The Value Of Education Choices

The United States is in the midst of historic experiments with publicly funded choice in K-12 education, experiments that recently received a "green light" from the Supreme Court. Other nations have long experience with the funding and regulation of nonpublic schools, including religious schools. This book asks what U.S. policymakers, public officials, and citizens can learn from these experiences. In particular, how do other countries regulate or structure publicly funded educational choice with an eye toward civic values —looking not only for improvements in test scores, but also in tolerance, civic cohesion, and democratic values such as integration across the lines of class, religion, and race? The experience of Europe and Canada with school choice is both extensive and varied. In England and Wales, public school choice is widespread, as parents play a significant role in selecting the school their children will attend. In the Netherlands and much of Belgium, a majority of students attend religious schools at government expense. In Canada, France, and Germany, state-financed school choice is limited to circumstances that serve particular social and governmental needs. In Italy, school choice has just recently arrived on the policy agenda. In spite of the diversity of national experiences, in all of these countries choice is regulated by the government in significant and varied ways to promote civic values. In several of these countries, school choice policy itself appears to have played an important role in promoting social cohesion and integration. This book presents a wealth of experience designed to aid policymakers and citizens as they consider historic changes in American public education policy.

This book, jointly authored by two distinguished philosophers and two prominent social scientists, has an ambitious aim: to improve decision-making in education policy. First they dive into the goals of education policy and explain the terms "educational goods" and "childhood goods," adding precision and clarity to the discussion of the distributive values that are essential for good decision-making about education. Then they provide a framework for individual decision-makers that enables them to combine values and evidence in the evaluation of educational policy options. Finally they delve into the particular policy issues of school finance, school accountability, and school choice, and they show how decision makers might approach them in the light of this decision-making framework. The authors are not advocated particular policy choices, however. The focus instead is a smart framework that will make it easier for policymakers (and readers) to identify and think through what they disagree with others about.

“An ambitious effort that succeeds in providing a fundamentally new way to talk about and . . . think about policy choices in education.” —Jeffrey R. Henig, Teachers College, Columbia University We spend a lot of time arguing about how schools might be improved. But we rarely take a step back to ask what we as a society should be looking for from education—what exactly should those who make decisions be trying to achieve? In Educational Goods, two philosophers and two social scientists address this very question. They begin by broadening the language for talking about educational policy: “educational goods” are the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that children develop for their own benefit and that of others; “childhood goods” are the valuable experiences and freedoms that make childhood a distinct phase of life. Balancing those, and understanding that not all of them can be measured through traditional methods, is a key first step. From there, they show how to think clearly about how those goods are distributed and propose a method for combining values and evidence to reach decisions. They conclude by showing the method in action, offering detailed accounts of how it might be applied in school finance, accountability, and choice. The result is a reimagining of our decision making about schools, one that will sharpen our thinking on familiar debates and push us toward better outcomes. “Every education decision-maker—and every education researcher—would benefit from reading this book.” —David N. Figlio, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University “Imaginative, informative, and unfailingly constructive.” —Michael S. McPherson, co-author of Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education

This volume of essays examines the empirical evidence on school choice in different countries across Europe, North America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It demonstrates the advantages which choice offers in different institutional contexts, whether it be Free Schools in the UK, voucher systems in Sweden or private-proprietor schools for low-income families in Liberia. Everywhere experience suggests that parents are ‘active choosers’: they make rational and considered decisions, drawing on available evidence and responding to incentives which vary from context to context. Government educators frequently downplay the importance of choice and try to constrain the options parents have. But they face increasing resistance: the evidence is that informed parents drive improvements in school quality. Where state education in some developing countries is particularly bad, private bottom-up provision is preferred even though it costs parents money which they can ill-afford. This book is both a collection of inspiring case studies and a call to action.

School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.