The following article is adapted from an address Doretta Wilson, the Executive Director of the Society for Quality Education, delivered recently to the Institute for Liberal Studies.
Almost a generation ago, some parents noticed their children could not read or do basic arithmetic, teachers were told that their tried and true methods were no longer to be used, and employers complained that they had greater difficulty hiring young people that appeared increasingly illiterate and innumerate.
At that time,Ontario citizens had no way to measure whether or not students had learned fundamental skills. Further, we had no way to know WHAT students were supposed to learn, because there was no standard provincial curriculum. What students were expected learned could vary from board to board, and from school to school. Worse, unproven teaching methods had been adopted as the latest fad to teach reading and math. Whole Language did its damage. We saw learning disabilities and the ensuing special education needs rise like never before. Education spending skyrocketed without any noticeable improvement in achievement. Not that we would know whether or not anything was helping our students, because achievement data was not publicly available.
Parents felt locked out and alienated when we asked tough questions. We could hold “funfairs” to raise money, but not ask why our kids were failing math in high school. Concerned caring teachers and educators also became frustrated by a system that made them powerless to bring about change. Many citizens were dissatisfied with an increasingly unresponsive education system.
The Society for Quality Education, a non-partisan grass-roots group of parents and educators was formed about 20 years ago and worked alongside many other similar groups of concerned members of the public, to bring about much-needed reforms to education in Ontario – testing, curriculum reform, higher academic standards, best practice teaching methodology, and increased parental involvement – all intended to lead to higher achievement for Ontario students and greater system accountability.
More recently, some of those individuals involved in grass-roots education reform decided that timely and accurate information about education governance and teaching methodology was important. It would be a way to dispel the myths surrounding ideas such as phonics and school choice.
The Society for Quality Education was established as a charitable non-profit organization whose mission is to significantly improve student learning inCanada. We provide the facts arising from research about quality education to policy makers, legislators, educators and the public. We are funded entirely by private donations and we do not accept government funding.
SQE believes the fundamentally keys to excellent education are Quality and Choice and we believe you cannot have one without the other.
Back in those early days, however, we naively believed that if strong accountability initiatives were in place, the publicly funded school system would be happy to change for the benefit of the students. We learned otherwise.
Some people thought the way to improve schools is to bring in the tough accountability measures described above, like a rigorous curriculum, high-stakes testing, and standardized reporting. These things too have been tried and, although they have had a slightly-greater success than increased spending, accountability measures are at best a partial solution.
In Ontario, for example, the Mike Harris government brought in all of the accountability measures mentioned above – and then some. And the measures did seem to yield a modest improvement in student achievement at first. But even before the PC government was voted out of office, the bureaucratic mice started to eat away at its accountability measures. Today, most of them are neutralized or gone.
Education Tax Credit was retroactively cancelled after many parents had already enrolled their children in private schools. The curriculum standards are slowly being lowered, school councils are mostly pussy cats, The Ontario College of Teachers has been captured by the teachers’ unions and teacher testing has been scrapped.Ontario’s experience is, alas, typical. Accountability measures, by themselves, are simply not enough to generate significant, lasting improvement.
So change the system? Wasn’t going to happen. The public school system liked things just the way things were thank you very much. They had neither reason nor incentive to change. Why should they? After all, they are essentially a monopoly.
“Education is unique among consumer products — when it fails to work as advertised, it’s the customer that gets labelled as defective.”
– Kevin Killion
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Kevin.Killion.Quote.57F0
Once again, education reformers were forced to look for a more effective approach. We had done a lot of research, looking at other educational jurisdictions around the world. We came to the conclusion that the fundamental problem, the root cause of schools’ poor outcomes, is the government’s monopoly over education.
If you had money you could move to a more affluent neighborhood that had the perceived “better” school. You could pay tuition for a private school— one that used a teaching approach that better suited your child: Montessori, or Waldorf, or a back-to-basics traditional model school. Problem with that, lower income families could never be able to afford it without tremendous sacrifice. So rather than try to reform a school system that wasn’t willing to change, why not opt out of it? Why not allow parents to choose how their children would be educated and give teachers the freedom to teach using methods that they knew worked. What was needed was a mechanism to allow parental school choice.
For the most part, Canadians are blessed with a wide range of consumer choice. Take buying a car—They can choose their vehicle from dozens of makes and models, and literally hundreds of colours and options. This same level of choice is taken for granted by Canadians, and is available in most other areas of their lives – food, housing, clothing, entertainment, day-care, travel, and so on. Even our Canadian health care system, once considered the third rail of any talk of private initiatives, has moved beyond that. Education remains the last institution to be sacrosanct around the topic of choice.
When it comes to their children’s education, most Canadians have little or no choice. The costs associated with private schools and home-schooling put these options out of the reach of most Canadians, leaving only publicly funded schools as the practical outcome. Most publicly-funded schools do not differ greatly from each other. The practice of school boards to assigning boundaries means that students are restricted to specific schools, giving parents no choice whatsoever.
The absence of school choice is primarily justified by people’s desire for one strong public school system where all children attend a common-denominator neighbourhood school. Monopolistic schooling has inherent defects, including the dominance of special-interest groups like teachers’ unions; excessively-uniform school policies; weak and inappropriate incentive structures; and inefficient, unresponsive large bureaucracies. Even with the best of intentions and highly-qualified teachers, monopolistic school systems cannot meet the needs of all students.
Canada has had government-run education for 150 years. To assess the implications of this monopolistic approach, it is instructive to compare the automobile industries in East andWest Germany between the years 1945 and 1989. Both countries started off at essentially the same economic level in the aftermath of World War II—pretty much devastated.
Forty-four years after the War, East Germans were lucky to own a Trabant, a car so dirty and dangerous it has achieved cult status since disappearing from East German roads more than a decade ago. It was powered by an anemic and smoky two-stroke engine, and its body was made out of pressed cardboard. A 1989 BMW, on the other hand, was one of the most advanced and well-made cars in the world. Even the lowliest car made inWest Germany– for example, an Opel or a German Ford – had excellent comfort, performance, and reliability.
What was the defining difference between the car industries of the twoGermanys? It doesn’t take a Milton Friedman to see it. One operated under practical monopoly protection of the East German state, while the other innovated performance and customer satisfaction based on competitive pressures in the West German marketplace.
“Parents generally have both greater interest in their children’s schooling and more intimate knowledge of their capacities and needs than anyone else.”
— Milton Friedman From Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (1979/1980)
We know that there is a strong desire for parents to find good schools for their children. An SQE-sponsored study ofOntarioprivate school parents listed the main reasons why parents chose private schools. Among the top reasons (such as faith, values, or academic focus), the top shared reason was safety. The increase in demand for specialty schools and academies in public boards is a result of decreasing enrollments and the demand for better schools.
Parental school choice policies can take many forms—expanded alternative schools within public boards, public vouchers, public charter schools, private voucher programs, and education tax credits to name a few.
Where it has been implemented, school choice works because it creates an incentive for ALL schools to improve in order to attract and retain students. A rising tide raises all boats.
“There is no doubt what the key obstacle is to the introduction of market competition into schooling: the perceived self-interest of the educational bureaucracy.”
— Milton Friedman, The New York Times Magazine (1975)
As you might imagine, choice outside of existing public systems is strongly opposed by the public educational establishment, especially the teachers’ unions, who loudly condemn school choice and try to scare monger by fostering myths about all the terrible things that will come to pass if parents are allowed to choose their children’s schools.
The challenge is to convince policy makers that giving parents the financial tools to choose independent schools will be a benefit to all.