to parents
and students in the first place.” 47 Thus it seems that in a fully open enrollment system, the
schools that are in demand may be resistant to disentangling the linkage between the
geographic proximity of nearby students and school enrollment. Not surprisingly, at least
part of the resistance to change will emanate from local residents who are fearful that
enrollment expansion to accommodate out-of-district students will compromise school
quality (as a result of diseconomies of scale or the introduction of a high-needs
population into the school without offsetting resources), and this will affect their
children’s educational experience and the investment value of their homes (where this
value reflects, in part, an expectation of access to highquality schools). While it is
possible to mitigate the severity of this resistance to enrollment expansion by requiring
schools to take students on a first-come, flrst-served basis or using lotteries to decide
which students are admitted to school, local residents (particularly in close proximity to