The Empty Aisles of Marketplace Reform - free choice of school as means to improve education

School Administrator, Nov, 2000 by Edward B. Fiske, Helen F. Add

A decade-long experience with wideopen school choice in New Zealand should serve as a warning to those advocating the same here

Many school reformers today argue that what public schools need is more competition. Force schools to compete for students in an educational marketplace, the argument goes, and everyone will be a winner. Schools will work hard to attract more students. Students and parents will have more options. The overall quality of teaching and learning will rise.

Whether this approach will solve the problems of schools serving high proportions of disadvantaged students is an open question--if only because the application of market principles to the delivery of public education has yet to be tested on a large scale in American schools.

To be sure, there are a few examples of "controlled choice" systems, such as Cambridge, Mass., and Boston, that give parents a choice of schools, subject to rules governing distribution of students by race or socioeconomic status. But the charter school movement, currently the most popular market-based approach to school improvement, is very young, with most charter schools in operation for less than three years. Voucher experiments which would extend the concept of competition outside the public sector, are too few and too small to offer much evidence, positive or negative, about the impact of competition.

Fortunately, there is a place, actually a whole country, where market-based reforms have been in place long enough to draw some conclusions about their impact. The country is New Zealand. With a population of 3.8 million, the island nation is the size of a typical American state, and its national Ministry of Education is thus the functional equivalent of a state education department under our decentralized system.

New Zealand's experience is particularly relevant to the United States because it shares similar political, economic and cultural traditions and, like our nation, it has a substantial minority group population, with Maori and Pacific Islanders making up 20 percent of the population.

What transpired in New Zealand should serve as a warning to those who put their faith in market-based reform.

Up-Close Observations

So how did New Zealand go about organizing its educational marketplace?

In 1989, under a plan known as Tomorrow's Schools, the Labour government then in power abolished the national Department of Education, which had overseen state schools for decades, and turned control of its nearly 2,700 primary and secondary schools over to locally elected boards of trustees.

Virtually overnight, legal responsibility for governing and managing New Zealand's state schools shifted from educational professionals to boards dominated by lay volunteers, and one of the world's most tightly controlled public education systems became one of the most decentralized. The central government continued to fund the education system, negotiate teacher contracts and enforce accountability through an inspectorate system.

Two years later New Zealand ratcheted up the stakes of school reform another notch. A newly elected government of the National Party committed to New Right (neo-liberal) social principles abolished neighborhood enrollment zones and gave parents the right to choose which school their child would attend. Primary and secondary schools found themselves competing for students against other schools in an educational agora. Public relations and marketing skills became as integral to the job description of principals as knowledge of curriculum and the ability to manage a faculty.

We had the opportunity to observe these changes during five months in New Zealand in the first half of 1998. Our intent was to discover what lessons the Tomorrow's Schools reforms might offer for the United States and other developed countries interested in giving schools operational autonomy in a competitive environment. We learned quite a few.

The decision to give schools the right to make their own decisions in areas ranging from pedagogy to the hiring of principals and teachers was a popular move, and most, though by no means all, schools were able to assemble boards of trustees competent to carry out their responsibilities. Large numbers of parents also took advantage of their right to exercise choice, and even critics admit that the parental choice genie is now out of the bottle for good.

Mixed Outcomes

Whether thrusting schools into a competitive environment was positive or negative is a somewhat more complex question. The answer depends on where you look.

The educational marketplace seems to be working well in stable areas such as the Upper Hutt Valley, which runs for 20 miles north of Wellington and includes communities ranging from prosperous hillside enclaves like Stokes Valley to flatland towns like Taita that owe their existence to state housing projects. A commuter railroad links these towns with Wellington, carrying thousands of workers into the capital city each day and offering easy mobility to students who choose to enroll in schools at some distance from their homes.