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

Many government officials, especially those at the treasury, resisted escalation of the School Improvement Project because it had no basis in the theory of the educational marketplace. Autonomy, incentives and good management were supposedly the keys to educational success, and schools that could not get their acts together should just go out of business and be replaced. It turned out, however, that closing a public school was near-impossible politically, and there was no reason for any other group of educational entrepreneurs to expect they could move into a place like South Auckland and compete any more successfully than the spiraling schools.

By 1998, top ministry officials were ready to admit that however well the educational marketplace might be suited for places like the Upper Hutt Valley, it could never become the model for the entire country. "Some schools will never work under this system, and for them we will have to have a different system," said Brian Donnelly, the associate minister of education at the time. "Some will have to be back under direct control of ministry, and South Auckland will get a design for schooling that will be unique."

In December 1999, New Zealand voters decided that nine years of National rule was enough and elected a new government run by a Labour-led coalition. While tweaking the rules but otherwise maintaining parental choice, the Ministry of Education has now abandoned the rhetoric of educational marketplaces and in recent months has increased funds available to the School Improvement Project.

A Proxy for Quality

So what went wrong with the marketplace model for education in New Zealand?

Part of the answer lies in the criteria that parents use to choose schools for their children. A good deal of research shows that the key factor for New Zealand families, including many Maori and Pacific Island ones, is the economic, social and ethnic mix of students in schools they are considering. In the absence of systematic data on student achievement, parents assume that schools with predominantly white and wealthy student bodies are superior to those with less prestigious profiles. As Margaret Ngarai, principal of Rowley Primary School in Christchurch told us, "People see little brown faces coming in our gate and immediately think that it's not a very good school."

The use of student mix as a proxy for quality in evaluating schools has at least two important consequences in the educational marketplace. First, it means that schools that start off with a high proportion of low-income or ethnic minority students are at a competitive disadvantage right from the get-go. Such schools are doomed to declining rolls, while competitors serving more advantaged populations are positioned to see their enrollments increase.

Second, it contributes to a concentration of difficult-to-teach students in the less selective schools. Over time, schools such as Tamaki and Tangaroa, which had empty seats and were thus obligated to take all applicants, found that they were serving a higher and higher proportion of students with learning or behavior problems, students with limited English proficiency or students who had been suspended from other schools. In short, enrollment across the system became increasingly polarized by ethnicity, socioeconomic status and the extent to which students presented educational challenges.